Posts Tagged ‘maps’
“What’s in a name?”*…
The occurrence of place names that contain the word “Swamp”
The concentrations of water toponyms in the United States: see similar visualizations of place names that contain “River,” Spring, “Lake,” and “Pond” at “Lake, River, Spring, Pond, Bay and Swamp.”
* Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet (II, ii, 1-2)
###
As we call ’em as we see ’em, we might recall that it was on this date in 1939 that John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath was published. The story of the Joads, a poor family of tenant farmers driven from their Oklahoma home by drought, agricultural industry changes, and bank foreclosures forcing tenant farmers out of work. Fleeing the Dust Bowl, the Joads set out, with thousands of other “Okies,” for California, seeking jobs, land, dignity, and a future.
“Vanity, not love, has been my folly”*…
When a DMV customer wanted to supposedly express his affection for his two children, Kyle and Sean, he applied for a vanity plate that read “KYLSEAN.” A sharp-eyed DMV staffer reviewing the proposed plate quickly raised an alarm. “Kill Sean!” he scrawled on the side of the application. Request denied.
KylSean was one of 20,000 requests for personalized plates that the California DMV received that month; nearly 250,000 were fielded by the department in 2018. Applicants are required to fill out a form listing the personalized plate they desire, along with a brief explanation as to why they want it. Whether or not the plate sees the light of day falls to a panel of four beleaguered bureaucrats, who weed through the slush pile and ferret out requests that are racist, tawdry, or otherwise offensive. It’s a tougher job than you might think. Ever since vanity plates were introduced in 1972, Californians have tried sneaking all manner of sly euphemisms and overt obscenities past the department’s guardians of civility…
As one of the most diverse states in the Union, California contains an expansive lexicon of offensive, lewd, and inappropriate words and cultural references. (Californians speak at least 220 languages—that’s 220 different ways to say “poop.”) But armed with Google Translate, Wikipedia, and Urban Dictionary, the DMV’s sentries gamely manage to weed out profanity in multiple languages, coded Nazi symbolism, and obscure internet acronyms…
Los Angeles Magazine obtained thousands of rejected applications via an official records act request. See a few of the more brazen, creative, and accidentally provocative plates, complete with the applicant’s explanation and the DMV’s deadpan response: “Rejected Vanity Plates: inside the important job of keeping poop puns, dick jokes, and hate speech off California’s roadways.”
* Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice
###
As we keep it civil, we might spare a thought for André Jules Michelin; he died on this date in 1931. Co-founder, with his brother Édouard, of the Michelin Tire Company (Compagnie Générale des Établissements Michelin) in 1888, he earned a place in the Automotive Hall of Fame for creating the first pneumatic tires that could be easily removed for repair (for bicycles in 1891 and for automobiles in 1895), and for introducing tire tread patterns, low-pressure balloon tires, and steel-cord tires.
Anxious to promote tourism by car, André created a tourist guide organization which placed milestones on French roads and established a standard road map service for most of Europe. He created The Green Guide, a gazatteer and inventory of sites and attractions. And with Curnonsky (Maurice Edmond Sailland), he created The Red Guide, with hotel and restaurant ratings… all of which remain in operation– and in heavy use by tourists– today.
“I’ll let you be in my dreams if I can be in yours”*…
From Glenn Macdonald (in his capacity as Spotify’s genre taxonomist– or as he put’s it “mechanic of the spiritual compases of erratic discovery robots that run on love”)
This is a mapping of genres to words, and words to genres, using words that are used distinctively in the titles of songs. A genre’s words are ranked by how disproportionately they appear in that genre’s songs’ titles compared to all songs. A word’s genres are ranked by the position of that word in each genre’s word list. 1525 genres and 4712 words qualify.
Visit “Genres in Their Own Words” And while you’re there, explore the genre map and the other nifty resources at Glenn’s site, Every Noise At Once.
* Bob Dylan
###
As we slip on the headphones, we might spare a thought for Sir George Henry Martin; he died on this date in 2016. A record producer, arranger, composer, conductor, audio engineer, and musician, Martin began his career as a producer of comedy and novelty records in the early 1950s, working with Peter Sellers, Spike Milligan, and Bernard Cribbins, among others. In 1962, while working at EMI/Parlophone, Martin was so impressed by Brian Epstein’s enthusiasm, that he agreed to record the Beatles before seeing or hearing them (and despite the fact that they’d been turned down by Decca).
Martin went on to produce 23 number ones on the Billboard Hot 100 chart, 19 of which were by The Beatles. Indeed, Paul McCartney referred to Martin as “the fifth Beatle.” He also produced chart topping hits for McCartney (“Say Say Say” with Michael Jackson and “Ebony and Ivory” with Stevie Wonder), Elton John (“Candle in the Wind”) and America (“Sister Golden Hair”).
George Harrison, Paul McCartney, George Martin, and John Lennon in the studio in 1966
“People almost invariably arrive at their beliefs not on the basis of proof but on the basis of what they find attractive”*…
A map characterizes the Republican trade policy platform in the 1888 election
When PJ Mode began to purchase old maps in the 1980s, he set out to amass a typical collection of world maps. But along the way, his attention turned to unusual maps that dealers weren’t sure how to categorize—those that attempted to persuade rather than convey geographic information.
“Most collectors looked down their noses at these maps because they didn’t technically consider them maps,” Mode says. “But they were fun and they were inexpensive, and over the years I became more interested in them than the old world maps.”
The interest has culminated in a collection of more than 800 “persuasive maps,” as they are now called, which can be found in digital form through Cornell University’s library…
Maps never succeed is depicting reality exactly, fully as it is. But as a digital collection at Cornell University shows, many important maps from our past haven’t even tried. How subjective maps can be used to manipulate opinion: “These ‘Persuasive Maps’ Want You to Believe.”
See also “Maps that Make a Point” and “A map of the world that does not include Utopia is not worth even glancing at, for it leaves out the one country at which Humanity is always landing.”
De l’art de persuader
###
As we try to find our way, we might send birthday greetings to a “cartographer” of a different sort: James Augustine Aloysius Joyce was born on this date in 1882. A poet and novelist best known for Ulysses, he was the preeminent figure in the Modernist avant-garde, and a formative influence on writers as various as (Joyce’s protege) Samuel Becket, Jorge Luis Borges, Salmon Rushdie, and Joesph Campbell.
In 1998, the Modern Library ranked Ulysses No. 1, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man No. 3, and Finnegans Wake No. 77, on its list of the 100 best English-language novels of the 20th century. The next year, Time Magazine named Joyce one of its 100 Most Important People of the 20th century, observing that “Joyce … revolutionized 20th century fiction.” And illustrating that Joyce’s influence was not confined to the arts: physicist Murray Gell-Mann used the sentence “Three quarks for Muster Mark!” (in Joyce’s Finnegans Wake) as source for the elementary particle he was naming– the quark.
Photo of Joyce included in a printed subscription order form for Ulysses, published Paris, 1921
“Who that goeth on Pilgrimage but would have one of these Maps about him, that he may look when he is at a stand, which is the way he must take?*…
Carta Marina, by Olaus Magnus, 1539
Johannes Gutenberg printed his first Bible in 1455, and the first published sailing directions appeared thirty-five years later. Print media encouraged the divergence of navigational information from material discussing the commercial prospects of trade at various ports. Printing promoted the widespread distribution of geographic and hydrographic information, including maps, to readers throughout Europe at a time when literacy was on the rise and the spreading use of vernacular languages made such works available to non-scholars…
Europe’s explorers actively sought and exploited both academic knowledge and geographic experience in their systematic search for new trade routes. Use of the sea ultimately rested on reliable knowledge of the ocean. Fresh appreciation for empirical evidence fueled recognition of the value of experience, and the process of exploration included mechanisms for accumulating and disseminating new geographic knowledge to form the basis for future navigation.
At the outset of the discovery of the seas, portolan charts recorded actual experiences at sea. These navigational aids provided mariners with compass direction and estimated the distance between coastal landmarks or harbors. Utterly novel for their time, portolans were the first charts to attempt to depict scale. Portolans created by fourteenth- and fifteenth-century explorers document Portuguese and Spanish discovery of Atlantic islands and the African coast and helped subsequent mariners retrace their steps. Accuracy of portolans was best over shorter distances, and they became less useful when navigators steered offshore.
In contrast to creators of portolans, armchair cartographers compiled world maps of little use for actual navigation but which reflected shifting knowledge of oceans. While manuscript maps had been produced alongside written manuscripts since antiquity, the earliest known printed map was included in an encyclopedia of 1470. It represents the world schematically within a circle, in which the three continents of Asia, Europe, and Africa are surrounded by an ocean river and separated from each other by horizontal and vertical rivers that form a T shape—hence the name “T-O” to describe this kind of map. Other early maps were based on Ptolemy’s work, on biblical stories or other allegories, or occasionally on portolans…
Although the majority of medieval maps and nautical charts of the Age of Discovery did not include sea monsters, the ones that do reveal both a rise of general interest in marvels and wonders and a specific concern for maritime activities that took place at sea, including in far distant oceans. The more exotic creatures are often positioned on maps at the edge of the Earth, conveying a sense of mystery and danger and perhaps discouraging voyages in those areas. Images of octopuses or other monsters attacking ships would seem to be warning of dangers to navigation…
An excerpt from a fascinating essay on how cartographers saw the– mostly blue– world in the Age of Discovery; read it in full at “Mapping the Oceans.”
* John Bunyan, The Pilgrim’s Progress
###
As we find our way, we might light a birthday candle for Sir Francis Bacon– English Renaissance philosopher, lawyer, linguist, composer, mathematician, geometer, musician, poet, painter, astronomer, classicist, philosopher, historian, theologian, architect, father of modern science (The Baconian– aka The Scientific– Method), and patron of modern democracy, whom some allege was the illegitimate son of Queen Elizabeth I of England (and other’s, the actual author of Shakespeare’s plays)… He was in any event born on this date in 1561.
Bacon (whose Essays were, in a fashion, the first “management book” in English) was, in Alexander Pope’s words, “the greatest genius that England, or perhaps any country, ever produced.” He probably did not actually write the plays attributed to Shakespeare (as a thin, but long, line of enthusiasts, including Mark Twain and Friedrich Nietzsche, believed). But Bacon did observe, in a discussion of sedition that’s as timely today as ever, that “the remedy is worse than the disease.”
You must be logged in to post a comment.