The 2010 Census: Population and Congressional Apportionment

Hey look, I have a blog! Guess I'll post something.



Yep, it's census stuff, from here. Roll over states for their particulars. I think it mostly speaks for itself - the Rust Belt continues to Rusts, the Sun Belt continues to... not rust. One thing I notice about the latter, though, is that there seems to be a bit of consolidation relative to earlier decades. Whereas growth had been widespread across many southern and western states from the 70s through the 90s, it seems a bit more focused in the last ten years, mainly centering on the states associated with megaregions: the Piedmont Atlantic (Georgia and the Carolinas), the Texas Triangle (Texas), and Florida (Florida) in particular. Less urbane states in the broader region, like Tennessee or New Mexico didn't gain as much in the past decade, relatively speaking. Blip? Trend? I speculate half-heartedly, you decide.

Mapping the Invisible in the Jungles of Belize

Jungle. Ancient civilization. Lasers. Cool:



Says the NY Times:

A small aircraft flying back and forth above the ancient Maya city of Caracol, in Belize, used a laser to penetrate the dense forest canopy.

Viewed in three dimensions, the data revealed new ruins, causeways and agricultural terraces of the sprawling city. A detail [of a detail] of Caracol's city center is shown here.

Interesting stuff, but a little disheartening in a sense. The age of physical human discovery is truly over; nowadays all we get is laser-guided dispatches from the global panopticon.

The Reformed State Map of the US

A proposal for electoral reform from fakeisthenewreal:



It's neat and all that the US was the first modern country to adopt many democratic institutions - we did it way back in the 18th Century, before the French Revolution even. Bully for us! However, a side effect of our early adoption of 'democracy' is that we have a lot of weird anachronistic leftovers from the pre-1789 era. Slavery was one, but fortunately we finally managed to get rid of that. But other, less significant but still not insignificant pre-democratic inconveniences remain. This map is meant to address some of these issues. Says fitn:

The electoral college is a time-honored system that has only produced results in conflict with the popular vote three times in over 200 years. However, it's obvious that reforms are needed. The organization of the states should be altered. This Electoral Reform Map redivides the territory of the United States into 50 bodies of equal size.... [This plan] overrepresentation of small states and underrepresention of large states in presidental voting and in the US Senate. Preserves the historical structure of the electoral college and the United States unique federal system, balancing power between levels of government. States could be redistricted after each census - just like house seats are distributed now.

Fifty states, as you see here, each with just about the same population. Yes, this would help with the problem of the electoral college system for picking presidents, which is insane by any reasonable standard and without which we might have avoided a certain period of unpleasantness from 2001-2009.

But the real advantage is in the Senate. Right now, Wyoming has as many senators as California. Vermont has as many as Texas. That's just straight up retarded. It's certainly not democratic. And don't give me any of that crap about how it preserves the sovereignty of states as the Great and Omniscient Founding Fathers intended, because do you know why they ended up with this provision that every state have an equal number of senators? To protect regional interests from the will of the majority; i.e., to protect southern interests; i.e., to protect slavery from meddlesome northerners. (And like just about everything unseemly in American politics, it all somehow goes back to the legacy of slavery...) Nothing approaches this level of blatant anti-democratic institutional structure in the free world. What's more, we can't even amend the constitution to allow for proportional representation in the Senate: the Founders made sure of that by making it the one thing that couldn't be repealed by amendment. Brilliant! So we would have to hold a constitutional convention and start over from scratch if we wanted to reform the Senate in a way that would really live up to modern norms.

Or - we could follow this guy's plan: just take the scissors to the ol' state map and produce what you see above. There would still be two senators per state, but every state would have equal population, so representation would be proportional. A fantastic idea! This would be much fairer than the system we've got going on now. In particular, as it stands, rural areas are way, way overrepresented in the Senate; having two senators each for neo-states like SF Bay, Los Angeles, Boston, New York, and Dallas would remedy that.

As for the electoral college, it wouldn't solve the problem entirely. It would still be possible to lose the popular vote and win the electoral college, but at least it wouldn't be due to the fact that the smallest states get overrepresented in the electoral college (e.g., North Dakota gets 3 EVs, because of its 1 representative + 2 senators, though it only has the population to justify 1).

Of course, there would be some logistical problems in re-organizing state governments throughout the country. But bah, I say. Small potatoes: the senate is dysfunctional as it is and it is going to end up killing the country. My own personal choice would be for us all to just ignore the Senate until it went away, sort of like the House of Lords. But this plan strikes me as the next best thing.

The Decline and Fall of Assorted Empires

A visualization of four European empires over the course of the 19th and 20th Centuries:



The bubbles respresent "the evolution of the top 4 maritime empires of the XIX and XX centuries by [areal] extent"; hence Britain's loss of Canada looks like a more significant bursting of the imperial bubble than its loss of India, even though India is obviously a far more important place than Canada.

Via Andrew Sullivan and 3quarksdaily.

Murder and the City

The New York Times has another interactive map that presents an absurd amount of information, so I am duty-bound to post it here:



It's a grim inventory: every murder in New York City since 2003. This image shows the race of the victim; they also show age, sex, and weapon used, among other statistics. Every dot is a life snuffed out, and you can click on them for details.

Fun fact: murder rates in the Middle Ages were much higher than they are today. By like orders of magnitude. This is from a paper by Manuel Eisner:



So, you know... none of that claptrap about "the good ol' days"...

The Spread of Marriage Equality in the US

The LA Times has a nice interactive map of gay marriage rights by state that shows the many changes that have taken place over the past decade or so. Here's how things stood in 2000:



And here's where things stand today:



The scale represents the range of rights denied or afforded to gay couples, from "constitutional amendment ban[ning] gay marriage and other legal rights for gay couples" (dark red) to "domestic partnership legal" (pale green) to "gay marriage legal" (dark green). You can mouse ove states for details. They also have a timeline depicting the various votes, judicial rulings, and other events that have produced the civil rights hodgepodge depicted on this map.

On the face of it, it looks like there's been a lot of movement both for and against legal recognition for gay marriage; while some states have extended full marriage rights, others have retrenched with constitutional amendments banning the same. But I think it makes sense to see these as two sorts of steps that are actually fundamentally moving in the same direction. After all, prior to 2000 or so, marriage equality wasn't really seen as conceivable - not in the foreseeable future, at any rate. But then - possibly because of a genuine sense of a shifting ground in public sentiment - a bunch of states amended their constitutions. This was a defensive move which anticipated the possibility that gay people might be allowed to marry which, like most changes in social institutions, tended to freak out people with more traditionalist orientations. But even though the effect was that a bunch of anti-equality measures got written into law, this was a symptom of a general progressive movement on the issue of gay marriage.

In retrospect, I think you might even say that the big movement earlier this decade to amend state constitutions to explicitly ban gay marriage actually spurred further progressive movement. Those votes - many of which were orchestrated in an effort to get more people to come out and vote Republican in 2004 and 2006 - raised the profile of the issue, certainly, and perhaps placed a veneer of plausibility on the concept of gay marriage. After all, if it was a concept that had to be fought at the ballot box, it must have been a concept that needed to be taken seriously, right? And with several states approving gay marriage this year, following the high-profile loss of gay marriage rights in California last November, I wonder if all the efforts at thwarting gay marriage have just had the net effect of telescoping the timeline of the spread of marriage equality.

6/3 UPDATE: And New Hampshire officially becomes the 6th state to sanction gay marriage, and the third to do so legislatively, after Vermont and Maine. Rhode Island is the only New England state without marriage equality.

Human Development Over Time: Maps from the UN

The site for the UN's Human Development Report has maps that show the (somewhat) shifting geography of development over the past few decades. Here are maps of HDI - broken into the conceptually nebulous but statistically precise categories of "low," "medium" and "high" development - for three selected years:





The main action seems to have been in Latin America, where several countries have gone from medium (.500-.800 on the HDI scale) to high (.800+), and in South Asia, where the entire Subcontinent has jumped the bar from low (<.500) to medium development.

But of course you notice how broad these categories are: high devlopment countries as of 2006 include everything from Ecuador to Denmark; middle income countries include both Thailand and Papua New Guinea. But you can click on countries to get a ton of details on demographics, health, education, and economics. You can also see HDI numbers for every hald-decade since 1975; China, for instance, has gone from .530 in 1975 to .777 in 2005.

"The Mappies"? National Geographic Hands Out Awards

The Map Room links to The National Geographic Map Awards, which are given out to cartographers who produce maps that stand out for technical proficiency and aesthetica quality. Here's a look at the 2008 winners.

Daniel Huffman, of the University of Wisconsin, won for this map of the tallest buildings in Europe between 1895 and 2007.



The size of the clock faces and the numbers on them indicate the number of buildings which were among the 30 tallest in Europe during the given time period. The colered rims indicate the time period and building type of the ranked buildings (e.g., red buildings were religious structures; blues were offices). You can see why it won - a ton of information simply portrayed, and a very broad implied narrative about the social and economic history of Europe over the last century and more. For instance, look at how at the beginning of the period - from "12 o'clock" to "6 o'clock" or even later, the tallest buildings are mostly religious and widespread; there's rarely more than one in any given city. By the time we get to the last few decades, the tallest buildings are almost all office buildings, and they're heavily concentrated in just a handful of cities: Paris, Frankfurt, London, and (though you need to click on the map to see it) Moscow and Istanbul.

Second place went to another UWer, Ben Coakley, for a map of small airline flights in Canada.



There's a certain elegant flourish to those flight paths, no?

Gregg Verutes, of San Diego State, got third place for his flash map of the slums of Accra, Ghana.



This image shows slum density. Verutes' map actually ran a bit slow for me, but then, my computer is rigged out of tin cans and AA batteries, so you might have better luck.

And as a bonus, here's a winner from 2007 - a zoomable map of armed forces sizes by Zachary Johnson, yet another U-Wisconsin mapmaker.



This is not to be confused with a cartogram of general military spending, which looks way different.

The New Old-Time Geography of Conflict

Robert D. Kaplan has a fascinating article in the new issue of Foreign Policy in which he makes the case for the preeminence of geography in determining the patterns of conquest and conflict throughout the world. He sees this view as a revival of a classical approach to world affairs which had taken a backseat in recent decades. The 20th Century had inaugurated a period of narratives of world affairs driven by broad ideologies - Communism! Fascism! Democracy! - rather than the literal global landscape; but Kaplan argues for returning geography to its erstwhile pride of place in describing world affairs:

In the 18th and 19th centuries, before the arrival of political science as an academic specialty, geography was an honored, if not always formalized, discipline in which politics, culture, and economics were often conceived of in reference to the relief map. Thus, in the Victorian and Edwardian eras, mountains and the men who grow out of them were the first order of reality; ideas, however uplifting, were only the second.

And yet, to embrace geography is not to accept it as an implacable force against which humankind is powerless. Rather, it serves to qualify human freedom and choice with a modest acceptance of fate. This is all the more important today, because rather than eliminating the relevance of geography, globalization is reinforcing it. Mass communications and economic integration are weakening many states, exposing a Hobbesian world of small, fractious regions. Within them, local, ethnic, and religious sources of identity are reasserting themselves, and because they are anchored to specific terrains, they are best explained by reference to geography. Like the faults that determine earthquakes, the political future will be defined by conflict and instability with a similar geographic logic. The upheaval spawned by the ongoing economic crisis is increasing the relevance of geography even further, by weakening social orders and other creations of humankind, leaving the natural frontiers of the globe as the only restraint.

So we, too, need to return to the map, and particularly to what I call the “shatter zones” of Eurasia. We need to reclaim those thinkers who knew the landscape best. And we need to update their theories for the revenge of geography in our time.

Kaplan describes a number of thinkers who had perceived the significance of geography in shaping global affairs. One was the French historian Fernand Braudel, who wrote The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II in 1949, which portrayed the ancient expansions of the Greek and Roman empires as a consequence of the marginal soils of the Mediterranean region. Another was Alfred Thayer Mahan, a US Naval Captain who "saw the Indian and Pacific oceans as the hinges of geopolitical destiny, for they would allow a maritime nation to project power all around the Eurasian rim and thereby affect political developments deep into Central Asia." Yet another was the prescient Dutch-American strategist Nicholas Spykman, who foresaw the necessity of America's protection of Japan and the rise of China before he died in 1943.

But Kaplan focuses particularly on Sir Halford J. Mackinder who, writing 1904, saw the global order as the inevitable product of the relations established across the vast expanses of Eurasia:

His thesis is that Russia, Eastern Europe, and Central Asia are the “pivot” around which the fate of world empire revolves. He would refer to this area of Eurasia as the “heartland” in a later book. Surrounding it are four “marginal” regions of the Eurasian landmass that correspond, not coincidentally, to the four great religions, because faith, too, is merely a function of geography for Mackinder. There are two “monsoon lands”: one in the east generally facing the Pacific Ocean, the home of Buddhism; the other in the south facing the Indian Ocean, the home of Hinduism. The third marginal region is Europe, watered by the Atlantic to the west and the home of Christianity. But the most fragile of the four marginal regions is the Middle East, home of Islam, “deprived of moisture by the proximity of Africa” and for the most part “thinly peopled” (in 1904, that is).

Europe's history, in the context of this landscape, is the story of an appendage to the great Eurasian landmass, despite the anomalous "Columbian epoch" of European discovery and colonialism. And the history of Russia, in particular, can be read as the history of a nation thoroughly traumatized by its invasion by Mongol hordes, and a consequent obsession with territorial acquisitiveness. This would later lead, during the Cold War, to a recapitulation of the struggle for control over the marginal areas of Eurasia, with a US containment policy of Communism that "depended heavily on rimland bases across the greater Middle East and the Indian Ocean."

Kaplan sees the geostrategically most important regions of the world as spreading through the same arc of lands - from the Middle East through South Asia and East Asia - that Mackinder described as the marginal regions of Eurasia. But unlike in previous centuries, these areas are deeply integrated with each other - rubbing shoulders, thanks to technological change, rather than being separate by natural geographical buffers as they had been in the past. (For example, countries from Israel through Iran, Pakistan, India, China, and North Korea form a contiguous overlapping region in which one country's ballistic missile range infringes on that of its neighbors.) Within this zone of potential geopolitical turbulence, Kaplan describes four "shatter zones" that may be particularly prone to instability and conflict in the decades ahead.

One shatter zone is the Indian subcontinent, where Nepal and Bangladesh constitute alarmingly weak states and are home to tens of millions of people; but they are paragons of stability compared to Pakistan and Afghanistan:

Of course, the worst nightmare on the subcontinent is Pakistan, whose dysfunction is directly the result of its utter lack of geographic logic. The Indus should be a border of sorts, but Pakistan sits astride both its banks, just as the fertile and teeming Punjab plain is bisected by the India-Pakistan border. Only the Thar Desert and the swamps to its south act as natural frontiers between Pakistan and India. And though these are formidable barriers, they are insufficient to frame a state composed of disparate, geographically based, ethnic groups—Punjabis, Sindhis, Baluchis, and Pashtuns—for whom Islam has provided insufficient glue to hold them together. All the other groups in Pakistan hate the Punjabis and the army they control, just as the groups in the former Yugoslavia hated the Serbs and the army they controlled. Pakistan’s raison d’être is that it supposedly provides a homeland for subcontinental Muslims, but 154 million of them, almost the same number as the entire population of Pakistan, live over the border in India.

The Pashtuns occupy a swathe of land that sprawls across portions of Pakistan and Afghanistan. If Pakistan falls apart, "Pashtunistan" would likely arise to partially take its place, which in turn would lead to the total dissolution of Afghanistan.

A second shatter zone is the Arabian peninsula. Interestingly, Kaplan describes the threat in this region not as arising within the Saudi Kingdom itself, but across the porous Saudi border with Yemen. Kaplan describes Yemen, a chaotic country in the southwestern corner of the peninsula that has almost as many people as Saudi Arabia itself, as "crowded with pickup trucks filled with armed young men, loyal to this sheikh or that, while the presence of the Yemeni government was negligible...Estimates of the number of firearms in Yemen vary, but any Yemeni who wants a weapon can get one easily. Meanwhile, groundwater supplies will last no more than a generation or two." Yemen, by the way, has one of the highest birth rates in the world.

A third shatter zone is in the area of the Fertile Crescent. In this case, it is due to the fact that the state borders of Jordan, Lebanon, Syria, and Iraq are almost totally divorced from the realities of natural geography that the potential for conflict exists. This is particularly true in the case of Iraq. Since there is nothing "natural" about the borders of Iraq - either in terms of natural borders or the distribution of ethnic and religious groups - a succession of strongmen has arisen in the country to hold the disparate pieces of the national fabric together. Saddam Hussein was the most recent, though not necessarily the last, of these. Some American intelligence experts tried to envision a more "rational" ordering of states in the Middle East - one that would reflect the realities of physical and cultural geography in the region:



(Though just a thought experiment, this map, which was posted at Strange Maps, caused a bit of a kerfuffle in the Middle East, where some people, understandably suspicious of American intentions in the region, saw it as arrogant and colonialist; of course, it was colonialism that led to the capricious carving of borders in the Middle East in the first place.)

The Persian Core, stretching from the Persian Gulf through the interior of Iran to the Caspian Sea, constitutes a final shatter zone. This region contains a huge amount of oil and natural gas wealth, both in the Persian Gulf and Caspian regions, and Iran has a hand in each of those regions. And Iran controls most of the Persian Gulf, including its entrance to the Indian Ocean at the Strait of Hormuz. According to Kaplan, its not accidental that Persia has played a prominent role throughout history. Unlike the other nations of the Middle East, its territorial borders follow the patterns of its natural geography.

Its border roughly traces and conforms to the natural contours of the landscape—plateaus to the west, mountains and seas to the north and south, and desert expanse in the east toward Afghanistan. For this reason, Iran has a far more venerable record as a nation-state and urbane civilization than most places in the Arab world and all the places in the Fertile Crescent. Unlike the geographically illogical countries of that adjacent region, there is nothing artificial about Iran. Not surprisingly, Iran is now being wooed by both India and China, whose navies will come to dominate the Eurasian sea lanes in the 21st century.

The threat in Iran is not, as in the other shatter zones, in its potential for dissolution; rather, its that a geographically unified and strong Persian state might erupt out of its own borders to create instability in the surrounding regions.

Kaplan concludes by noting that "we all must learn to think like Victorians." That is, we have to be open to the insights of geographical determinism: the view that geography and climate, more than ideology, will drive the important events and conflicts of the next century. Kaplan uses another word to describe this attitude - a word that had lost some of its currency in the years after September 11th, but which now is enjoying something of a revival: realism.

UPDATE: For an interesting and skeptical take on Kaplan's article, go here.

The World Digital Library Has Lots of Maps

The World Digital Library has launched.



The mission of the WDL is to "[make] available on the Internet, free of charge and in multilingual format, significant primary materials from countries and cultures around the world." It was developed by a team from the US Library of Congress with support from UNESCO. According to the site

The WDL makes it possible to discover, study, and enjoy cultural treasures from around the world on one site, in a variety of ways. These cultural treasures include, but are not limited to, manuscripts, maps, rare books, musical scores, recordings, films, prints, photographs, and architectural drawings.

Items on the WDL may easily be browsed by place, time, topic, type of item, and contributing institution, or can be located by an open-ended search, in several languages. Special features include interactive geographic clusters, a timeline, advanced image-viewing and interpretive capabilities. Item-level descriptions and interviews with curators about featured items provide additional information.

Navigation tools and content descriptions are provided in Arabic, Chinese, English, French, Portuguese, Russian, and Spanish. Many more languages are represented in the actual books, manuscripts, maps, photographs, and other primary materials, which are provided in their original languages.

Indeed, the site is very friendly to the user; the map interface is especially handy for those of us who like our information represented in geographical terms. And they've got lots of great stuff, including, of course, hundreds of historical maps. Maps like this one of the Lands Where the Sage-Emperor Yu Left His Traces.

This rubbing is of a Chinese map engraved in stone in the seventh year of the Fouchang era of the Qi state (1136). The stele survives in the Forest of Steles in Xi’an. The map is oriented with north at the top and south at the bottom. Over 500 place names are plotted on the map, which represents a panorama of China in Song times. The engraving of the hydraulic systems is especially detailed, with nearly 80 rivers named. The courses of the Yellow and Yangtze rivers are very close to the way they appear on present-day maps. The contour of the seacoast is also quite accurate. Among surviving maps engraved in stone, this map is the oldest and the earliest to have grid marks indicating scale. It is a prime example of the level of mapmaking in the Song dynasty, and occupies an important place in the history of Chinese cartography. In his Science and Civilisation in China, the British scholar Joseph Needham praised this work as the most outstanding map of its time.

And there's hundreds more where that came from.

Anti-Miscegenation Laws: A Precursor to Gay Marriage Bans?

So I was thinking about this map of the future of gay marriage, and wondering about what sort of precedents there might be in American social history for the sort of change involved in allowing gay couples to marry. And the best parallel to the legalization of gay marriage I can think of is the repeal of anti-miscegenation laws. Here's a map of the history of the repeal of anti-miscegenation laws.



There are obviously a ton of differences between the social acceptance of interracial marriages and the social acceptance of same-sex marriages. For one thing, the history of relations between races varies considerably between different regions of the country. But the basic shift in perceptions that undergird both expansions of social acceptance is pretty much the same: in both cases, the institution of marriage expands to include relationships that had once been seen as taboo. And the maps of the repeal of anti-miscegenation laws and the predicted failure of gay marriage bans (shown below) show a lot of correlation. In both cases, the socially progressive view takes hold first in the Northeast, and the South is the last holdout. In fact, every single state in the South continued to ban inter-racial marriage until the Supreme Court declared it unconstitutional in the case of Loving v. Virginia in 1967. It wouldn't surprise me terribly if a lot of Southern states continue to hold out against same-sex marriage until a comparable future Supreme Court decision.

But there are differences, too. The Western states - hypothetical early adopters of the legalization of gay marriage - were relatively slow to sanction interracial marriage. And the Midwest, especially the "prairie populism" states of the Upper Midwest, were early in sanctioning interracial marriage, but are predicted to be slower on the same-sex marriage front. (Of course, Iowa has already become the fourth state to legalize gay marriage - before any Western state - so history may yet repeat itself.)

And, of course, the time scales are radically different: it took nearly 200 years between the first state ban on interracial marriage to be lifted (Pennsylvania, in 1780) and the Supreme Court decision that ended such bans once and for all. And the progress was very fitful. After Pennsylvania, no marriage ban was lifted until 1843; 44 years later, ever Northern Union state other than Indiana had lifted their bans. But then - nothing, literally for generations. The post-Reconstruction period of racist retrenchment, aka Jim Crow, saw a total lack of progress in the states on interracial marriage. It wasn't until the modern Civil Rights era that interracial marriage bans again started to be overturned. And even by the time of the Loving decision, the country was still deeply bifurcated: every single non-Southern or border state had repealed their marriage bans, and every single Southern state still had a ban on the books.

Are there lessons to be drawn here about the future of same-sex marriage? One would seem to be that progressive change is not inexorable; or if it is, it can still be delayed by quite a lot, as the 1887 to 1948 lacuna in repealing marriage bans shows. And, though the generational divide on gay marriage is really stark, according to polls like this one, which found that 41% of people under 45 support same-sex marriage, as opposed to 18% of people over 65, even young people are only split on the issue, so it would seem wrong to view the inexorable spread of marriage equality as a fait accompli.

Nonetheless, I think there are good reasons to think that an outcome in which same-sex marriage becomes broadly accepted within a generation is likely. In particular, that same poll shows 60-35% support for either same-sex marriage or civil unions. That seems to suggest that, despite some lingering apprehension about what some people see as a re-definition of marriage, there is broad support for the principle of equality for gay couples. There's no reason to expect that support to reverse itself. The taboo on gay relationships is on the way out the door, and I can't help but think that it's only a matter of time before the law reflects this reality.

Here, by the way, are the dates when anti-miscegenation laws were repealed, according to Wikipedia.

Pennsylvania - 1780
Massachusetts - 1843
Iowa - 1851
Kansas - 1859
New Mexico - 1866
Washington - 1868
Illinois - 1874
Rhode Island - 1881
Maine - 1883
Michigan - 1883
Ohio - 1887

California - 1948
Oregon - 1951
Montana - 1953
North Dakota - 1955
Colorado - 1957
South Dakota - 1957
Idaho - 1959
Nevada - 1959
Arizona - 1962
Nebraska - 1963
Utah - 1963
Indiana - 1965
Wyoming - 1965
Maryland - 1967

Alabama - June 12, 1967
Arkansas - June 12, 1967
Delaware - June 12, 1967
Florida - June 12, 1967
Georgia - June 12, 1967
Kentucky - June 12, 1967
Louisiana - June 12, 1967
Mississippi - June 12, 1967
Missouri - June 12, 1967
North Carolina - June 12, 1967
Oklahome - June 12, 1967
South Carolina - June 12, 1967
Tennessee - June 12, 1967
Texas - June 12, 1967
Virginia - June 12, 1967
West Virginia - June 12, 1967

The Road to Canterbury

If, like me, you like literature and English is your primary language, you probably have this occasional nagging sense that you ought to read Canterbury Tales. But - again, if you're like me - you probably haven't. Well good news! There's no need. You can just go and check out NPR's interactive map of the journey about which Chaucer's work was written.



The map is connected to a series of stories NPR is doing on modern England, and the sorts of changes that have happened there since Chaucer's time. From NPR:

Chaucer's stories, published in the late 14th century, follow a collection of travelers from London to visit the tomb of Thomas Becket at Canterbury Cathedral. The Canterbury Tales offers readers a "concise portrait of an entire nation, high and low, old and young, male and female, lay and clerical, learned and ignorant, rogue and righteous, land and sea, town and country," wrote Oxford scholar Nevill Coghill.

Yep. Definitely ought to read that some time...

The Geography of Economic Tumult

The Atlantic has put up a series of interactive maps that let you track the relative economic power and influence of US cities over time.



The maps accompany an article by urbanist and pop sociologist Richard Florida. He makes a bunch of interesting predictions about the effects the economic meltdown will have on the geography of the United States. He thinks, for instance, that New York is positioned to come out okay - better than a lot of places, at least - thanks to its economic and cultural diversity. (Despite being the epicenter of the financial collapse, only 8% of New York's jobs are in finance; compare that to 18% in Des Moines, Iowa.) Indeed, he writes:

While the crisis may have begun in New York, it will likely find its fullest bloom in the interior of the country—in older, manufacturing regions whose heydays are long past and in newer, shallow-rooted Sun Belt communities whose recent booms have been fueled in part by real-estate speculation, overdevelopment, and fictitious housing wealth. These typically less affluent places are likely to become less wealthy still in the coming years, and will continue to struggle long after the mega-regional hubs and creative cities have put the crisis behind them.

The Rust Belt - the cities built on manufacturing in the 19th and 20th centuries, from Buffalo to St. Louis - is especialy likely to take it on the chin, and perhaps to never fully recover. More surprising is that the Sun Belt might get hit pretty hard as well. The vast arc of fast-growing states in the south and west will have some winners, like Charlotte and Austin, which have been adding jobs in the "creative class" sector. But the growth of other cities, like Las Vegas and Phoenix, has been mostly driven by construction and real estate - essentially, their growth has been based on their growth, which is not the most sustainable model in a recession.

Florida also makes prescriptions for the future, arguing that the suburban model of urban growth is past its prime and ill-suited to the developing creative economy; that homeownership should not be a goal of public policy; and that we should be cultivating growth in the burgeoning megaregions and the creative centers within them. Ultimately, he foresees this:

What will this geography look like? It will likely be sparser in the Midwest and also, ultimately, in those parts of the Southeast that are dependent on manufacturing. Its suburbs will be thinner and its houses, perhaps, smaller. Some of its southwestern cities will grow less quickly. Its great mega-regions will rise farther upward and extend farther outward. It will feature a lower rate of homeownership, and a more mobile population of renters. In short, it will be a more concentrated geography, one that allows more people to mix more freely and interact more efficiently in a discrete number of dense, innovative mega-regions and creative cities. Serendipitously, it will be a landscape suited to a world in which petroleum is no longer cheap by any measure. But most of all, it will be a landscape that can accommodate and accelerate invention, innovation, and creation—the activities in which the U.S. still holds a big competitive advantage.

Sounds good to me.

Human Migration

I like this map of the spread of humans across the planet.



The projection (some kind of oblique mercator?) [UPDATE: it's a Dymaxion map, apparently.] makes the course of human migration seem like the natural consequence of the spatial relationships between the continents - which of course is just what it was. (It also makes the hypothesized route to North America actually seem like easily the most sensible way to get from Europe to the New World, though I don't know what that dashed line is indicating; it seems to be suggesting that Europeans were emigrating to eastern Greenland during the Stone Age, but I've never heard of such a thing.)

The blue hatchmarked lines indicate the extent of ice and tundra during the last ice age. The numbers are thousand of years before the present, and the corresponding colored arcs on the map indicate the spread of humans at those times. According to this map, migration was most rapid through ice-free southern Asia. People actually arrived in Australia before they ever made it to Europe, which climatically was not nearly as rosy as it is today. It took still longer to make it to northeastern Asia, and then the Western Hemisphere was the last area to become populated when a land bridge allowed people to cross over from Asia.

The letters indicate mitochondrial DNA haplogroups. If they mean something to you, then bully. If not, I'm afraid I'm not qualified to explain them. I do like the map's pretty colors, though.

The Greatest Journeys Ever

This is fun. The folks at Good Magazine have put together an interactive map of some of the greatest voyages in history.



Magellan and Columbus and Marco Polo are all on there. But so are Ken Kesey's Electric Kool-Aid Acid trip, Jack Kerouac's route from On the Road, and the Pequod's voyage in Moby Dick. You can select a voyage and click through slideshows to see, for instance that Ken Kesey and the Beats sort of didn't get along, or that Captain Cook was on secret orders to claim any new continents he might happen to stumble upon for England. Or that Pizarro was a real asshole. That sort of thing.


One of history's great trips.

Wealth II

Here's more on wealth since 1500, from Visualizing Economics:



You can pretty clearly see that the story of the global economy from like 1750 to 1950 was really all about a redistribution of wealth from India and China to Western Europe and the US. Other regions of the world just didn't change that much one way or the other.

But it's also interesting how many trends have reversed themselves since ca. 1950. The dominance of the US and Western Europe has receded somewhat. Japan has about doubled its historical share of global wealth. China and India have halted their long slides (though they still have a long way to go to recoup their historical norms).

We'll check in in another 500 years and see how things are coming along.

UPDATE: I am told that - this being The Map Scroll rather than The Chart Scroll - good form demands that this post include a map. So, here is a moderately relevant map animation showing the changing map of Europe from 1519 CE to the present.

Wealth

Global Wealth in 1500:



Global Wealth in 2002:



These are from the UK's Daily Mail. They're cartograms - and we loves the cartograms! - showing the relative wealth of nations in 1500 and in 2002; the larger the nation, the more wealth it had.

One thing I find interesting is that wealth at both times in history was tripodal. In 1500, the 3 big axes were Western Europe, India, and China; in 2002 it's the US, Western Europe, and East Asia. That might be a coincidence, or it might be the case that there's some reason that that's a more naturally stable way for wealth to tend to become distributed across the globe. Maybe the geography of the world is such that there tend to be dominant powers that exert enough power to dominate roughly 1/3 of the planet, beyond which further concentration of wealth sets off negative feedbacks, like the way growth in predator populations eventually starts to induce a negative feedback when they start eating all the prey and running out of food. But I lean toward coincidence.

Also: West Africa wasn't really doing too poorly for itself in 1500. Nigeria (or whatever turn-of-the-16th Century conglomeration of tribes and city-states and kingdoms constituted the area corresponding to modern Nigeria (you see how much I know about African history)), for instance, was about on par with the middle-range European nation-state of the time.

Plus: you might expect wealth to serve as a decent proxy for military power. But, while Mexico is clearly not the equal of Spain in 1500, the disparity is hardly so severe as to account for the fact that, just a few years later, Cortes would march into the Aztec capital with like a couple of drinking buddies and a mule and conquer the whole freakin civilization. So clearly other factors were involved. (And indeed, here are three suggestions.)

And finally: has Russia ever made good on its enormous resource potential?