This video is pretty darn cool. The Scream is especially good but you’ll also see Nighthawks, The Gleaners, The Girl with the Pearl Earring, the Seurrat pointillism one that I can never remember the name of, Escher, and Magritte’s Son of Man:
Ziebell approached 29 strangers on the University of Michigan’s campus, handed them a pen and half a sheet of paper, and asked them, on the spot, to draw a map of the world.
What You Get When 30 People Draw a World Map From Memory
Ziebell, a high school student from San Antonio, took each drawing and layered them to create a composite ‘average’ world map (the second incorporates satelite data and some artistic licence):
You can view more of the drawn maps here.
Stray thoughts:
- Florida and Italy make the cut on pretty much every map.
- Australia (an entire freaking continent) is noticeably absent from quite a few
- In fact, generally speaking if you’re an island you’re shit out of luck. Madagascar perhaps fares the best, but Greenland, Iceland, the British Isles, Sri Lanka, Indonesia, Japan, the Caribbean, New Zealand, Taiwan (and more) are missing more often than not.
- Same for landlocked seas.
- It would be fascinating to repeat this in different countries to see how the maps vary.
- As wild as some of them are they are all recognisable as world maps.
- I wonder how many of these more accurately represent land area than Mercator?
(via the always excellent @kottke, who you should consider supporting if you can spare $30 a year, his content is consistently great).
Categories
Fujiyama
If you’re looking for a rabbit hole allow me to recommend digital collections of the New York Public Library. Naturally, I headed straight for their Meiji era photos of Japan:
The first daguerreotype camera was imported into Japan in 1848 (the patent dates to 1839). Wet and dry plate photographic processes were introduced into Japan by Dutch photographers stationed on the island of Dejima, in Nagasaki Bay, beginning in the 1850s.
I love how instantly recognisable Fuji is:
And how similar this is to Hokusai’s view of Fuji from the Tōkaidō, produced some 70-80 years earlier:
I wonder if the photographer had that in mind when they created the shot.
"Times passes. Paxador Paxador is drenched in sweat." #BwlPod (last one from me!) pic.twitter.com/QlwXaGm987
— Dan (@dan_connolly) November 28, 2016
And another trailer why not (certainly better than thinking too much about the real world).