Showing posts with label maps. Show all posts
Showing posts with label maps. Show all posts

2 January 2016

The sea

If you should dip your hand in,
your wrist would ache immediately,
your bones would begin to ache and your hand would burn
as if the water were a transmutation of fire
that feeds on stones and burns with a dark gray flame.
If you tasted it, it would first taste bitter,
then briny, then surely burn your tongue.
It is like what we imagine knowledge to be:
dark, salt, clear, moving, utterly free,
drawn from the cold hard mouth
of the world, derived from the rocky breasts
forever, flowing and drawn, and since
our knowledge is historical, flowing, and flown.
from ‘At the Fishhouses’ by Elizabeth Bishop

Image: Earth 100 million years from now

22 October 2015

Big


The Copernican principle states that, on the large scale, the universe is homogenous and is nowhere special.  But it is reported that at least three phenomena call that into question:
A void almost 2 billion light years wide called the CMB coldspot. 
A structure strung out over 4 billion light years containing 73 quasars known as the Huge Large Quasar Group. 
A group of gamma-ray burst emitting galaxies that form a ring 5.6 billion light years across – 6% of the size of the entire visible universe.
Some physicists argue that these phenomena may be evidence for brane theory  the idea that what we perceive as our universe is a single four dimensional membrane floating in a sea of similar (mem)branes spanning multiple extra dimensions.

Image via Daily Galaxy

26 August 2015

'The map is real...'

Suppose you have a city map. It’s definitely useful. Without it, you might never reach your goal. Is the map a perfect rendering of the city? No. There is no such thing as a two-dimensional, black-and-white city filled with perfectly straight paths and neat angles. But the city itself is real, the map is real, the information in it is mostly valid if simplified, and so the map is unquestionably of practical use. Knowing all this, you probably won’t suffer an existential crisis over the reality of the city or dismiss the contents or the existence of the map as an illusion. The truth is much simpler: your model of the city is helpful but not perfectly accurate.
Build a Brain - Is consciousness and engineering problem? Michael Graziano


Image: Eric Fisher

15 June 2015

River nymphs


Glico the running streames in sweetnesse still that keepes,
And Clymene which rules, when they surround their deepes.
Spio, in hollow bankes, the waters that doth hide:
With Opis that doth beare them backward with the tyde.
Semaia that for sights doth keepe the water cleare;
Zanthe their yellow sands, that maketh to appeare,
Then Drymo for the okes that shadow every banke,
Phylodice, the boughs for garlands fresh and ranke.
Which the clear Naiades make them anadems with all,
They are cauld to daunse in Neptunes mightie hall.
Then Lifeo, which maintaines the birds harmonious layes,
Which sing on river banks amongst the slender sprayes,
With Rhodida, which for them doth nurse the roseat sets,
Iodia, which preserves the azure violets.
from the Poly-Olbion by Michael Drayton (1612, 1622)

Image: detail from a map by William Hole for the Poly-Olbion

5 June 2015

A map of colours


The courses of the strata, or the length and breadth of surface occupied by each, as they rise successively from the level of the sea, on the eastern to the western side of the Island, are represented by colours. 
The edges of the strata, which may all be crossed in journey from east to west, are called their outcrops; and the under-edge of every stratum, being the top of the next, and that being generally the best defined, is represented by the fullest part of each colour…. 
The colours, though brighter than those they represent, are in some degree assimulated to the colour of each stratum, except the chalk, which being colourless seems best represented by green, as strong colours are necessary, and there being no stratum of equal extent which required that colour....In this mode of representing the strata by colours, various insular, or detached parts of the same colour may be observed.
William Smith, 1815


Images: wikipedia and NASA

1 June 2015

'A story is like the wind'

/Han#kass’o, //Kabbo's son-in-law, told Lloyd that it was at Haarfontein that //Kabbo’s son, Smoke’s Man “saw the wind”. He was in the employ of a white farmer, watching sheep, when he threw a stone at a bird, presumably hunting it. In /Xam mythology the elements were able to take different forms. The bird was the wind, the stone-throwing provoked a violent storm that terrified Smoke’s Man, until it disappeared into a hole in the mountain.
The Storyteller's Map by Kevin Davie
The hot, flat landscape means that wind is a feature. Dia!kwain said the /Xam people each own their own wind, that this wind blows when we die, blowing away the spoor we leave while still alive. 

Image: Mike Rossi

14 May 2015

A math of dreams

Players will begin at the outer edges of a galaxy containing 18,446,744,073,709,551,616 unique planets... 
Every player will begin on a randomly chosen planet at the outer perimeter of a galaxy. The goal is to head toward the center, to uncover a fundamental mystery, but how players do that, or even whether they choose to do so, is open to them. People can mine, trade, fight, or merely explore. As planets are discovered, information about them (including the names of their discoverers) is loaded onto a galactic map that is updated through the Internet. But, because of the game’s near-limitless proportions, players will rarely encounter one another by chance. As they move toward the center, the game will get harder, and the worlds—the terrain, the fauna and flora—will become more alien, more surreal.
from Word without end - creating a full scale digital cosmos by Raffi Khatchadourian


Image: Messier 82 NASA, ESA

1 April 2015

A shimmering succession

If [my] head were to try to encapsulate in a few words everything that is most amazing about itself, those few words would be: it has a world
-- The Kingdom of Infinite Space by Raymond Tallis (2008)


Map by Orlando Ferguson, 1893 via wikipedia

19 March 2015

Unafraid of the empty wastes

Let us create vessels and sails adjusted to the heavenly ether, and there will be plenty of people unafraid of the empty wastes. In the meantime, we shall prepare, for the brave sky-travellers, maps of the celestial bodies.
from a letter by Johannes Kepler to Galileo Galileo written in 1610, cited here

Image from Francis Godwin (1638)

10 March 2015

A whole other land

Exploring, discovering and mapping a land is a fascinating process. We might think of maps as constructed, drawn, or laid over the land. But with these children it's as if they seep up like water through the ground. When Cody said he was going to find secret water did we really believe him? Did we think it existed beyond his imagination? And yet here it is making itself visible -- making us realise that the land we are exploring and narrating sits on top of a whole other land, subterranean, that shares with ours a single, continuous, touchable surface.
from Ways into Hinchingbrooke Country Park by Deb Wilenski and Caroline Wending of Cambridge Curiosity and Imagination.


Image: Revolving House by Paul Klee (1921)

19 February 2015

A New World


At the beginning of A Short Account of the Destruction of the Indies (1542), Bartolomé de las Casas writes "the marvelous discovery of the Americas...silence[s] all talk of other wonders." Then he reports on one of the worst genocides in recorded history.

About 150 years later, English explorers in North America begin many of their reports with rapturous descriptions of what they find. Andro Linklater writes in Owning the Earth (2014):
The extravagant fertility can be sensed in the language..."the millionous multitudes" of seabird, the "huge flights of wild Turkies," "such infinite Herds of Deare," "innumerable of Pines, tall and good for boards and masts," and forests of oaks with "great Bodies tall and streight from 60 to 80 foot before there be any Boughs in height," all of it fed by soil that was "like to manure" so that "we cannot sett down a foot but tread on Strawberries, raspers, fallen mulberry vines, acchorns, walnutts, saxafras etc."
The waters, too, were wondrous. In The Unnatural History of the Sea (2007), Callum Roberts notes:
Like the rivers in early medieval Europe, those of the New World ran pure and clear through thickly wooded valleys and flood plains that protected the soil from erosion. This newfound clarity must have dazzled people of the seventeenth century used to rivers like the Thames whose refuse-thickened waters slopped London's bridges and embankments.
In some places, according to an account of a 1608 reconnaissance of the Chesapeake tributaries (cited by Roberts), the fish were:
lying so thick with their heads above the water, as for want of nets...we attempted to capture them with a frying pan... 
We spied many of them lurking amongst the weeds on the sands, our captain sporting himself to catch them by nailing them to the ground with his sword, set us all fish in in that manner, by this devise, we took more in an hours than we all could eat.

Image: Map of Virginia by John White, 1585

4 February 2015

"Childhood is a branch of cartography"

It was clear that the children perceived a drastically different landscape from [the adults] Deb and Caroline. They travelled simultaneously in physical, imagined and wholly speculative worlds. With the children as her guides, Deb began to see the park as a 'place of possibility', in which 'the ordinary and the fantastic' — immiscible to adult eyes — melded into a single alloy. No longer constituted by municipal zonings and boundaries, it was instead a limitless universe, wormholes and Möbian, constantly replenished in its novelty. No map of it could ever be complete for new stories seethed up from its soil, and its surfaces could dive way at any moment. The hollows of its trees were routes to other planets, its sub terrane flowed with streams of silver, and its woods were threaded through with filaments of magical force. Within it children could shape-shift into bird, leaf, fish or water.
— from Childish in Landmarks by Robert Macfarlane (2015).

"Childhood is a branch of cartography" comes from Manhood for Amateurs: The Wilderness of Childhood by Michael Chabon

Image: NicolayR

28 January 2015

Internal difference, where the meanings are

The retina is covered in light-sensitive cells which alter the voltage on their membranes according to the brightness that impinges on them. The light-sensitive cells are connected to neurons in their immediate vicinity that perform some local processing before passing them on to the brain. The processing cells each send out an axon that travels directly into the brain. Many go to an area near the back of the head called the superior colliculus in mammals. The axons of the retinal ganglion cells all run parallel to each other as a thick cable — the optic nerve — but when they reach the superior colliculus they disperse and connect to it in a quite remarkable manner; the place to which each one connects to the colliculus depends, in a precise way, on each ganglion cell’s place in the retina. In effect the exact layout of the ganglion cells on the retina is replicated on the colliculus so that it has a fully laid-out image, in electrical activity, of the optical image that is present at the back of the eye.
— from Life Unfolding by Jamie A. Davies (2014)

Image: Wei Li, National Eye Institute, NIH, via Zeiss

22 January 2015

"...the exquisite astuteness of proteins..."

The wind forms blades in the sea like lines on a page; the current traces its passage along the talweg and the glacier in a valley; the axle projects on the sundial the exact latitude of the place; the stylus scars the wax and the tip of the diamond inscribes its trace on the glass. Let us not pretend that we alone write. Oil and water do not mix; bodies choose their partners in combination while excluding other elements; crystals characterised by impurities straighten the course of certain flows. It is not just we who are concerned with acts of choosing. Islands, cliffs, radioactive bodies engrave memories. Let us not pretend that only we remember. In short, things themselves, inert as well as organic, exchange elements, energy and information, conserving, diffusing and selecting this last. Let us not pretend that only we are given to acts of exchange. This inscription, these decisions, these mnemotechnics, these codings, along with many other examples, give to objects quasi-cognitive properties. There is an ‘it thinks’, in the sense of ‘it rains’ as well as an ‘I think’ or ‘we think.’
  from L'Incandescent by Michel Serres (2003), quoted by Steven Connor

Image: Mouth of the Matanuska Glacier by Sbork

15 January 2015

Cartography without limits

Technological progress has always brought novel ways of seeing the natural world and thus new ways of mapping it. The telescope was what allowed Galileo to sketch...a first map of Jupiter’s largest moons. The invention of the microscope...led to Robert Hooke’s famous depiction of a flea...as well as the discovery of the cell. Today the pace of invention and the raw power of technology are shocking: A Nobel Prize was awarded last fall for the creation of a microscope with a resolution so extreme that it seems to defy the physical constraints of light itself.

What has made the early 21st century a particularly giddy moment for scientific mapmakers, though, is the precipitous rise of information technology. Advances in computers have provided a cheap means to collect and analyze huge volumes of data, and Moore’s Law, which predicts regular doublings in computing power, has shown little sign of flagging. Just as important is the fact that machines can now do the grunt work of research automatically, handling samples, measuring and recording data. Set up a robotic system, feed the data to the cloud and the map will practically draw itself. It’s easy to forget Borges’s caution: The question is not whether a map can be made, but what insights it will bring.
— from Sebastian Seung’s Quest to Map the Human Brain by Gareth Cook.

Update 16 Jan: a short report on expansion microscopy and Alva Noe argues that a map of the brain may not actually tell us very much about how it works. Also The 30,000 Futures of the Brain.

Image: Jupiter's Moons, adapted from The Starry Messenger (1610)

5 December 2014

Invisible Island


Invisible Island. 54°1′S 37°19′W.  A small, tussock-covered island lying in the Bay of Isles, South Georgia.

Image: Lichten Hansen

19 November 2014

On Maps, 2

In the universe now there was no longer a container and a thing contained, but only a general thickness of signs superimposed and coagulated, occupying the whole volume of space; it was constantly being dotted, minutely a network of lines and scratches and reliefs and engravings: a universe was scrawled over the sides, along all dimensions. There was no longer any way to establish a point of reference: the Galaxy went on turning but I could no longer count the revolutions, any point could be the point of departure, any sign heaped up with the others could be mine, but discovering it would have served no purpose, because it was clear that, independent of signs, space didn’t exist and perhaps had never existed.
— from Cosmicomics by Italo Calvino (1965)

Image: The Sloan Great Wall. W. Schaap et al. (2007) via APOD

On Maps, 1

He had bought a large map representing the sea,
Without the least vestige of land:
And the crew were much pleased when they found it to be
A map they could all understand.

"What's the good of Mercator's North Poles and Equators,
Tropics, Zones, and Meridian Lines?"
So the Bellman would cry: and the crew would reply
"They are merely conventional signs!

"Other maps are such shapes, with their islands and capes!
But we've got our brave Captain to thank:
(So the crew would protest) "that he's bought us the best--
A perfect and absolute blank!"
— from The Hunting of the Snark by Lewis Carroll (1876)

15 November 2014

Not nature itself

Contemporary thought is endangered by the picture of nature drawn by physics. This danger lies in the fact that the picture is now regarded as an exhaustive account of nature itself, so that science forgets that in its study of nature it is merely studying its own picture.
What we observe is not nature itself, but nature exposed to our method of questioning.
— Werner Heisenberg.

The first observation is quoted by Michael Benson in Cosmigraphics (2014) via a citation in Architecture in the Age of Divided Representation by Dalibor Vesely (2004). Apparently, it comes from The Idea of Nature in Contemporary Physics (1954). The second is from Physics and Philosophy (1958).  In the latter, Heisenberg writes:
Existing scientific concepts cover always only a very limited part of reality, and the other part that has not yet been understood is infinite.
In Time Reborn (2013), Lee Smolin writes:
Quantum mechanics, too, is likely an approximation to a more fundamental theory. One sign of this is the fact that its equations are linear — meaning that they effects are always directly proportional to their causes. In every other example in which a linear equation is used in physics, the theory is known to arise as an approximation to a more fundamental (but still effective) theory that is non-linear (in the sense that the effects may be proportional to a higher power of the cause), and the best bet is that this will turn out to be true of quantum mechanics as well.


Image: Russell Savory via Guardian

10 November 2014

A dark Illimitable ocean, without bound, without dimension



Among many extraordinary images in Cosmigraphics by Michael Benson (2014) is a seldom-reproduced depiction of the black void before the light of creation from Utriusque comsi... by Robert Fludd. [1]

Benson notes a similarity to Kazimir Malevich's Black Square on a White Ground (1915) [2]

Anselm Kiefer pays homage to Fludd in works such as The Secret Life of Plants (1987-2014). Equally striking, to me at least, is Kiefer's For Ingeborg Bachmann: the Renewed Orders of the Night. [3]  In this work, hundreds (perhaps) of small diamonds embedded in a large sheet of textured lead shine like stars as one approaches, and like rainbows as one gets even closer.  It seems like something that could emerge out of Fludd's primal black.


Notes

[1] A selection of more frequently reproduced images at Public Domain Review

[2] As Julian Bell notes, Malevich declared:
I have destroyed the ring of the horizon and escaped from the circle of things...
I have released all the birds from the eternal cage...
I have untied the knots of wisdom and set free the consciousness of colour!...
I have overcome the impossible...
[3] I can't at present find a reproduction of this image.