Maphead_ Charting the Wide, Weird World of Geography Wonks - Ken Jennings [134]
* The term, however, seems to have been coined almost thirty years before, by no less than W. H. Auden, who used it to describe the strong sense of place in the work of his fellow poet John Betjeman.
* The costs of losing one’s way in unfamiliar territory were much higher a few centuries ago, when you might be robbed or shipwrecked or eaten by hungry wolves every time you strayed off course. G. Malcolm Lewis has argued that maps were humanity’s way of inoculating itself against that fear of the unknown: by staring at a map of new territory, you were forcing yourself to confront your fear of it via the behavioral therapy that today we would call desensitization.
* Quick—is Los Angeles east or west of Reno? What’s the first U.S. state you’ll hit if you travel due north from Ecuador, on the west coast of South America? The answers (east and Florida, respectively) may seem counterintuitive if you’ve never seen this particular type of geographic brainteaser before. The underlying misconceptions here are a result of our brain’s inability to remember and manage diagonal relationships. We simplify them in our mental models so that California is due west of Nevada and South America due south of North America, when the actual relationships are much less rectilinear.
† The Dutch-born geographer Harm de Blij has claimed that, contrary to what you might expect, Americans actually have a much better innate sense of direction than Europeans do, because Americans have more experience navigating orderly, gridlike cities. Twisty cobblestoned streets apparently don’t sharpen a person’s skills—they just cause people to throw their hands up in the air, shout “Zut alors!” or “Ach du lieber!” or something, and give up.
* For many years, the uncanny homing abilities of Tunisian desert ants were one of the great navigational mysteries of the animal kingdom. Most ant species find their way home by following the scent trails left by other ants, but that doesn’t work well in the windy, sandy Sahara. A Swiss zoologist named Rüdiger Wehner spent decades trying to crack the secret of the ants’ internal odometers with a series of ingenious experiments. To find out whether ants judge distances based on “optic flow,” the speed with which they observe the landscape passing them by, he blocked their vision with tiny paint “blindfolds.” To find out if they judge distances based on metabolic effort, he fitted each ant with a tiny weighted backpack. Finally, his team decided to alter the ants’ pace length by putting them on tiny stilts made of individual pig bristles. Bingo! The stilt-walking ants drastically overshot their destination, proving to the researchers that ants reckon the distance they’ve traveled by counting their steps in some instinctive fashion. Best of all, the researchers now have an adorable set of ant-sized fashion accessories ready for all occasions.
* You may have read that the Great Wall of China is the only man-made object visible from orbit, but that’s bunk. The Mercury astronauts reported seeing all kinds of stuff, from trains to oil refineries to Tibetan monasteries. When Gordon Cooper told Houston that he was watching a white big-rig truck travel down a Texas highway, NASA assumed that he must be hallucinating—until workers there later investigated and were actually able to identify the truck in question.
* Dante’s dreamlike terza rima poetry doesn’t really lend itself to cartography, but devising “accurate” maps of his Inferno, Purgatory, and Paradise nevertheless became a popular pastime during the Renaissance, attracting luminaries from Botticelli to Galileo. It was a faux-academic pursuit, like the “Sherlockians” today who write deadpan scholarly treatises about Holmes and Watson as if they were real historical figures.
* There are also a Riverside, Delaware;