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Cartographic curiosities
'Midway in the journey of our life I came to myself in a dark wood, for the straight way was lost. Dante Alighieri was about 35 and suffering from what we now would call a mid-life crisis, when he wrote these lines [1], the opening stanza of the Divine Comedy. As in many other ...
There's much to criticise about this map of Pangea [1], but in spite of the geological anachronisms, it's hard to tear your eyes away from it. The map shows a world in which the continents have broken loose from their moorings and crashed into each other in a planet-wide collision. These United ...
Maybe you've never heard of Emmaland or Sophialand, but if you're reading this in the United States, there's a better than 90% chance that you live in either one of these two curious nations. The former is made up of the 31 states where 'Emma' was the most popular baby name for girls in 2012 ...
National Geographic, some years ago: a melancholy piece about the emptying of the Dakotan prairie, illustrated with pictures of pension-age waitresses in doomed diners in dying towns, and of the wind playing with dolls in windowless farmhouses, abandoned long ago. Same location, same magazine ...
In The American Language, H.L. Mencken quotes Robert Louis Stevenson's paean to the American toponym: "There is no place in the world where nomenclature is so rich, poetical, humorous and picturesque as the United States […]". Mencken then goes on to list such curious examples as ...
I had you at maps. Obviously. Because you too are puzzled by this peculiar cartographic specimen, showing the spatial distribution of certain social traits across Central Africa. The purple blob in the middle is a matriarchal zone, where females rule, and social stress tends to be relieved ...
"A cucumber should be well sliced, and dressed with pepper and vinegar, and then thrown out, as good for nothing", said Samuel Johnson [1]. The lexicographer's wit is as piquant as the cucumber's taste is bland. The humble fruit [2] is about 95% water and not terribly high in nutrients, so perhaps ...
Millions live in or near Ossulstone, but only a handful have ever heard of it. Why and how has this place disappeared from common memory? Perhaps the when is easier to trace - to 1869, the year in which the mysterious object that lent its name to the area was stolen. Marking the intersection of ...
Charles de Gaulle, exasperated by his countrymen, once asked of France: "How can you expect to govern a country which has 246 varieties of cheese?" [1] If culinary diversity is an indicator for political instability, then there can't be much hope for Italy, with over 350 different pasta shapes [2 ...
Last week, Harry Beck finally got his blue plaque. The house where the designer of the iconic London Tube map spent his first years is now marked by a memorial sign - and unlike English Heritage's other plaques, the one affixed to 14 Wesley Road in Leyton (East London) is the font used on London ...
The natural state of any territory, it seems, is binary. The centre cannot hold. So it splits in two. France is Paris and la province. Russia is European and Asian. Belgium is Francophone and Dutch-speaking. In Italy, the North is distinct from and even opposed to the South. So too in England [1] ...
So the Catholic Church has a new leader. And the Vatican has a new head of state. Two job descriptions, filled by just one single guy [1]: the Pope. Until very recently, Jorge Mario Bergoglio's main concern was tending to the spiritual needs of the 2.5 million souls in his flock, the ...
One of cartography’s most persistent myths: mapmakers of yore, frustrated by the world beyond their ken, marked the blank spaces on their maps with the legend Here be monsters. It’s a pleasing hypothesis. For to label a cartographic vacuum with the stuff of nightmares solves two problems at ...
The end of Nazi Germany in two words? Pincer movement [1]. After it turns the tide at the bloody battles of Stalingrad (August 1942 - January 1943) and Kursk (July - August 1943), the Red Army relentlessly steamrollers westward to Berlin. The Anglo-American push eastward, also in the general ...
What to do with a dream that's too big for reality? Among many other things, you could map it. Such a representation could serve as an exhortation - This is the plan, get going! But if the gap between cartography and reality remains unbridged, the exhortation becomes a souvenir of the road not ...