402 – Homeland Is Where the Heartland Is

In geopolitical theory, the term ‘Heartland’ refers to the area between the Volga and Yangtze rivers, and between the Himalaya and the Arctic regions. According to H.J. Mackinder’s 1904 article The Geographical Pivot of History, this area was of paramount geopolitical importance due to its crucial position within what he called the World-Island (i.e. Europe, Asia and Africa). Mackinder summarised his ‘Heartland Theory’ thus: “Who rules East Europe commands the Heartland; who rules the Heartland commands the World-Island; who rules the World-Island controls the world.”

Mackinder’s theory emanated from a late-19th century vision of wars being decided by massive, land-based troop movements (speeded up by rail transport). The theory proved valuable as a context (or even a justification) for Germany’s push into the Soviet Union during the Second World War, and to a certain extent as a frame of reference during the Cold War. But one can wonder how relevant it remained, with the development of highly destructive long-range air raids as a major component of modern warfare.

Another use of the term ‘Heartland’ is as shorthand for the giant Hinterland of the United States. This American Heartland is not totally identical to its obvious geographic manifestation – i.e. the flyover states, the vast, landlocked bulk of the country without its more populated, urbane Atlantic and Pacific coasts. It also a symbolic concept, referring to an essentialist vision of an America where an apple pie is forever cooling on the window-sill. This America is less defined by geography than by nostalgia; a Heartland that is not merely a place, but also a yearning - for a country still defined by pioneering spirit and small-town values.

The heartland portrayed here is a very literal one, composed by cleverly arranging all 50 US states to have their oblique sides help form the outline of a giant heart. Texas’ pointy southern extremity represents the bottom part of the iconic heart-shape, while the slightly wedge-shaped top of Michigan’s Upper Peninsula is very aptly chosen as the place where the tops of both heart halves merge. All in all, this picture is a very nice fit – considering that all states are drawn to the same scale.

Many thanks to Casey T. for pointing out this (he)artwork, originally titled ‘States United’ (although the artist, Beauchamping, inevitably also considered ‘Heartland’). The original context of the work is here, on the website www.etsy.com, a “global vintage and handmade marketplace”.

401 – What’s On Earth Tonight?

 

The first tv images of World War II are about to hit Aldebaran star system, 65 light years [ly] away. If there’s anybody out there alive and with eyes to see it, the barrage of actual and dramatised footage of WW2 will keep them shocked and/or entertained for decades to come. Which is just as well, for they’ll have to wait quite a few years to catch the first episodes of such seminal series as The Twilight Zone and Bonanza (both 1959), just about now hitting the (putative) extraterrestrial biological entities of the Mu Arae area (appr. 50 ly). The Cosby Show, Miami Vice and Night Court (all 1984) should be all the rage on Fomalhaut (25 ly). Meanwhile, the sentient, tv-watching creatures near Alpha Centauri (4.4 ly), our closest extrasolar star, are just recovering from the infamous “wardrobe malfunction” during Janet Jackson and Justin Timberlake’s halftime show during the 2004 Superbowl.

All this is assuming, of course, that the aforementioned extraterrestrials prefer American tv to, say, German Fernsehen. And – this surely is the greater assumption – that our terran television signals are able to penetrate the universe in a way that makes them receivable in the far-flung corners of our galaxy.

Many thanks to Patrick McComb and Wallace J. McLean for sending in this map, found here on Abstruse Goose.

400 – Japanese Whispers: Mapping the Forbidden Outside World

For two centuries after 1640, the official Japanese policy towards the outside world was known as sakoku (‘closed country’), by which both Japanese leaving the country and foreigners entering it could expect the death penalty.

Although not quite as harshly absolute as that, isolationism prevailed until American commodore Matthew Perry’s Black Fleet sailed into Uraga harbour in 1853, forcing Japan to open up, first to commerce with the US, later to trade with other western countries.

This Japanese world map circa 1850, gives an impression of the country’s view of its place in the world on the verge of its forced reintegration into the international community. It is an intriguing mix of foreign knowledge and native perspective.

The Japanese archipelago is placed self-confidently at the centre of the map, banishing Europe from its usual central place to a marginal one, at the western edge. The American continent is banished to the map’s far eastern side.

The continents, each assigned a different colour, are generally in the right position vis-a-vis each other, but their contours are very poorly rendered, as if the map was not drawn directly from a contemporary western example, but via a system of Chinese whispers.

• Europe is an elongated mess, the Black Sea landlocked, the Greek peninsula melted, the British Isles fragmented into multiple rocks the very presence of which has smoothed out the continent’s northwestern shores to an almost straight line from Biarritz to Hamburg.
• Africa is intersected by giant rivers morphing into two fabulous (and fabulated) inland seas; South Africa’s Natal region is placed on its own island. Madagascar had bent out of shape, its northern cape aiming at a clutter of too-large islands.
• the Red Sea is coloured red, but the Arabian peninsula is coloured in as part of Europe – not to mention triangle-shaped. The Indian subcontinent (which actually is triangle-shaped) is rendered as a tired, sagging lump of land, much smaller than the huge Indochinese land mass.
• Unless one generously discerns the St Lawrence River in the giant wound gaping in North America’s eastern side, that continent shows hardly any resemblance to its actual shape (South America is shown much more realistically).
• By 1850, the British were busy colonising Australia, but this map still presupposed the area to be barely visited, showing it as a confused, semi-discovered muddle of land, attached to the Southland – the mythical Terra Australis Incognita of ancient – western – lore.

However flawed it may be, what this map proves by getting the general gist of the world’s geography right,  is that Japan was not entirely cut off from outside knowledge. Indeed, during the whole period of sakoku, severely restricted but nonetheless significant trading and other contacts were maintained with a handful of privileged partners.

The Dutch, who were allowed to maintain a foothold on the small island of Deshima, were Japan’s main source for western scientific knowledge, including cartography. This allowed Japan to keep up with the general development of geography, even if sometimes, as in this case, only very generally.

Many thanks to An Olaerts for providing me with this link to a series of antique Japanese world maps.

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NB: this is the 400th entry on Strange Maps, and if that isn’t enough to feel at least a bit festive, it will (most likely) coincide with the 12 millionth hit on the blog. Add to that the fact that the publication date of the Strange Maps book is approaching, and there’s three whole reasons to be cheerful. My thanks to all readers, commenters and contributors to this blog!

 

 

 

399 – Cracked and Gone: the World’s Largest Map

 

 

The terrazzo map in 1964; for a more contemporary image, cf. inf.

 

When this 130 by 166 foot plot of polished terrazzo tiling was inaugurated at New York’s 1964 World’s Fair, it was the largest map in the world. A facsimile extrapolation of a New York State road map by Rand McNally, the half-acre-sized piece of cartography today would still be the world’s largest map - if it had actually survived. But decades of human neglect and hard work by the elements have left their mark on the plywood tiles.

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The Texaco-sponsored map was one of the eyecatchers at the 1964 New York World’s Fair, serving as the floor of the Tent of Tomorrow, which was later turned into a concert venue but fell into disuse by the late Sixties. By the early Seventies, the plywood tiles were covered with a layer of polyurethane and the area was used as a skating rink. It now is part of the Flushing Meadows-Corona Park in Queens. With Ozymandias-like predictability, the Tent of Tomorrow’s 16 concrete pillars now support little more than sky. The only part of the New York State contribution to the Fair to survive unscathed is the Queens Theater in the Park, once the pavilion’s Theaterama.

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 As the driving irony of heritage conservation dictates, the map wasn’t deemed of value until it was nearly gone. By early 2008, the New York Times in this article called it “an exuberantly overstated mix of small-town parochialism, space-age optimism and Pop Art irony” in the course of reporting on a rescue attempt of this “valuable artifact”.

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As reported by the Times, a team of the University of Pennsylvania’s graduate programme in historic preservation has been trialing the preservation of four of the 567 4×4-foot panels that make up the map. They were replacing missing letters, numerals and symbols on the original map. It was estimated that conservation would cost about $1,100 per panel, bringing the total cost up to $623,700. However, no plans were made beyond the trial conservation, and I have no update on the current status of the project.

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In any case, the conservation process apparently would leave the map in dubious condition, rendering the purpose of a restored map rather unclear: the surface is so fragile and uneven that walking it, as back in the mid-Sixties, would be impractical at best, and probably quite dangerous.

Many thanks to Chris Perriman, who sent in this link to Tent of Tomorrow, a website dedicated to the eponymous construction, and the 1964 World’s Fair in general. Both images taken from that website. 

398 – Bridge to Nowhere: a Map of Golden Gate Jumpers

It’s 75 metres (245 ft) down from the deck of the Golden Gate Bridge to the water below. That drop will kill most people (*). And that’s exactly what it did to over 1,200 people who jumped off the bridge since its opening in 1937.

San Francisco’s most famous landmark, the world’s longest suspension bridge at its opening, has earned the sad distinction of being the world’s most popular suicide spot (others include Aokigahara, the “Sea of Trees” at the foot of Mount Fuji [Japan], Niagara Falls [US/Can], Beachy Head and Clifton Bridge [both in England]).

The number of jumpers from the bridge, spanning the over 2 km (6,700 ft) wide strait at the entrance of San Francisco Bay, has varied greatly throughout the years, never more than around 10 until 1960 (with the exception of the 20 of 1948), then rising dramatically to peak at 40 in 1977 and dropping again to a low of less than 10 in 1990.

In 2004, 24 people jumped off the Bridge, spiking to 38 in 2007 – an increase many blamed on The Bridge, a documentary about the place’s fatal attraction. In 2008, authorities voted to install a ’safety net’ six metres below the Bridge (although how this should prevent people from jumping from the net  is a question that should definitely be covered by the study to be conducted on the net’s impact).

This cartogram details the exact locations of the suicides, corresponding them with the 128 light poles that line the Bridge (east to west, even ones on the oceanside, uneven ones on the bayside). For obvious reasons, the areas closest to the edges of the Bridge are less popular (most suicides aim for maximum effect, i.e. longest way down). Remarkably, the bayside is a lot more popular than the oceanside. The hotspot is light pole 69 with – if I counted correctly – 56 recorded suicides.

Many thanks to Szymon Piotr Nogalski, who most recently submitted this map, and others who did so earlier. The map was sourced here on SFGate, the online presence of the San Francisco Chronicle, the newspaper that first published this suicide map. 

(*) After a fall of about 4 seconds, a jumper would hit the water at approximately 140 km/h (87 mph) – lethal in most cases. Those surviving the actual fall usually succumb to hypothermia, induced by the cold (8°C/47°F) water of the Bay. Over the decades, 26 people are known to have survived the fall and the cold water.

397 – Eliminating the Bottom 5%

How would you eliminate almost half the planet by subtracting just 5% from it? This map shows you how: delete the countries that constitute the bottom 5% of global GDP contributors, and you scrap almost 3 billion people from the equation. Those people mainly live in Africa and South East Asia, as demonstrated by the disappearance of those areas beneath the waves.

This map was first shown on the political website FiveThirtyEight (“Politics done right”), in reaction to an argument that climate change would affect global GDP by “only” 5% over the next 100 years. Quite rightly, the point was raised that a reduction in potential GDP might not be an adequate measure of the human impact of such society-shattering change.

As per-capita GDP varies across the world’s countries by a factor of 800 (or 2,000 if you count Zimbabwe), this is a rather cynical (or at least cold-hearted) way of measuring the worth of human lives, making the average Rwandan life hundreds of times less important than that of the average Luxembourger.

To demonstrate the impact of a reduction of global GDP by a mere 5%, FiveThirtyEight erased the countries constituting the bottom 5% of global GDP (IMF estimates for 2008), in reverse order of magnitude:

Zimbabwe (1), Burundi, DR Congo, Liberia, Guinea-Bissau, Eritrea, Malawi, Ethiopia, Sierra Leone, Niger, Afghanistan, Togo, Guinea, Uganda, Madagascar, the Central African Republic, Nepal, Myanmar (Burma), Rwanda, Mozambique, East Timor, the Gambia (2), Bangladesh, Tanzania, Burkina Faso, Mali, Lesotho, Ghana, Haiti, Tajikistan, the Comoros, Cambodia, Laos, Benin, Kenya, Chad, the Solomon Islands, Kyrgyzstan, India (3), Nicaragua, Uzbekistan, Vietnam, Mauritania, Pakistan, Senegal, Sao Tome and Principe, Ivory Coast, Zambia, the Yemen, Cameroon, Djibouti, Papua New Guinea, Kiribati, Nigeria (4), Guyana, the Sudan, Bolivia, Moldova, Honduras, the Philippines, Sri Lanka, Mongolia, Bhutan, Egypt (5), Vanuatu, Tonga, Paraguay, Morocco, Syria, Swaziland, Samoa, Guatemala, Georgia, the Congo, Iraq, Armenia, Jordan, Cape Verde, the Maldives, Fiji and Namibia (6).

All in all 81 countries (almost half of the 192 UN member states), representing nearly 2.9 billion people (about 43%) of the world population. But still, a mere 5% of world GDP…

Thanks to Jackson Wagner for providing me with this link to the FiveThirtyEight page.

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(1) 0.02% of global GDP, or $55 p.p.

(2) the list of countries up til now represents only 0.27% of global GDP.

(3) apparently constitutes only 2% of global GDP, surprisingly

(4) the list of countries up til now represents 3.6% of global GDP.

(5) the list of countries up til now represents 4.4% of global GDP.

(6) these countries together constitute 4.99997% of global GDP.