Looking past the horizon
Exploration. How; Why; Where?
muizz and
Looking past the horizon
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
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.
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
Linus Lee • the stream
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
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
Simon Wardley • Highlights From medium.com
In 1820, if you wanted to discover a new idea, you’d probably sail to a new continent