How big is Africa, really? A few years back there was an exhibition in a London gallery by the Royal Geographic Society, and the curator asked the edge.org group to contribute “unusual maps”. Thinking it would be for a few hundred people at most, I put together a little map that I had made previously in the mid 80s before, then as an example of scientific visualization graphics software (which I spent a decade on, actually).
It was a very simple premise that I had seen done a number of times before – never claimed it to be a novel invention – but had a slightly new twist in mind: Africa is so mind-numbingly immense, that it exceeds the common assumptions by just about anyone I ever met: it contains the entirety of the USA, all of China, India, as well as Japan and pretty much all of Europe as well – all combined !
And the idea was to roughly put all of them as puzzle pieces somehow fitting inside the outline shape of Africa, which is of course just a symbolic image – it may as well have been just blobs to tell the story, but it actually worked pretty well with the real pieces, at least enough to get the idea across in a visual and visceral way.
The whole point being made was that we all have been taught geography mainly based on the Mercator projection – as the background in daily television news, the cover of my school atlas, in general the ubiquitous depiction of the planet.
But the basic fact is that a three-dimensional sphere being shown as a single two-dimensional flat image will always be subject to a conversion loss: something has to give…
The reason why Mercator was such an important advance is simple: on it one can draw straight lines to account for travel routes – in the days of the gigantic merchant fleets and naval battles an immensely valuable attribute.
But that ability to use lines instead of curves came at a cost: areas near the poles would be greatly exaggerated. Greenland looks deceivingly as if it were the size of all of South America for instance…
In other words: if things are normal near the equator, everything further north and south is familiar to us in a stretched and enlarged version, veering further and further away from the proper size. And conversely: if we kept the shapes as we intuitively know them now, Africa ought to be stretched massively larger to keep it in true proportion.
Hence the fact that in everyday thinking, Africa is just about always hugely underestimated – even by college grads, off by factor of 2 or 3.
It is that time of the year. To crown the best and to do the lists of favourite topics.
Here are some of mine:
1. Best Song: FooFighters The Sky is a neighborhood
A brilliant song that I have had on repeat the last months. Can’t stop listening to it.
2. Best Album: U2 Songs of Experience
They were back, the best rock’n band on the planet. Do I need to say more? Listen to ‘Love is all we have left” – then you will understand.
3. Best Movie: Get Out
Scary. Scary. Scary. And very good.
4. Best TV Serie: Rellik
Innovative, unexpected, intensively addictive. This BBC detective show also available on HBO was the best thing we have seen since the first season of True Detective. As they say…..To know the truth – go back.
5. Best Football Game: Sweden vs. France 2-1
The big man was gone ending his international career after 116 caps and a record breaking 62 goals. The Sweden national team was given a horrifying qualification group for FIFA World Cup 2018 playing France and Netherlands with only one team going through. After a 1-1 draw against Netherlands this new young team faced favourites France at home and won 2-1 after a stunning 60 meter last minute goal from own pitch by Ola Toivonen. We started to believe. After knocking out Netherlands, and beating Portugal away 3-2, this new team like a Phoenix also sent four times World Champions Italy out of World Cup winning the play-off (1-0, 0-0). Rocket to Russia. But it all started with that 2-1 win in Stockholm.
China recently opened a new futuristic library that contains a staggering 1.2 million books.
The new Tianjin Binhai Library in Tianjin, China, was recently opened and is an architectural masterpiece. I love it, I have to go to see it.
The five-story, 360,000-square-foot library features shelves spanning from the floor to ceiling — many of the shelves double as stairs and seats in the beautifully designed space.
The “books” above the actual bookshelves are actually painted onto the building to look like full shelves that continue up to the ceiling (creating the floor-to-ceiling illusion).
The Tianjin Binhai Library was built in just 3 years and opened to the public on October 1st, 2017.
Read the article here; A new world library
Image credits: Photographs by Ossip van Duivenbode and used with permission
Source: PetaPixel
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