What chance have we when that's where we think we live.
Showing posts with label maps. Show all posts
Showing posts with label maps. Show all posts
11 July 2026
07 March 2026
Inexhaustible.
Sargent, Robert Louis Stevenson, 1887
I am told there are people who do not care for maps, and I find it hard to believe. The names, the shapes of the woodlands, the courses of the roads and rivers, the prehistoric footsteps of man still distinctly traceable up hill and down dale, the mills and the ruins, the ponds and the ferries, perhaps the standing tone or the Druidic Circle on the heath; here is an inexhaustible fund of interest for any man with eyes to see or twopence-worth of imagination to understand with! No child but must remember laying his head in the grass, staring into the infinitesimal forest and seeing it grow populous with fairy armies.
Somewhat in this way, as I paused upon my map of Treasure Island, the future character of the book began to appear there visibly among imaginary woods; and their brown faces and bright weapons peeped out upon me from unexpected quarters, as they passed to and fro, fighting and hunting treasure, on these few square inches of a flat projection. The next thing I knew I had some papers before me and was writing out a list of chapters. How often have I done so, and the thing gone no further! But there seemed elements of success about this enterprise.
Robert Louis Stevenson, from "My First Book, Treasure Island"
17 June 2025
Whites.
Trumbull, The Death of General Warren at the Battle of Bunker's Hill, 1778
Don't fire until you see the whites of their eyes.
Colonel William Prescott, hollered this day in 1775 during the Battle of Bunker Hill.
Drury, Plan of Boston and its Environs Shewing the True Situation of His Majesty's Army and Also Those of the Rebels, 1775
The American Battlefield Trust always does an outstanding job of telling the story ...
The Journal of the American Revolution has more.
16 November 2024
Excellent.
An excellent book ...
A prerequisite for finding our way through any story or novel is to be lost: the journey can’t begin until we’ve been set down in a place somehow unfamiliar. As readers, we are content, even delighted, to be lost, in the sense that we are both absorbed and uncertain of where we are or where we are going, as long as we feel confident we are following a guide who has not only the destination but our route to it clearly in mind.
Peter Turchi, from Maps of the Imagination: The Writer as Cartographer
14 May 2024
11 January 2020
25 July 2019
Astonishing.
CONNECT
24 January 2018
21 December 2017
Analemma.
The sun’s position in the sky, noted at the same location at the same time of day throughout a year, forms an analemma. This shows the sun’s apparent swinging from its northernmost position, at the analemma’s uppermost point, at summer solstice, to its southernmost position/lowest point, at winter solstice.
The Sun's Signature: AViewing of Infinity ...
Analemma Dial
29 November 2017
28 November 2017
21 November 2017
03 October 2017
07 August 2017
04 August 2017
05 April 2017
Height.
Using NASA satellite data, scientists have produced a map that details the height of the world’s forests. Although
there are other local- and regional-scale forest canopy maps, the new map is
the first that spans the entire globe based on one uniform method.
The work -- based on data collected by NASA's ICESat, Terra, and Aqua satellites -- should help scientists build an inventory of how much carbon the world’s forests store and how fast that carbon cycles through ecosystems and back into the atmosphere. Michael Lefsky of the Colorado State University described his results in the journal Geophysical Research Letters.
Labels:
appreciation,
forests,
maps,
NASA,
technology,
trees
30 March 2017
22 December 2016
Delivered.
With only a drawing of a map for guidance, a piece of mail was delivered to a farm in West Iceland.
14 November 2016
Slingshot.
There are many ways of moving through the Universe – of
travelling from one point to another over great, even extraordinary distances.
There is also a way of using the world for your own ends: taking advantage of
slopes, winds, currents or gravitational fields, as fuel-efficient resources
for your own acceleration.
Gravity-assisted space travel is one such example, when a
spacecraft uses the gravitational pull of a nearby planet or other celestial
body to ‘slingshot’ itself toward another, more distant goal. Crucially, the
target or destination here is one that could not have been reached without this
assistance, not only in terms of the ship’s velocity but even in terms of its
original direction of travel.
You head toward one place to get to another – or,
channelling Hamlet, "by indirections find directions out."
Remarkably, this metaphorically rich idea of heading in one
direction to arrive somewhere else entirely connects gravitational slingshots
with the oceangoing people who settled remote island chains in the South
Pacific. These ancient mariners learned to use a combination of seasonal winds
and celestial navigation to push ever farther east, reaching the most extreme
outer edges of Polynesia.
Labels:
boats,
history,
maps,
navigation,
sailing,
science,
technology,
tradition
02 October 2016
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