see things differently

Posts tagged with geography

What is Eastern Europe? How did places like Gepidia, Nitra, Great Moravia, the Avar Khaganate, Habsburgia, Pannonia, Thrace, Dacia, Moesia, nomadic Göktürks under the Rouran Khaganate, Dalmatia, Cimmeria, Anatolia, the Great Seljuq Empire, Corinth, Onoghuria, Scythia, Syrmia, Vojvodina, Bulgaria, Carpathia, Illyria, Hamangia, Bosnia, Budim, Egri, Sigetvar, Temeşvar, Pomorje, Serbia, Arduba, Daorson, Ošanićia, Sarmatia, Čapljina, Ardea, Neretva, and Ossetia, in the middle of a continent that became socially dominated in the later half of the 2nd millennium A.D. by residents of its western islands and peninsulas, come to be seen as a “unified group” so that when an American visits Bratislava he expects something similar to Bucharest?

Anne Applebaum’s answer is that the present categorisation was essentially shaped by the USSR, a political powerhouse in Eurasia during the 20th century.

bonus: from Wikipedia, here are some notable biomes in the middle of the Eurasian supercontinent.

the steppe:

The Pannonian plain is divided into two parts along the Transdanubian Mountains (Hungarian: Dunántúli-középhegység). The northwestern part…and the southeastern part…comprise the following sections:

Western Pannonian Plain (province):
- Vienna Basin
- Little Hungarian Plain
Eastern Pannonian Plain (province):
- Great Hungarian Plain
- Pannonian Island Mountains (Serbian: Panonske ostrvske planine)
- Transdanubian Mountains (Hungarian: Dunántúli-középhegység)
- Drava–Mura lowlands

Note: The Transylvanian Plateau and the Lučenec-Košice Depression (both parts of the Carpathians) and some other lowlands are sometimes also considered part of the Pannonian Plain in non-geomorphological or older divisions.

Regions

Relatively large or distinctive areas of the plain that do not necessarily correspond to national borders include:

Bačka/Bácska
- Šajkaška
- Telečka
- Gornji Breg
Banat
- Pančevački Rit
- Veliki Rit
- Gornje Livade
Baranya/Baranja
Burgenland (Neusiedler Basin)
Crişana
Jászság
Kunság
Little Hungarian Plain (Kisalföld/Malá dunajská kotlina)
Mačva
Međimurje
Moravia
Moslavina
Podravina (around Drava river)
Podunavlje (around Danube river)
Pokuplje (around Kupa river)
Pomoravlje around Morava river
Pomorišje (around Mureş river)
Posavina (around Sava river)
Potisje (Serbia, around Tisa river)
Prekmurje
Semberija
Slavonia
- Palača
Srem/Srijem
- Podlužje
- Šokadija
- Spačva
Transdanubia
Vienna Basin
Vojvodina

Population distribution of the United States in units of Canadas.

(having a hard time locating the original source. if you can clue me in I’ll link to it!)

hi-res

An Ugly Discontinuity II

Here’s another example of what mathematicians mean by an “ugly discontinuity”.

The Torus is the Cartesian product of circles ◯×◯. I.e. an abstract geometry in which concrete angular measurement pairs (or triples or quadruples or quintuples or …) are realised.

The Sphere is … not that.

A is the north pole and C is the south pole in the Sphere picture.

It’s nontrivial to recognise that ◯×◯≠sphere. For example the people who wrote the Starfox battle mode drew the screen as a sphere but programmed the battle mode on a torus.

By the Hairy Ball Theorem we know that spheres are different to independent pairs of circles. Specifically: one circle “vanishes” at the top and bottom of the other, to make a sphere. Changing your latitude coordinate at the North Pole leaves you in the same place. In other words “two” collapses to “one” at the poles which also implies that, for consistency, latitude needs to be close to collapse around 89°N—not at all like ◯×◯. where the two capstans spin freely independent of one another.

(This is half of the “joke” … or, “prank”, or “not-funny joke” in my twitter location. I designate myself at (−90,45) so you can imagine a person spinning around uselessly as they try to “walk in a circle” on the South Pole. OK … it’s only slightly funny even to me.)

This is like how globes can represent the Earth much better than maps on a flat sheet of paper. Since it’s impossible to map R² onto S², flat maps can never be perfect. (The fact that the difference is merely a point—that is R² does map onto S²\{0}—is a distraction from how distorted real maps get. Look how different Greenland looks from the North versus the European view

Furthermore the torus can’t be deformed into a sphere, and it’s difficult for mathematicians to see the relationships between high-dimensional and low-dimensional spheres. (And this has something to do with the story of what Grigory Perelman achieved in solving that Clay Prize.)

The savvy way of talking about this is to say that the sphere has ugly symmetries. How can I say that when the Sphere is a Platonically perfect elementary shape?! The Sphere is so perfect that mass in outer space likes to form itself into that most balanced of balanced shapes.

Basically because when you hold the globe with two fingers and your friend spins it, the antipodes where your two fingers are holding it don’t move. (Yes, neighbourhoods around them move—but “points” in the infinitely-deep-down-continuum-set-of-measure-zero sense are singularities (erm, singularities in the 1/z sense, not in the “black hole” sense).)

Tomorrow: a post on a statistical application of the humble circle.

(Source: )

Eric Fischer cross-referenced geolocated Tweets from across the world with data on known transport nodes. He then created what are in effect transit cartograms, with the thickness of a road or other mass transport line corresponding to the volume of Tweets sent along its path.

Fischer British Isles

http://www.flickr.com/photos/walkingsf/sets/72157628993413851/with/6804680189/

aggregated by John Burn-Murdoch on The Guardian, came to me through @vruba and reading.am.

dimensions of sociology

One of the important discoveries of the late 1700s and 1800s was that family life in Northwest Europe during this period varied substantially from family life in other parts of the world, such as Russia, The Middle East, China and India.

Compared to family life in many other parts of the world—with extensive family solidarity, little individualism, overwhelming control of parents over adolescent children, a young age at marriage, universal marriage, marriages arranged by parents, and large and extended households—family life in Northwest Europe could be characterized as having relatively little family solidarity, great individualism, little control of parents over adolescent children, an older age at marriage, many people never marrying, marriages arranged by the couple through courtship, and small and nuclear (or stem) households.

—arvind thornton

Hat tip to @mileskimball.

(Source: developmentalidealism.org)

As to longitude, I declare that I found so much difficulty in determining it that I was put to great pains to ascertain the east-west distance I had covered. The final result of my labours was that I found nothing better to do than to watch for and take observations at night of the conjunction of one planet with another, and especially of the conjunction of the moon with the other planets….

After I had made experiments many nights, one night, the twenty-third of August 1499, there was a conjunction of the moon with Mars, which according to the almanac was to occur at midnight or a half hour before. I found that…at midnight Mars’s position was three and a half degrees to the east.

Amerigo Vespucci

Good gosh. Can you imagine having travelled so far on the globe—without a swift means of return, of course—that you literally had no idea where you were?

And what’s more, ∄ science to save you. You can’t ask anyone around you for the answer. Many of the people around you not only have never heard of Europe, but can’t even conceive of such a thing.

Nobody knows the answer. ∄ books that purport to have the answer. ∄ communication channels back to home. You’re all alone, mentally. To figure out what’s going on all you have to go on is reason and facts. And if you get the answer right, whom are you going to tell?

(Source: Wikipedia)

Landsat Image of the Sundarbans mangrove forest in India.

High Res (23 mb)

via infinity-imagined

More from @vruba: In which I politicize a natural disaster:

Here’s Bangladesh, home of 160,000,000 people:

This picture is about 750 km (450 mi) on a side. Bangladesh is the area of New York State. It has the highest population density of any country except micronations like Singapore and the Vatican.

Notice there is no patchwork logging texture like most of the developed world has from space. Bangladesh’s only remaning lowland forests of any size are the Sundarbans, a dark green mangrove swamp on the coast. Except some foothills around the edges, the country is almost entirely a dense network of villages between fields and ponds. More than two thirds of its people – roughly the equivalent of the entire population of Japan or Mexico – live outside cities. If you pull it up on Google Maps, you’ll see many ponds have been squared off as surrounding farm plots crowded at their edges over centuries.

Notice the braided rivers. These are the members of the Ganges river system. Rivers can only flow in that kind of pattern on flat land. The land is flat because it is mostly the delta of the Ganges. Soil from the mountain range at the top of the frame, the Himalaya, washes down the rivers and has slowly built a bay into a huge bench along the Indian Ocean. About a third of Bangladesh is below 10 meters. The Sundarbans are legally protected partly because they buffer storm surges: when a cyclone makes landfall, the seawater it pushes is slowed by the manifold roots. This was learned the hard way.

Notice two cities – lichen-like gray patches. The one in the lower center of the frame is Dhaka (Dacca); 15 million people live there, or a little less than twice as many as in the five boroughs of New York City. To its southwest, not far from the water, is Kolkata (Calcutta), just over the border in India, with a population of about 14.5 million. Both of them are roughly half below 10 meters.

The border with India is winding and sometimes contentious. One of the main disagreements is sharing the water of the Ganges. The Ganges depends on the monsoons and snowfall in the Himalaya. The area is politically complex. To the west, India, a nuclear-armed democracy, plays a difficult set of roles in the world and is not always friendly. To the north, past the tiny Himalayan countries, is China, a nuclear-armed single-party state and rival of India. To the east is Myanmar, a terribly oppressive dictatorship. Bangladesh would soon find itself in trouble if many of its people, even a small proportion like ten million, spilled across any of its borders. As I write this, I see that the UN High Commission on Refugees has in fact just asked Bangladesh to open its borders to people leaving Myanmar.

Bangladesh’s Human Development Index is comparable to that of Cambodia or Angola, two countries that suffered generation-long episodes of violence near the end of the last century, but Bangladesh has been basically at peace since the year-long war of independence in 1971. It is simply very poor. It’s getting richer, but it’s very poor. The nation cannot afford to, say, take the approach of the Netherlands and wall out the ocean, even if that were possible in a country of rivers. Now, for all its challenges, Bangladesh has well-chosen strategies to deal with them. It is not powerless and it is not a lost cause. But it is 160,000,000 people living under a threat that, so far, only increases.

Regions

An Ugly Discontinuity II

dimensions of sociology

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