To Speak of MapsWe have maps scattered around the home. This is a welcome thing; it is good to know where things are, even if by representation. We have a large thumping hard bound Atlas, which is probably by now showing age; it is likely that it speaks of countries called something else again. We have maps of our home in various granularity: city, county, state, country. I particularly like the hot red books of state topo maps; we keep one in the car, for when we get lost.
We have paper topo survey maps from the USGS for here, there, and two other places have been important or perhaps will soon be. These things are treasures of line drawn art, well made maps from an era of maps made well, a time that I fear is slipping away under the digital onslaught. They were cheap, four bucks each, and they took months to arrive in the mail. They are printed on good paper. Someday, we will frame them.
We do not have a globe, but I have discovered something almost better. The desktop of my computer is now provided with an image by the excellent software Xplanet. Xplanet is flexible stuff, but my present and so far favorite selection is an updated image of our good blue planet, hanging in a field of stars. The camera of my eye (as it were) is centered over my country, state, county, city, home, myself; it is the terminator that turns under and over me, updated in real time, so that as I see the darkness sweep rightward on my screen I can also look out the window and see the dim come. Where the Earth lies in night, Xplanet helpfully draws in the splotches and dots of light that map the human presence. Xplanet, too, pulls cloud data from the world outside and shows me that as well, painted across the planet. Having lived near the fist of the ocean, I do not look forward to hurricane season, but I am somewhat curious about seeing one churn across the Atlantic, seeing it to scale.
(I expect at some point to have a globe that does this, but I do not know if we know how to build that yet.)
There are people who are putting together a world map, labeled with markers of what each country calls itself. Would that the world was more like that.
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