"I am not one who was born in the custody of wisdom. I am one who is fond of olden times and intense in quest of the sacred knowing of the ancients." Gustave Courbet
Showing posts with label maps. Show all posts
Showing posts with label maps. Show all posts

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 ...


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

First.

Hole, Jamestown (detail), 1624


On this day in 1607, English settlers arriving under the authority of the Virginia Company of London chartered by King James I, established the first permanent English settlement in North America at a place they named Jamestown.

11 January 2020

25 July 2019

Astonishing.


On March 26, 2018, a young Arctic fox left her birthplace of Spitsbergen, an island in Norway’s Svalbard Archipelago, and embarked on a harrowing westward journey. Seventy-six days and more than 2,175 miles later, the roughly one-year-old female arrived on Canada’s Ellesmere Island, astonishing researchers who say the animal, traveling at a maximum pace of 96 miles per day, exhibited the fastest movement rate recorded for her species to date.


CONNECT

21 December 2017

Analemma.


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

04 August 2017

Paradise.




I have always imagined that Paradise will be a kind of library.

Jorge Luis Borges

The Denizler Kitabevi Bookshop in Istanbul, which specializes in old books, antique maps, and engravings ... HERE.

That last picture ... imagine the scents in that room.

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.

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.


02 October 2016

Most.

Jansson, Nova Anglia, Novum Belgium, et Virginia, 1636


To those devoid of imagination a blank place on the map is a useless waste; to others, the most valuable part.

Aldo Leopold, from A Sand County Almanac

Thank You, Jessica.