Week 46: 'A public statement, a celebration of where we live.'

Wonder spawned in: various times
Wondered into being by: everyone who ever lived
Wonderspan: less than 10 min

So, wonder-lovers, the statistics tell me that you're mostly erotic, storgic and agapic, and I can only say that I'm not surprised.

I don't have much time today so I'll get straight to it.  It's maps.  Motley maps of space, time, life.  The categories are old maps, maps of outer space, maps of the Sun, maps of the Earth, maps of localities, maps of people.  Pick a category and go exploring...

Oldest maps in the world
For a while the oldest map was thought to be Babylonian, around 5th century BC, chiseled into stone.  It was intended to show the entire world, with Bablyon at its centre and three islands situated around this axis, known as island-"place of the rising sun", island-"the sun is hidden and nothing can be seen", and, most compelling of all, island-"beyond the flight of birds" (says Wikipedia).  There's a swamp and a canal and the whole thing is surrounded by a circle of sea, beyond which are objects from Babylonian mythology - always just there but beyond the reach of humankind

• Here's the stone: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/a5/Baylonianmaps.JPG
• And here's the Wikipedia article showing a key for the map's parts: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Babylonian_Map_of_the_World

It turned out that wasn't the oldest map after all.  According to the admittedly not-the-most-authoritative Ancient Wisdom website, the oldest map was found inscribed on a mammoth tusk - yes, a mammoth tusk - in a tomb in Ukraine.  It dates to 11000 to 12000 BC.  It shows a river and some dwellings, think the experts, although they don't really know.

• Here's a copy of the mammoth tusk map: http://www.ancient-wisdom.co.uk/Images/ukrainemap1.gif - see if you can work out what's going on in it.

And here's a map on a wall from 6000 BC, which today resembles an unusually arresting work of modern art.  Have a look and guess what it is, then I'll tell you what the Ancient Wisdom website says it is: http://www.ancient-wisdom.co.uk/Images/countries/Turkish%20pics/catalhuyukmap.jpg

So the answer is... 'the streets and houses in plan form, lying beneath the profile of the mountain of Hazan Dag with its volcano erupting', of course.  Well done if you got that right.  I think I'll print that one off an hang it up at home - it's beautiful.

The Ancient Wisdom website has these and other very old maps here: www.ancient-wisdom.co.uk/cartography.htm
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Outer space
When we found out the universe was bigger than you could map precisely on a stone, we kept mapping anyway.  Prepare to be stunned by this.  Nick Risinger travelled 60,000 miles in the space of a year to create the photographs that would become this Sky Survey.  When you click on the link you'll see our galaxy, The Milky Way, with every star visible from Earth photographed as if they lie on the ceiling of a 360-degree sphere.  That's pretty wild already, but you can also navigate the image.  Use the arrows at the bottom of the screen to move up, down, left and right, and to zoom in.  Click the icon on the left to show the constellations:

• http://media.skysurvey.org/interactive360/index.html

The sun
Here's a video of the sun undergoing a coronal mass ejection, which is when the star sheds some of its matter in a huge explosion.  This one is big enough for Jupiter to pass through the ring it creates.  One of the YouTube comments (mine, as it happens) is: ‘It must have eaten a huge vindaloo last night.’ www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lmm3J0WAres&hd=1  Here's the same thing scaled against the size of the Earth: http://sohowww.nascom.nasa.gov/gallery/images/large/molten304_earth.jpg
Coronal mass ejections create solar storms, which interfere with our electronic equipment and allow us to watch the northern lights at lower latitudes, such as in Scotland.  We did just that earlier in the year, in Week 15.

This is a false-colour image of the sun taken by the Solar and Heliospheric Observatory showing up various features on its surface and in the coronosphere: http://sohowww.nascom.nasa.gov/gallery/images/large/trico1.jpg

Here's an image closer in to the sun's surface, where magnetic tubes of plasma called spicules create a sort of chocolate-pudding-mix effect. https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh9p7P0mhU0wBRoH2j-8aidy9jP-to58it4j37TdijqXR2GyKZtJe5jD6PD_TlnzzbcfdrWJmcM90mFp2Frri3y1B88H9ec6Wh_VJZoyl-Ozb7vjKt9fUksfIw5Dolm_0Dnl7v2Vit4qCs/s1600/spicules_sst.jpg

This is a sunspot.  The sun has a seven-year sunspot cycle, which is said to interfere with our weather - some people say it even affects society's moods.  If you zoom in you can see huge waves of golden plasma on the sun's surface, like a sea, at about 6,000 degrees centigrade: http://photoshd.files.wordpress.com/2009/09/sun1.jpg

Watching these videos and images of the sun I feel like I'm looking at a god.

Earth

• Here is the Earth right now, in real time, from the International Space Station: http://www.nasa.gov/multimedia/nasatv/iss_ustream.html
• Here are how our cities appear to astronauts, who set up their own DIY photographic system in the space station to picture them for us.  They remind me of the Monday wonder a couple of weeks ago when we looked at the thread-like mycelia of fungi, pushing out tiny filaments through the soil.  From space the cities look like single living organisms: www.youtube.com/watch?v=ItX8M55-65g  
• Here are our flights across the Earth in a 24-hour period, looking a little like a plague: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4gkJTJIPWqo
• Here is the patchwork of industrial agriculture in Kansas, introduced by the European Space Agency's Kelsea Brennan-Wessels (who seems to be waiting for her job in TV to come through) and backed with some pretty awful corporate synth-musak: www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rx6rwCkV0R4&hd=1  - argh!
• And here is the loss of Arctic sea ice projected, due largely to air travel, industrial agriculture and other trappings of consumer-capitalist society - note how the image of the right gradually loses its covering... http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6z2RpwSrNAU  And if Greenland and Arctic ice melts completely, this is what happens to the UK!  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=skMO4GN1rns 

And finally, here are some non-topographical maps of the Earth from Worldmapper.org:

• Wealth based on GDP per person: http://www.worldmapper.org/posters/worldmapper_map169_ver5.pdf
• …and poverty based on Human Poverty Index scores: http://www.worldmapper.org/posters/worldmapper_map174_ver5.pdf 
• ...and military spending in 2002: http://www.worldmapper.org/display.php?selected=279 (US has since grown  to about a half, see www.milspend.org)
• ...and Greenhouse Gas emissions.  Note how tiny Africa is.  This is a good one to show folks who say they'd like to do something about global warming but think it's pointless while all those Africans keep breeding and burning up the planet.  Nope - that'll be us doing that.  In fact, the UK military alone emits the same greenhouse gas emissions as the whole of Senegal (according to Scientists for Global Responsibility): http://www.worldmapper.org/display.php?selected=299
• ...and here's one for Campaign Against Arms Trade to use - it's a map based on profits made from selling arms abroad: http://www.worldmapper.org/display.php?selected=281

Local

The campaigning organisation Common Ground has a wonderful project facilitating people to make maps of their locatities based on what they think is most important to them.  Many of these 'parish maps' have been published and I think they're still running the project.  Describing the beautiful parish map of Thirsk, North Yorkshire, its creators wrote:

'The idea started with Civic Society concern over the proposed development of a supermarket on the nearby nursery site.  

'Things can all too easily disappear before people realise what is happening and are able to do anything about it, so we decided to illustrate what people value most in the community, and the map will now be a permanent record.

'It will have a powerful influence on future development where people might be unaware of the importance of what the community did not want destroyed or damaged. People would be able to tell developers:'here it is on the map'. I am sure that if outside developers had some idea before they make plans for an area just how the community feels, they would think twice before investing their money in destroying things that other people value. The map is a public statement, a celebration of where we live.'

• Here's the Thirsk map: http://www.england-in-particular.info/parishmaps/m-thirsk.html
• And here's more about the parish maps with some other examples: http://www.england-in-particular.info/parishmaps/m-index.html

Also have a look at Christian Nold's emotion maps of localities, showing how our anxiety leaps at road crossings and diminishes in the park.

• Here's his map showing the topography of arousal in walkers in British cities: http://www.biomapping.net/iso2.jpg
• And here are many more: http://www.biomapping.net

People

The coding of the DNA map of human beings has been printed out and fills a hefty stack of bookshelves.  The whole DNA double-helix is crammed in a tiny ball called a 'fractal globule', crammed in turn into the nucleus of each of our trillion cells.  Only 3% of it actually does anything. 

• Here's Julian Parkhill telling us how it all looks when printed out into a multi-volume map-book:  http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/8296861.stm (scroll down to see the film)

And here's a handy way to explore human anatomy in your spare time: http://health.yahoo.net/human-body-maps

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I've barely scratched the surface - there are so many incredible maps out there.  What is a map, why do we map this and not that, what can be mapped and what can't, what is a map a metaphor of, is a map a mirror of reality or its dream, who are the map-makers...?  I wish I had more time today to wonder at these questions before clicking 'Publish'.   I wonder if map-makers wonder the same thing.


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