Strange Maps: Octopoidal Prussia

The above map is from Strange Maps, a sub-blog at Big Think. It is from the recent post: War is the National Industry of Prussia.

It's a very nice map. Now just imagine, for a moment, that those tentacles stretching outwards from Prussia were actual tentacles spreading out across the landscape from a cyclopean prehuman monstrosity dredged-up from the bottom of the sea by bent Prussian scientists who probably went to medical school next to Baron Frankenstein's kid Victor. What other European or Colonial Kaiju might be lurking in the depths of the oceans or in some uncharted territory like Maple White Land?

Something to think about on a drizzly day...

Shakespeare: How To Think Like Old Will

Big Think is hosting a series on How To Think Like Shakespeare. That's where we're going to be spending some time today...

Strange Maps Blog--A Quick Non-A to Z Note

Frank Jacobs is doing an entire dedicated blog at Big Think focused on Strange Maps. It's fairly new, but we've signed up to catch his updates and will be watching this potential new resource with an eye towards reviewing. (The Shen has volunteered to do the review. Since he took a community college course in geography he thinks he's a cartographer-in-the-making. Don't say anything until after he finishes our geomorphs, okay?)

Intellectual technologies shape the way people think. Maps facilitate a very different way of thinking in terms of our location within space. Clocks enforce a way of thinking in terms of our position within time. Books train us to focus our attentions and give us a way to think about our relation to what has come before and what might yet come to be.

The Internet breaks down the boundaries of space, erodes the steady progression of discrete quanta of time by enabling us to work asynchronously, and it obliterates the capacity for focused attention by bombarding us with every distraction possible.

Definitely something to consider. The Big Think site is an excellent resource for stuff like this, and we encourage you to give it a whirl.