The map library

Just DON’T look at it!

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I had to look up chukars. They’re a kind of partridge. I think this map is playing a bit fast-and-loose with the definition of “domesticated”.

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Domesticated humans?

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That’s not how I understood all the “Florida Man” headlines.

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In years past you could also get some good photos to use for mountains (though you might need to Photoshop out the shopping carts embedded in the snow piles.) That wouldn’t really work that well last year or this year, though, since in Boston it’s been two full years since we got a snowfall of 4 or more inches. So the piles created by snowplows clearing parking lots weren’t that impressive unless the parking lot was really big.

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Very interesting and some good points about the value of “history” and “geology” in development of fantasy maps.

I don’t read a lot of fantasy, or play the games, but if I pick up a book in the library or bookstore, I’ll check if it has a map and whether said map rings true, as it were. Lots of these maps look like afterthoughts.

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It’s just for scale.

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The Greenwich Meridian’s Forgotten Rival

If you’ve ever been to the Louvre, you may have stumbled across a small disc bearing the word “Arago” and the letters “N” and “S” - or in other words, the exact location of the old Paris Meridian. But what’s the story there? How close did Paris ever get to becoming THE meridian? And why did we end up with Greenwich instead? I decided to investigate…

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Does it increase or decrease my nerd cred that I first knew about the Paris meridian from reading Tin Tin?

BTW, some years ago I read a book arguing that the growing requirement to somehow synchronise time in order to improve international train travel is what prompted Albert Einstein to think about time and space. Apparently he audited several proposals on how to synchronise clocks during his time at the patent office.

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i cant unsee this GIF by Chicks on the Right

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IKR? :shushing_face: Don’t tell those Greater Idaho folks! They might react like this…

:joy:

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That’s quite close to the Fuck You metric system topic.

I love it.

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From an Indy100 story that popped up. Apparently someone decided you can take an oval map centered on the Atlantic and just copy-paste to center it on the Pacific. You…can’t.

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