Another brilliant exercise in global history is Jerry Brotton's A History of the World in Twelve Maps (Allen Lane, £30), which sketches the startlingly various ways we've tried to visualise our planet, from Ptolemy, 1900 years ago, to Google Earth.
Now, Call of Duty has such a history of players, maps and memories, and that gives us a great advantage.
In doing so she charts, through a history of language, a map of the emotions that have mattered most to us.
While the official site is amusing, animated and informative, to get to the basics, such as a history of the Olympics and maps, it's easier to go somewhere where they are clearly marked on the home page.
A new book by Prof Jerry Brotton, A History of the World in Twelve Maps, argues that no map is ever wholly accurate or objective.
www.fs.fed.us/grasslands The National Parks Service pages on the 17 National Grasslands areas include a history of the prairies, a map and information about most of the areas.
The history of maps is a long and varied one, from the earliest wall paintings depicting ancient cities to the digital representations we're all familiar with from looking at Google Earth.
While researching his forthcoming book, A History of the World in Twelve Maps, Brotton sometimes brought up the "one-to-one map" idea, from Borges and Carroll, with people at Google, but they didn't find it particularly witty or intriguing.
Regardless, these geographic drawings and all other maps based on scientific calculation are his legacy.But as Jerry Brotton explains in "A History of the World in Twelve Maps", Ptolemy's scientific influence tells only part of the story.
"We always want to put ourselves on the map," says Jerry Brotton, a professor of renaissance studies at Queen Mary University London, and author of A History of the World in 12 Maps.
