Let's get this party started

So. We're gonna make a map. To scale. Unfortunately, I missed out on Principles of Cartography, so I'll have to start from scratch.

The way a map is constructed is important, and your map's construction can say a lot about your values. Or so I've heard. Whatever our map ends up meaning, there are some mechanical details we're going to have to work out. Like, for example, the scale.

America is big. This, in and of itself, isn't really a problem. With the right scale, you could get a properly proportioned physical map of an entire continent (or, if you're more locally-minded, a map of the CTA's "L" lines) tattooed on your arm.

Our problem, however, is two-fold. First, rather than a physical map, we want a political map, both in the "third grade social studies" sense and the "reflective of the outcome of a political event" sense. The second problem is that we're really mapping 50 states and one federal district, not a country, so each entity on our map will need to be discernable. So the scale will be important.

When deciding on the scale, it'll be important to keep the nature of our building materials in mind. Cans (about 2.5 inches in diameter), SOLO cups (about 3.75 inches in diameter at the open end), and bottle caps (about .75 inches in diameter) will all come in handy. If we want to get all topological on you, we might even use the bottles themselves (what's up, Mt. McKinley?). But clearly, our media will have implications in terms of scale.

It'll probably be easiest to start off small, so let's think about the District of Columbia. The district covers 68.3 square miles, or 274,189,639,680 square inches. At full scale, Washington DC could be covered by approximately

• 43,870,342,300 cans
• 19,497,929,900 SOLO cups
• 487,448,248,320 bottle caps

And that's just Washington DC. So full scale is probably out.

To attempt to keep this somewhat manageable, let's say Washington DC will be one bottle cap on our map. If we make it any smaller, we won't be able to see it. If we make it any bigger, we'll have to switch into fundraising mode so we can buy a large farm on which to construct our map.

With the scale set, the rest of the map can start to take shape. Rhode Island will be about the size of a SOLO cup. Illinois will be about 77 beer cans. But the best part about this scale is that we would only need about 55,550 bottle caps to cover the entire country. Bottoms up!