geography

"The gods living in the north at the Meru mountain (i.e., at the north pole) see the Sun, after it has risen, for half a solar year; so is done by the demons too [who live at the south pole]."

"The West is a series of institutions and values. The West is not a geographical place. Russia is European, but not Western. Japan is Western, but not European. ‘Western’ means rule of law, democracy, private property, open markets, respect for the individual, diversity, pluralism of opinion, and all the other freedoms that we enjoy, which we sometimes take for granted. We sometimes forget where they came from. But that’s what the West is."

"Westward the course of empire takes its way; The first four acts already past, A fifth shall close the drama with the day: Time’s noblest offspring is the last."

"The Description confider'd as to Form is of three Sorts; The first exhibits the Earth, by a Draught or Delineation; the second by Tables, or Registers; and the third by Treties or Discourse. Hence Technical Geography may be divided into Representatory, Synoptical, and Explanatory."

"The technical geography topic presents a range of subjects that provide essential tools to geographical research, teaching, and practice. On one hand it includes geomatics, one of geography’s classical subject matters; on the other it introduces modeling of geographical systems, a field that has gained an important place in modern geography. It contains two articles related to the most traditional geographical techniques: geodesy, topography, mapping, and atlas production. The other three articles present modern techniques now very widely used by geographers: remote sensing, geographical information systems, and modeling."

"The risk is that non-geographers mastering these methods analyze the spatiotemporal data and information better than the geographers. That is why the need to deal with competition induced by other sciences claiming the geographic space as their subject of study and research becomes a serious challenge for geographers. Geographers need to test and adapt to the new methods, models and procedures and implement them in all fields and development trends of Geography. By these also, Technical Geography as a new line of research and professional training becomes a necessity."

"The technical approaches allow Geography to become an anticipatory science. For example, the predictive models based on geospatial data collected via remote sensing and monitoring sensors enable the early identification of natural risks such as floods, earthquakes or climate changes and help with the efficient management of the natural resources and urban development. Technical Geography not only explains past phenomena, but it also plays an active role in shaping the future."

"In my opinion, Technical Geography is based on two concepts/attributes of the geographical processes and phenomena, i.e. autocorrelation and frequency."

"BOUNDARY, n. In political geography, an imaginary line between two nations, separating the imaginary rights of one from the imaginary rights of the other."

"Tom’s country ends here: he will not pass the borders. Tom has his house to mind, and Goldberry is waiting!"

"My father, whom the robber Afghans vex, And clip his borders short, and drive his herds, And he has none to guard his weak old age: There would I go, and hang my armour up, And with my great name fence that weak old man."

"... what distinguishes a borderland from a frontier is the existence of a territorial boundary that is artificial but specific. The American West, for example, is a place that is difficult to encapsulate as a single unit because it changed with time and settlement and always had ambiguous boundaries."

"Space, the final frontier These are the voyages of the Starship Enterprise"

"Action on the part of one side has always immediately called forth a reaction on the part of the other, and one may rightly doubt whether the Occident has always supplied the action, and the Orient the response, as is now the case, or whether the initiative has not rather changed from one side to the other in the course of history."

"Upon her head she weares a crowne of starres, Through which her orient hayre waves to her waist, By which beleeving mortalls hold her fast, And in those golden chordes are carried even, Till with her breath she blowes them up to heaven."

"The darkness of her Oriental eye Accorded with her Moorish origin (Her blood was not all Spanish, by the by; In Spain, you know, this is a sort of sin); When proud Granada fell, and, forced to fly, Boabdil wept, of Donna Julia’s kin Some went to Africa, some stay’d in Spain, Her great-great-grandmamma chose to remain."

"O fons Bandusiae splendidior vitro ..."

"I am the Alpha and the Omega, the Beginning and the End. To the thirsty I will give water without cost from the spring of the water of life."

"Bandusia, stainless mirror of the sky! Thine is the flower-crown'd bowl, for thee shall die, When dawns again yon sun, the kid; Whose budding horns, half-seen, half-hid,Challenge to dalliance or to strife—in vain! Soon must the hope of the wild herd be slain, And those cold springs of thine With blood incarnadine.Fierce glows the Dog-star, but his fiery beam Toucheth not thee: still grateful thy cool stream To labour-wearied ox, Or wanderer from the flocks:And henceforth thou shalt be a royal fountain: My harp shall tell how from yon cavernous mountain, Topt by the brown oak-tree, Thou breakest babblingly."

"From the Heliconian Muses let us begin to sing, who hold the great and holy mount of Helicon, and dance on soft feet about the deep-blue spring and the altar of the almighty son of Cronos, and, when they have washed their tender bodies in Permessus or in the Horse's Spring or Olmeius, make their fair, lovely dances upon highest Helicon and move with vigorous feet."

"I am Alpha and Omega, the beginning and the end. I will give unto him that is athirst of the fountain of the water of life freely."

"This relative lack of external pressure, together with the rise of laissez-faire liberalism at home, caused many a commentator to argue that colonial acquisitions were unnecessary, being merely a set of “millstones” around the neck of the overburdened British taxpayer. Yet whatever the rhetoric of anti-imperialism within Britain, the fact was that the empire continued to grow, expanding (according to one calculation) at an average annual pace of about 100,000 square miles between 1815 and 1865. Some were strategical/commercial acquisitions, like Singapore, Aden, the Falkland Islands, Hong Kong, Lagos; others were the consequence of land-hungry white settlers, moving across the South African veldt, the Canadian prairies, and the Australian outback—whose expansion usually provoked a native resistance that often had to be suppressed by troops from Britain or British India. And even when formal annexations were resisted by a home government perturbed at this growing list of new responsibilities, the “informal influence” of an expanding British society was felt from Uruguay to the Levant and from the Congo to the Yangtze. Compared with the sporadic colonizing efforts of the French and the more localized internal colonization by the Americans and the Russians, the British as imperialists were in a class of their own for most of the nineteenth century."

"To illustrate how dramatically populations can displace each other over time, the historian E.M. Kulischer once reminded his readers that in A.D. 900 Berlin had no Germans, Moscow had no Russians, Budapest had no Hungarians, Madrid was a Moorish settlement, and Constantinople had hardly any Turks. He added that the Normans had not yet settled in Great Britain and before the sixteenth century there were no Europeans living in North or South America, Australia, New Zealand, or South Africa."

"In reality, however, it was a 'white peril' that menaced Asia - and indeed the rest of the world. In all history, there had never been a mass movement of peoples to compare with the exodus from Europe between 1850 and 1914… However, a rising proportion of European emigrants were now heading eastward. Scotsmen and Irishmen in particular were flocking to Australia and New Zealand; by the eve of the First World War, nearly one in five British emigrants was bound for Australasia; by the middle of the century it would be one in two. Settlers from Britain, Holland and France were also busily establishing themselves as planters in Malaya, the East Indies and Indo-China. Meanwhile, a growing number of Central and East European Jews, inspired by Zionist leaders like Theodor Herzl, were moving to Palestine in the hope of establishing a Jewish state there. Finally, as we shall see, a very large number of Russians were also heading east, to Central Asia, Siberia and beyond. All this movement was in large measure voluntary, unlike the enforced shipment of millions of Africans to American and Caribbean plantations that had taken place in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. However, comparable numbers of indentured labourers from India and China were also on the move in 1900, their condition only marginally better than slavery, to work in plantations and mines owned and managed by Europeans. Asians would have preferred to migrate in larger numbers to America and Australasia, but were prevented from doing so by restrictions imposed on Japanese and Chinese immigration in the late nineteenth century."

"The violence of invasion is not contained to first contact or the unfortunate birthpangs of a new nation, but is reasserted each day of occupation."

"Settler colonizers come to stay: invasion is a structure not an event."

"Overt debates about genocide have been relatively slow in developing, in part because of the creation of a TRC, mandated with collecting the ‘truth’ about the IRS system while similarly engaging in ‘reconciliation’ (a contested term) with settler Canadians. While Canada's history wars may seem slow in getting off the ground, the TRC's more ‘balanced’ approach and wide-ranging engagement with non-Aboriginal societal actors may have a greater effect in stimulating national awareness than in the United States and Australia."

"Settler colonialism is the specific formation of colonialism in which the colonizer comes to stay, making himself the sovereign, and the arbiter of citizenship, civility, and knowing."

"Without suburbs a city has no centre either."

"I guess most people think of the suburb as a place with all the disadvantages of the city, and none of the advantages of the country. And vice versa."

"There is no Death! What seems so is transition; This life of mortal breath Is but a suburb of the life elysian, Whose portal we call Death."

"A map is not the territory. - Alfred Korzybski"

"We invented a nonexistent Plan, and They not only believed it was real but convinced themselves that They had been part of it for ages, or rather They identified the fragments of their muddled mythology as moments of our Plan, moments joined in a logical, irrefutable web of analogy, semblance, suspicion. But if you invent a plan and others carry it out, it's as if the Plan exists. At that point it does exist. Hereafter, hordes of Diabolicals will swarm through the world in search of the map. We offered a map to people who were trying to overcome a deep private frustration. What frustration? Belbo's first file suggested it to me: There can be no failure if there really is a Plan. Defeated you may be, but never through any fault of your own. To bow to a cosmic will is no shame. You are not a coward; you are a martyr."

"You fall in love with somebody who fits within what I call your 'love map,' an unconscious list of traits that you build in childhood as you grow up. And I also think that you gravitate to certain people, actually, with somewhat complementary brain systems."

"We may think of maps and mapping as an objective process, but that would be an illusion. What gets mapped, and more importantly, what does not, is a product of various social, economic, and political phenomena. Quite apart from border disputes and contentious sovereignty, mapping also reflects political priorities. Creating the survey data that can be used in maps is expensive, and large-scale mapping endeavors are typically the preserve of states, whose ability to deliver that data often depends on resources that compete with other governmental priorities. This is true especially in resource-constrained settings."

"This seems highly likely, especially as it has been shown that in several systems mutations affecting the same amino acid are extremely near together on the genetic map."

"In generalizing lies the difficulty of scientific map-making, for it no longer allows the cartographer to rely merely on objective facts but requires him to interpret them subjectively. To be sure the selection of the subject matter is controlled by considerations regarding its suitability and value, but the manner in which this material is to be rendered graphically depends on personal and subjective feeling. But the latter must not predominate: the dictates of science will prevent any erratic flight of the imagination and impart to the map a fundamentally objective character in spite of all subjective impulses. It is in this respect that maps are distinguished from fine products of art. Generalized maps and, in fact, all abstract maps should, therefore, be products of art clarified by science."

"The three basic mechanisms of averaging, feedback and division of labor give us a first idea of a how a CMM [Collective Mental Map] can be developed in the most efficient way, that is, how a given number of individuals can achieve a maximum of collective problem-solving competence. A collective mental map is developed basically by superposing a number of individual mental maps. There must be sufficient diversity among these individual maps to cover an as large as possible domain, yet sufficient redundancy so that the overlap between maps is large enough to make the resulting graph fully connected, and so that each preference in the map is the superposition of a number of individual preferences that is large enough to cancel out individual fluctuations. The best way to quickly expand and improve the map and fill in gaps is to use a positive feedback that encourages individuals to use high preference paths discovered by others, yet is not so strong that it discourages the exploration of new paths."

"“It does not appear to be too difficult,” Alain agreed. “But I remember being cautioned that maps carry their own illusions, often making appear simple a journey which is actually far more difficult in practice.”"

"In fact, it is Shakespeare who gives us the map of the mind. It is Shakespeare who invents Freudian Psychology. Freud finds ways of translating it into supposedly analytical vocabulary."

"History is not everything, but it is a starting point. History is a clock that people use to tell their political and cultural time of day. It is a compass they use to find themselves on the map of human geography. It tells them where they are but, more importantly, what they must be."

"Let's not pretend that mental phenomena can be mapped on to the characteristics of billiard balls."

"There are no maps to lead us where we are going, to this new world of our own making. As the world looks back to nine decades of war, of strife, of suspicion, let us also look forward—to a new century, and a new millennium, of peace, freedom and prosperity."

"Wars of nations are fought to change maps. But wars of poverty are fought to map change."

"A face is a road map of someone's life. Without any need to amplify that or draw attention to it, there's a great deal that's communicated about who this person is and what their life experiences have been."

"Now, to use the famous metaphor by Alfred Korzybski in his Science and Sanity (1933), this verbal world ought to stand in relation to the extensional world as a map does to the territory it is supposed to represent. If a child grows to adulthood with a verbal world in his head which corresponds fairly closely to the extensional world that he finds around him in his widening experience, he is in relatively small danger of being shocked or hurt by what he finds, because his verbal world has told him what, more or less, to expect. He is prepared for life. If, however, he grows up with a false map in his head [...] he will constantly be running into trouble, wasting his efforts, and acting like a fool. He will not be adjusted to the world as it is: he may, if the lack of adjustment is serious, end up in a mental hospital. (editor's link)"

"What often happens if you study this integral map is that it begins to make room in your psyche, in your being, in your soul, for all the parts of you that were disowned, whether by society, your parents, your peers, whomever. An integral approach even makes room for those who did the disowning to you."

"Israel, as the Jewish state, must disappear from the map. The so called peace-path is not peace and it is not a substitute for jihad and resistance."

"The map is not the territory, and the name is not the thing named."

"Believable fairy-stories must be intensely practical. You must have a map, no matter how rough. Otherwise you wander all over the place. In The Lord of the Rings I never made anyone go farther than he could on a given day"