Looking past the horizon
Exploration. How; Why; Where?
muizz and
Looking past the horizon
The maps of the world drawn by the medieval cartographers were so hopelessly inaccurate, so filled with factual error, that they elicit condescending smiles today when almost the entire surface of the earth has been charted. Yet the great explorers could never have discovered the New World without them. Nor could the better, more accurate maps of t
... See moreAlvin Toffler • Future Shock
muizz and
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
It seems obvious in hindsight…
Island chains in the middle of the Pacific cause predictable disturbances in ocean currents. If you listen carefully, you can find the source of the perturbations.
So there are fundamentally two mindsets about the future. A pessimistic one where we see the Earth as finite in resources and conclude that we must limit ourselves. And an optimistic one where we see the Earth as finite in time and conclude that we must grow our knowledge towards infinity. The former mindset is not only uninspiring but will ultimat... See more
Albert Wenger • To Infinity and Beyond
Apart from a very limited amount of state sponsorship, it was usually the prospect of commercial gain or of new lands for settlement which funded exploration – a misleading term, which usually signified the ‘mapping’ of existing trade paths through local informants. But the propulsion of economic or demographic need was spasmodic at best.
John Darwin • After Tamerlane: The Rise and Fall of Global Empires, 1400-2000
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
More on Polynesian navigation
A map, in other words, is an arrangement of symbols into a system of meaning — and we use maps because we understand the language of signs that undergirds them. If the mapping of space was a human invention, she explained, one could also invent a means of mapping time.
Susan Schulten • Emma Willard's Maps of Time
In 1820, if you wanted to discover a new idea, you’d probably sail to a new continent
Anthony Pompliano • Writing for Leverage, Teenage Billionaires, The Problem with Mainstream Media, and More - David Perell on Off the Chain, Hosted By Anthony Pompliano • Podcast Notes
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