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Maps
I grew up learning how to read, write, think and draw on maps. They have always been at the heart of how I see, think, express and feel. I believe one of the most important advancements in our lives is not the personal computer, not the Internet, and certainly not those damn smart phones but rather the explosion of cartographic literacy brought about by online map functions.
Maps teach you many things at once, once you know how to read them. They can teach you:
1. Facts
2. Distances and relationships (ways to get from Point A to Point B)
3. AND get you actively thinking of ALTERNATIVE routes from Point A to Point B
4. Likewise alternative DESTINATIONS
5. AND - in a series, maps can teach you changes in all of the above across time
This is when maps are the most powerful - their ability to convey immense sets of information about all dimensions of knowledge very efficiently and in a way that the human mind can connect with naturally - in the language of recognizable patterns.
In this respect, the human mind has yet to meet its cybernetic match; we might get beaten by our lovely new silicon cousins the supercomputers and the artificial intelligences that develop from them...but that day is not yet.
Maps are perhaps one of the oldest forms not only of written communication - cave paintings showing nature scenes may well had cartographic value. (Herd of horses? check. Near big tree with crack down middle? Check. How far? Heh. Let me get back to you on that one.)
Some history of cartography- marking hunting spots was only part of it.
The earliest known maps are of the heavens, not the earth. Dots dating to 16,500 BCE found on the walls of the Lascaux caves map out part of the night sky, including the three bright stars Vega, Deneb, and Altair (the Summer Triangle asterism), as well as the Pleiades star cluster. The Cuevas de El Castillo in Spain contain a dot map of the Corona Borealis constellation dating from 12,000 BCE.
Cave painting and rock carvings used simple visual elements that may have aided in recognizing landscape features, such as hills or dwellings. A map-like representation of a mountain, river, valleys and routes around Pavlov in the Czech Republic has been dated to 25,000 BP, and a 14,000 BP polished chunk of sandstone from a cave in Spanish Navarre may represent similar features superimposed on animal etchings, although it may also represent a spiritual landscape, or simple incisings.
Another ancient picture that resembles a map was created in the late 7th millennium BCE in Çatalhöyük, Anatolia, modern Turkey. This wall painting may represent a plan of this Neolithic village; however, recent scholarship has questioned the identification of this painting as a map.
Whoever visualized the Çatalhöyük "mental map" may have been encouraged by the fact that houses in Çatalhöyük were clustered together and were entered via flat roofs. Therefore, it was normal for the inhabitants to view their city from a bird's eye view. Later civilizations followed the same convention; today, almost all maps are drawn as if we are looking down from the sky instead of from a horizontal or oblique perspective. The logical advantage of such a perspective is that it provides a view of a greater area, conceptually. There are exceptions: one of the "quasi-maps" of the Minoan civilization on Crete, the “House of the Admiral” wall painting, dating from c. 1600 BCE, shows a seaside community in an oblique perspective.
Maps were a kind of art as well. Maps are, after all, pretty. The first maps were essentially panoramic landscapes, as if one were viewing a scene from a high mountaintop. The practice of envisioning maps as from a high view (the place o the gods, a bird's eye view, etc.) was utilized through history long before anyone could actually go up in the sky... and it was done effectively even in places where there were no such vantages. The human mind, once tuned to a visual heuristic, can do that very well.
Thus, in a nutshell, is the power of maps.
I wonder, sometimes, if in the future, as a means of keeping up with the pace of our own lives and the cybernetic chitchat of our AI brethren, we will start speaking, not in tongues, but in maps - glyphs, if you will, complex multidimensional expressions of facts, relations, vectors in space, energy and time that evolve and indicate a purer kind of truth - that we know (and therefore our reader/listener/downloaders know that we know) that we hold our truths to be context-evident.
This, of course, is important - has always been important - in rhetoric, philosophy and let's not forget the rigorous discipline of empiricism.
The future will require many things of us - first and foremost, to be clearer in our vision, in our expression - and faster with recognizing the emergence and decay of the relevance of the teachings we receive, the experiences we live... and the lessons we have to pass on to our colleagues... and our posterity.
The Future: A Simple (heh) est Case for Maps
It's really, really hard to demonstrate a spreadsheet on a blog. Even showcasing results, such as the relationship between water scarcity and both civil and interstate warfare, is a real chore.
This is because the facts and contexts change over space and time.
OK, fine. What about telling it with maps? I thought. Heh. It's rather obvious in hindsight, but what's the best way to do that? The really interesting stuff changes over time.
I contemplated posting a bunch of stills on Webshots and flashing them at you here but then I thought…why do that? Just assemble them into a video, add some commentary, add music and make that the main exhibit.
So I did.
What you are about to see (if you clip the video) is a progression of world maps from the year 2020 through 2200 AD, in 20-year intervals. You will most of the existing political divisions of the planet get gobbled up as a combination of economic and ecological collapse - one the mild end of the decay scenarios we are facing as a planet, mind you.
The purpose of the exercise is to show that whatever mechanism or mechanisms you adhere to with regards to environment change, it is difficult to ignore the very simple model that both overpopulation and overconsumption have stripped entire regions of habitability in the recorded past...and now, this is happening at an unprecedented level, both in numbers and in intensity of resource extraction of all kinds, in every part of the Earth.
What I have done here is force, mathematically speaking, the nations of the world to come to terms with a 50% degradation in the habitability of the planet, applied uniformly, and applied everywhere, starting in the year 2050 and escalating through the period shown in the video.
The climatologists in the audience might challenge this on two grounds - one, that gentle a downgrade is optimistic and, two, that quick a downgrade is aggressive. They won't say it's totally out of the question, though.
Demographers might challenge the population projections here - that overpopulation will swiftly be replaced by depopulation as a public policy concern in many newly-developed and nearly-developed societies. They might be right - for the sakes of generations to come, I hope they're not. I hope if, say, China goes from a country that has water sufficient for 1.2 billion people to a country with sufficient water for only 600 million... I hope the resulting population crash is from a sharp uptick in deficit births not surplus deaths.
International political scientists and strategists from various orientations are going to take issue with the maps' political intimations. Good. They need to - they are the target audience. The Pentagon runs these kinds of analyses all day long for good cause - this, not the daydream world where the imaginary and invisible god, Free Markets, hands out solutions to catastrophic problems ... to the deserving who are the rich by definition in this sad, sick, sorry cult.
In the real world, people by the billions will suffer from ecological ruination. Some of them will matter to Americans and their government, who will then call on the Pentagon to send its best and brightest (in numbers small and large) to die (and, here and there, to kill) in conditions of chaos and misery and despair that the world has not seen since the Black Death.
Oh - did I mention this was the rosy scenario?
Or...they might opt for sitting back, fortify the frontiers and waiting this one out for a few hundred years.
I don't actually think either full-on intervention or isolationism is likely.. but I do think that, by default, America is going to be on the sidelines of the great wars of the next couple of centuries... and the happier for it.
But never mind my talk - see for yourself
My info comment in full
One way people don't usually think about climate change - but should - is the maps will change. Some areas of the world will become much more uninhabitable, first. Residents of those places will want to move to nicer areas. People already there will debate this (sometimes violently).
This scenario assumes that for a variety of reasons, the Earth (more in some parts than others) basically wears out like an old rechargeable battery - it winds up half as user-friendly as it is today, and we all have to make adjustments.
Take your pick - war, pollution, overgrazing, overpopulation, groundwater depletion, radiological contamination and good old fashioned climate change. Object to one if you want. There are a dozen other decrements to take its place.
But history shows humans are pretty darn good at land management when they must be - and as horrible as they can be when they can get away with it.
The end result (AD 2200 here):
- There's still a United States, only many more states and much more Hispanic (it annexes Mexico).
- Contrary to grave fear-mongering, China does not go on an expansionist tear, save for quietly reuniting with Taiwan and even more quietly taking over Korea when unification there doesn't quite work out.
- European union works out so well…there end up being three competing EUs!
- There is war in the Middle East and lots of it... only the Arab-Israeli axis turns out in the long run to be friendly, as the most reactionary threats to come along are from outside the Arab sphere - namely, Sudan and Pakistan
- Someone eventually invades Iran. It's not the USA.
- The Americans largely retreat to North America.
- The Russians get most of their old empire back…and no one cares.
- While the rest of the planet is either full-on isolationist, dealing with ecological collapse, masses of refugees and religious strife, Brazil gradually becomes the dominant superpower.
Rather, all this happens in just one scenario.
And remember: It's not the future, it's just a YouTube. Make your own if you want. :)
Oh I did mention music
I've composed music all my life but it is only since my return from the hospital in spring 2010 that I gave serious thought to pursuing it more rigorously, and only since late summer 2010 that I started posting videos on YouTube to go along with some of the songs.
In my experience since then, I have learned a few things. First, that music is a volume business, like blogging. Most songs, like diaries, are just not that insightful and emotive to other people. Second... oh, boy. The difference between where I am and professional composing is as night and day. Then again, no one pays me to blog, so it's all good. Third, so long as I accept this is basically practice - and that posting songs is a way to hold myself accountable and not just fling sounds at people (not without risking the dread DISLIKE). Hopefully, they will improve over time.
Some songs have done better than others. These two are the clear faves with the viewing public...though my theory is this has more to do with the titles being fairly popular searches.
I generally do three styles (so far)
Pictures with effects:
Animation, using Celestia:
Stills, using Celestia:
For more I haz channel
And now it's time for....
TOP COMMENTS
January 8, 2012
Thanks to tonight's Top Comments contributors! Let us hear from YOU
when you find that proficient comment.
figbash sends in some prose from bubbanomics
Last night's debate was like watching paint peel and then having the chips poked under your eyelids while listening to a burlap sack full of malnourished weasels fighting. Don't ask me how I know that.
Fear not. I won't.
bonus Hot Foot Long Corn Dog Action, also from bubbanomics.
I went Ewww. You can go Ewww, too.
MOVING right along....
I'll let Seneca Doane explain himself (it's worth the price of admission):
Normally, I don't submit Top Comments in which I myself played a substantial role. But in a comment to my diary about how Mitt Romney would deny people the right to have oral sex I mused about whether Mitt would consider the female orgasm to be unseemly or ungodly.
Within minutes, cassandracarolina came back with a perfect riposte that would make a top sitcom writer green with envy.
Her answer....
Unlikely.
Heh. :)
AND NOW for something COMPLETELY different
This in from lineatus (and, separately, bronte17):
I really can't add anything to this comment from detroitmechworks - it's just perfect as is.
How perfect is it? Pretty darn perfect:
Since so few of us are paying...
It explains why the bill is so fricking high Mitt...
When we split the check on these damn wars, you'd think those of you who ordered the Lobster Thermidor of wars would chip in a little more than you have been.
I think it's getting to the time when we demand separate checks...
To quote the Bard: Word.
From the Clever Put-Backs Department...
Killer of Sacred Cows provides us with this fantastic response to Obama-is-a-socialist theorists from Sychotic1
Every time they say that "Obama wants European style socialism,"
I always say, "Damn, I wish."
That shuts up my conservative friends most of the time.
In my experience nothing does for long.. they're not in the game to make things better, they are in it to make things theirs.
And, last but not least, from the Smarter Than Most Primates Corner
lineatus with a late edition..
wherein fishoutofwater calls it like he sees it. I had to forgive him for the implicit implication....
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TOP PHOTOS
January 7, 2012
Enjoy jotter's wonderful PictureQuilt™ below. Just click on the picture and it will magically take you to the comment that features that photo. Have fun, Kossacks!
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