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A word about Big Ideas and Themes — The architecture of Big Think
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Themes are the seven broad umbrellas under which we organize the hundreds of big ideas that populate Big Think. They include New World Order, Earth and Beyond, 21st Century Living, Going Mental, Extreme Biology, Power and Influence, and Inventing the Future.
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Cartographic curiosities
Washington DC as a big, red heart, pumping life-blood through the arteries of the nation’s body? Few Americans will view their oft-reviled capital as favourably as this metaphor suggests. However, the ‘body politic’ is a philosophical trope with a more than respectable pedigree. Around 500 BC ...
This map is an essential ingredient of a story that has ‘Indiana Jones’ written all over it: secret caves, a lost civilisation and above all, a treasure trove of gold in unimaginable quantities. And all this in the ground below the present-day metropolis of Los Angeles. Below are two extracts ...
It matters where we are, for it helps determine who we are. Or, as the quote often attributed to Napoleon states: Geography is destiny. That destiny extends to drink, as demonstrated by this map. Where we are determines to a statistically significant degree what kind of alcohol we prefer. Or is ...
Scattered across the centre of San Francisco are almost seventy semi-secret spaces, privately owned but open to the public. Subject to the fine print of a little-known pact between City and Commerce, these so-called POPOS (Privately Owned Public Open Spaces) allow alluring vistas of San ...
With an army numbering a mere 7,000 soldiers and an official policy of neutrality, the Irish Free State’s attitude at the outbreak of the Second World War was that of a very nervous bystander. While covertly providing the Brits with some intelligence and assistance, the overt goal throughout ...
We could rattle off some statistics, about size and distance. But sometimes a picture is more eloquent than a thousand words. Here are two postcard maps. That’s two thousand words right there. Many thanks to Anna Chlebinska, a collector of cartographic postcards, for sending in these ...
“China’s internet is open.” (PRC government spokesperson responding to a question on Google’s announcement to stop filtering its Chinese search engine, citing concerted hacker attacks on the e-mail accounts of political dissidents) Will Google leave China? Probably so. After the online giant ...
We’ve discussed the Ancient Greeks’ snowglobe vision of the Universe(#288), tackled the far-out theories of the Hollow Earth (#85), and yet managed to be surprised by the absurdity of the square earth theory. It seems unnecessarily implausible to add straight borderlines to the already ...
The rapid spread of the Great Fear was one of the weirder episodes in the early, confusing days of the French Revolution. This combination of a riot, a brush fire and a game of Chinese whispers raged from July 20 to August 5 of the revolutionary year 1789 - a year now better remembered for July ...
So it’s 2010, and we’re not living on Mars, nor even zipping through the sky in flying cars. But neither do we have to bow to our new insect overlords. The promises (and threats) of the future never quite materialise how we once imagined them. The current paradigm of futurism is of impending ...
In 1145, the Syrian bishop Hugo of Jabala brought Pope Eugene III the news of the Muslim reconquest of Edessa, an important Crusader stronghold in the Holy Land. The bishop softened the blow – and hoped to encourage the Pope to a new Crusade – with tales of a mighty Christian king attacking the ...
The Vikings set foot in America just over a millennium ago, but credit for the discovery generally goes to Columbus, who only stumbled upon the New World almost 500 years later. One reason might be that the Norse involvement in North America was brief and inconsequential, whereas Columbus ...
Take the length of the equator on this map, double that distance and you have the width of a human hair. For this is the world’s smallest world map, with the 40,000 kilometre-long equator reduced to a mere 40 micrometres.The smallest features on the map, corresponding to 100 kilometres, are ...
This map was taken from the August 2, 1919 edition of the US news magazine Literary Digest, and originally appeared in the London Sphere. It details the projected break-up of the Austro-Hungarian empire, one of the First World War’s defeated Central Powers. That empire would eventually be ...
At the beginning of this new year, hardly any map could be as appropriate as this one of Calendria, a place made out of time. This wondrous world was conceived in the tradition of so-called ‘symbolic’ maps, which use cartographic conventions to represent the relationship between non-geographic ...