This does not exist
I recently stumbled across a website called This City Does Not Exist. Every refresh loads an AI-generated aerial image of a city that, indeed, does not exist. As a lover of maps, I enjoy playing with this website, creating stories and histories in my head for these invented landscapes. Through researching the technology that enabled…
Power of Landscape
In response to a question about how landscape is something that forms each of us, Irish poet, theologian, and philosopher John O’Donohue provided this answer on Krista Tippet’s podcast “On Being” that I think wonderfully summarizes the need for wilderness in our collective lives. Krista Tippet: “I know that “landscape” is a really pivotal word…
Time enough
Time is a fickle thing. In the western tradition we tend to describe it as something we continuously move through with a constant speed and direction, but I’ve come across some other interesting descriptions lately that I think are worth considering. In PrairyErth: A Deep Map author William Least Heat-Moon notes that in western philosophy…
Uncanny Valleys
There’s a concept in robotics called the uncanny valley. Basically, as robots become more and more human-like, people want to be around them less and less, the robots become uncanny. This is why robots intended to socialize with humans often have cute cartoon faces instead of lifelike animatronic ones. The cartoon faces are different enough…
Polar aspirations
It has always bugged me that Robert Scott and Ernest Shackleton are two of the best known Antarctic explorers. Scott, after all, died during an attempt to become the first to reach the south pole due to a number of reasons including poor planning, lack of preparation, and sheer British bravado. Shackleton is only known…
Traverses
I like to think that I put more than average brain cycles towards thinking about routes and traverse paths. My job requires it after all and I’m predisposed due to hobbies like hiking and backpacking which require good route knowledge. I’m always on the lookout for new styles and types of maps that represent route…
Why I Quit
I sent out the last edition of my Explore and Observe newsletter this weekend. I started it in the summer of 2019 thinking with the goal to share something I’m passionate about with a lot of other people. I saw it as an asset, something that would grow with time and hopefully provide significant benefits…
GPS
I’ve read a fair bit on navigation techniques and books never fail to point out how GPS is bad for your brain. The general story is that spatial navigation exercises the hippocampus, a region of the brain also closely linked with episodic memory, spatial reasoning, and other important functions. An overreliance on GPS means you…
The Wild Places
Another quote from the ever adroit Robert MacFarlane on maps that I’ve been pondering lately. “Before it was a field science, cartography was an art: this was the first thing I had understood. We are now used to regarding cartography as an endeavor of exacting precision, whose ambition is the elimination of subjectivity from the…
Roosevelt
Theodore Roosevelt lived a life that was both remarkable and well documented, so there is no shortage of literature on the man. A few that I’ve read are Edmond Morris’s authoritative trilogy which can’t be beat for thoroughness, Theodore Roosevelt in the Field by Michael Canfield predictably focuses on Roosevelt’s exploits as a naturalist and…