Curiosity-encouraging views of life.
Longitude; or, How Are Clocks Seriously That Important When I look around, finding my way based on what I see, the world becomes more and more fascinating! Take the sun, for example. When it’s shining bright on my side of the Earth, the other side is in shadow. My midday is Uzbekistan’s midnight. This is …
After surveying this location over the summer, using 15th century technology, I was finally able to take the data and make the final illustrated map! For those cartographers in the crowd, I was basing my restrictions on world maps of the time, which would have little to no capacity for pinpointing the coordinates for non-land-based …
Everything is constantly in motion, even at the smallest level. The world rotates and revolves, and time marches on, whether we’re watching or not. And usually, we’re not. The best way to start paying attention to time, is by observing the sun. Please don’t stare directly into the sun, that’s an A+ Bad Idea. If …
What does time have to do with anything? I keep talking about time and speed, without actually tackling what significance they have. Time itself, and how a person experiences time is a HUGE topic that I won’t dive all the way into. It gets very philosophical. For our purposes, we’re interested more in timekeeping. How …
“That does it! Now, I’m going to take your sense of duty, your sense of proportion, and especially your sense of direction!” – Senses Taker, The Phantom Tollbooth (movie, 1970) You know, I have always understood that compasses point generally Northward, or that East is in the direction of sunrise, but… I never really knew …
Hello. We’ve just been chatting about finding your way around this big, beautiful world of ours. And it’s not just about finding your way, but about feeling secure in where you are, and the journey you’re going on. Last time we explored the direction circle, or what degrees mean in relation to turning around. Now …
If you’ve never read Norton Juster’s The Phantom Tollbooth, it’s full of unexpected life truths. Essentially, Milo, a little boy bored with life, blithely embarks on an adventure where he meets extraordinary people and creatures. At one point, he encounters Alec, a boy that was born in the air and grows from his adult height …
Due to a mysterious construction project, I am unable to get out to the site I’ve been mapping. So I decided to kick off a small navigation series in the meantime! I will be focusing on celestial navigation, a topic that I will be learning right along with you, as well as exploring some natural …
Conditions have not been great for conducting a survey, heat smoke, and now the local peoples are carrying out some sort of construction project. But it’s been a great time to get some practice in, sighting horizontal distances! There’s some math involved, but it’s actually very simple and requires only one formula. Using an astrolabe …
That’s right! One of the reasons why maps looked so wild in the medieval era, is that science was sort of on pause. The gaps in knowledge were often filled with reports from sailors or whatever the cartographer could imagine a place would look like. Even toward the end of the century, when measurement tools …