Conversation: Serpentine Gallery ~ Edge: Map Marathon
A partial map of BoingBoing content
The first twelve hours of the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami caused by a 900-mile long submarine earthquake (indicated by the stars). But it was the first two hours that were most devastating.Only 17 minutes after the earthquake, a 100-foot tsunami bulldozed towns out of existence along the Aceh coast of northern Sumatra, Indonesia. In less than an hour 240,000 were dead. In less than two hours smaller but still powerful tsunami waves had killed 7,500 in Thailand, 31,000 in Sir Lanka, and 16,000 in India. Submarine ridges focused the tsunami wave energy like a lens focuses light, eventually guiding them out of the Indian Ocean and up the Atlantic, though now greatly reduced in size. It was that same bathymetric effect that sometimes determined who would live and who would die. More than 8,500 Sri Lankans died in Kalmunai at the shoreward end of a submarine ridge, while eight miles south only 2 died in Oluvil at the shoreward end of a submarine canyon. This is a modified version of a model-produced map from NOAA’s National Geophysical Data Center.
(left) Chromosome 9. A schematic map of a chromosome shared by all the great ape, showing our degree of relatedness.?(right) A map of a human proteome. The molecules from a drop of human blood are mapped by weight (left to right), and by slipperiness (top to bottom). The reason that multiple stripes appear in series is that the atoms in proteins come in different isotopes creating variations that different in weight by a single neutron.
DNA of the Early Roman Emperors and Famous Associates: Squares are males. Disks are females. Blue arrows show direction of descent. Horizontal blue bars bind siblings. Red curves join "spouses" – that is, procreative couples. In cases of multiple spouses, the child goes with the most tightly bound spouse. Yellow squares represent one strain of Y-chromosome DNA (YDNA) passed down via males only; orange another. Magenta disks represent one strain of mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) passed down via females only; green another. Small disks within squares are males carrying the designated mtDNA, who could not, being male, pass it on. The surprise is the predominance of the mtDNA lines over the YDNA – that is, of the feminine connections over the masculine.
??Flavor network: culinary ingredients and their chemical relationship. The color of each ingredient represents the food category that the ingredient belongs, and the size of an ingredient is proportional to the frequency we use. Two culinary ingredients are connected if they share many flavor compounds. The thickness of an edge represents the number of shared flavor compounds.
??The oldest words in our lexicon (largest font in image) change through history slowly enough that they might have been recognized by people living 15,000 years ago or more, younger words (small font) would not. Our ancient shared speech is dominated in all languages by social relations: you, me (I), what we do, to whom, and has been throughout our history. Map credit: Mark Pagel and Andreea Claude
The first Harry Beck London Underground map?While I have no special map of my own, I recommend posting the first Harry Beck London Underground map. It was the world's first topological map. Beck trained in electronics as a young man, hence the circuit board appearance. I am attaching 3 ppt slides showing the London Underground railway map before Beck, Beck's first sketch of a new diagram (he always called it a 'Diagram' not a 'map'), and his first finished map of 1933. Stingemore's map made travel seem complicated and journeys looked very long (most of the stations couldn't even fit on the map!). People weren't using the Underground because of that and it was heading for financial disaster. Beck's map solved all these problems. He enlarged the crowded inner regions, brought in the outer regions, had all lines horizontal, vertical or 45 degress, and beautifully solved the problem of representing exchange stations. Besides being one of the world's iconic design classics, its sociological impact on London was huge: it defined the way most people think of the layout of London as well as the house price contours. Whereas Stingemore's maps were geographical, Beck's were not. He didn't try to represent where stations really were geographically. All that mattered were the links to other stations — and when you are under the ground all that does matter is the next station. If you draw a map on a large rubber sheet then a topologically equivalent map is created by stretching the sheet in any way you like without tearing it. The links will all be preserved but the distances between stations on the sheet will change. Beck's was the first map of this sort.
Religions, like animals, plants and bacteria, speciate. If beliefs and institutions don't adapt and adopt, as the environment changes, they too go extinct. This map illustrates some of the speciation that occurred with three of the world's great religions after originating from a common Abrahamic belief. (P.S most don't adapt which is why > 90% of the world's religions and Gods are now extinct…)
