Looking past the horizon

The first, and most obvious thing, is that they are visual. If I was going to move a piece on a map then I could point to where it was and where it needed to go. Navigation was visual but that was normal. Except, I realised it wasn’t. When people stopped me in their cars to find their way to the nearest petrol station — this was 2004 and GPS was st... See more

In 1820, if you wanted to discover a new idea, you’d probably sail to a new continent

If the polynesian wayfinding tradition had died out just a couple centuries earlier, so that we didn't have living practitioners as a matter of record, they'd tell us that navigating the pacific like that was impossible and those stories were just legends and allegories

Howard Aiken—the inventor of the earliest general purpose computer—was never worried about people stealing his ideas. “If your ideas are any good” he’s quoted as saying, “you'll have to ram them down people's throats.” And yet, we think that the moment that we hit the dance floor, all eyes will be on us. The moment we hit publish, the world will ta... See more

These aren’t sculptures, they’re maps of water. Navigators from the Marshall Islands made ‘stick charts’ to record wave patterns in the sea, treating the ocean as terrain—the shells indicate islands. Their methods and skills are the most advanced of any known for ‘reading’ water

The computer can look at every word on the page, every phrase, name, quote, and section of text, and show me a "map" of the words and ideas behind which lay the most interesting ideas I might want to know about. Links are no longer lonesome strands precariously holding together a sparsely connected Web, but a booming choir of ephemeral connections ... See more