Category Archives: Maps

Arcane Sunday Bits

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More snow on Saturday, which probably removes the risk that we might see patches of ground again before sometime in March. More shoveling last night, though this time Lilly helped. That was the price of borrowing the car today.

Tenchi Meisatsu (Samurai Astronomer) was an interesting movie. As I was watching it yesterday, it occurred to me that I knew little about the pre-Meiji Japanese calendar, except that it had been borrowed from the Chinese, and tossed out in favor of the Gregorian calendar. Tenchi Meisatsu (2012) is the story of Yasui Santetsu, the first official astronomer of the Tokugawa shogunate, and his dramatized efforts to reform the Japanese calendar in the 17th century.

As the reviewer at the imbd points out, that’s an unusual subject for a movie, yet it’s effective. As a Japan Times reviewer points out, “it’s probably the best film about calendar making you’ll ever see.” So far, that’s true. I don’t expect to see an action thriller about Pope Gregory any time soon, and poor old Sosigenes didn’t even rate a mention in the HBO series Rome that I recall, though he seems to have been a character in the 1963 movie Cleopatra.

Another arcane matter: It’s never occurred to me to have a favorite map projection, but I know enough to find this funny. I’m fond of most any map, except for grossly inaccurate tourist maps. That is, the sort that have a few vague lines of actual geography, but which mostly sport drawings of famous places or random fun-time activities. They aren’t real maps anyway.

These are some interesting maps. Especially this one.

Tuesday Recommendations

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Butter toffee from Guth’s End of the Trail Candy Shoppe in Waupun, Wis., a burg southwest of Fond du Lac. Every year a PR company I’ve long dealt with sends me a box for the holidays. It’s the only time I eat toffee. It’s insanely good. Only a few pieces will make you feel a little queasy, so rich is the confection. But you eat them anyway.

The Man of Bronze. It’s the first Doc Savage novel, and probably the only one I’ll ever read. With genre pulp, that’s usually enough. I have memory fragments of the mid-70s Doc Savage movie I didn’t see – not many people did – so I’m probably remembering the commercials. My friend Kevin recommended Doc Savage as an entertaining read of no consequence, and I’ll go along with that so far. You have to like a yarn that begins with the sentence, “There was death afoot in the darkness.”

Gravity. It’s a really engaging Man Against Nature story, or to be more exact, Woman Against Vacuum. With a one-damn-thing-after-another plot that keeps your attention. Also, worth the extra money to see in 3D, and not too many movies are. In fact, the depiction of space alone is worth the price of admission. A few of the space-science stretchers bothered me a little – I don’t think hopping from spacecraft to spacecraft is quite that straightforward – but not that much. I don’t want exact space science from a movie, just high verisimilitude, and this movie delivers.

Lizard Point Consulting’s geography quizzes. Every now and then, I make Lilly and Ann take some of the easy ones, such as U.S. states or capitals. It’s my opinion that every adult American citizen without cognitive impairment ought to know all of the states.

But I can’t brag about a lot of the other quizzes. It’s clear that my knowledge of, say, French regions is fairly meager, and sad to say I don’t do that well on Japanese prefectures, either – I tend to remember only the ones I’ve been to, plus a scattering of others (like Aomori, where Aomori apples come from, because it’s due south of Hokkaido).

Even quizzes that ought to be easy-ish, such as African nations, have their confusions. Without looking, which one is Swaziland, which one Lesotho? Which is Benin, which one Togo? Which one is Guinea, which one Guinea-Bissau? (That should be easy, Guinea’s bigger.) Similarly, it’s hard to keep track of which –stan is which in Asia, except for Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Kazakstan.

Maps, Maps, Maps

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Back again around September 22 — about on the equinox. That’s just a coincidence, since it’s the next Sunday that I want to begin posting again. But those days must mean something. Years ago, I took a flight across the equator on the solstice, and I turned into a Druid for a few minutes.

I have a collection of maps, many of which I’ve picked up as I visited places. Recently I moved them out of the lower level of the house, and as I was leafing through them, it occurred to me that my daughters — if they’re ever so peripatetic — will probably not end up with a clutch of paper maps. They’ll have some electronic box that offers directions wherever they are: New York, London, Paris, Munich.

Paper maps can be cumbersome. Of course I use Google Maps and its ilk sometimes. But my daughters and their cohort don’t know how much they’ll be missing without paper maps.

I’ve posted about that Stadtplan Berlin before, and one of my favorite maps ever (not pictured), Bensons MapGuide London Street Map.

And when am I going to give up my paper maps? When they pry them from my cold, dead fingers.

Mali by Golly

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How often is Mali in the news? Here in North America, anyway, since I’d think the French pay more attention to French West Africa than we do.

Not too often. It’s the kind of place, under normal circumstances, gets mentioned in a half a column in a publication like the Economist occasionally because of a change of government, violent or not. Last time it was top of mind for me was when I got a postcard from Timbuktu.

I always thought country had an interesting shape. A compact area along the Niger and below 15 degrees N., plus an enormous lobe reaching out into the Sahara. You can see how a rebellion might get some traction up in the far-flung reaches of that lobe. By vicious Islamist bastards, from the sound of it. (Listen to that lovely first track posted with that article.)

I had to check: Mali’s total area is 478,841 sq. mi., making it the 24th largest country on Earth by that measure. You could put a Texas and a California in there with room to spare, so that’s a sizable chunk of land to quarrel over.