Nova Totius Terrarum Orbis Geographica ac Hydrographica Tabula

My younger daughter and I just finished a puzzle of this wonderful world map by Dutch geographer Henricus Hondius the Younger, published in 1630. It was great fun. (Wikipedia has a very big image of this map, a less colorful than the above but clearer.) 

Gazing at the complete puzzle I fell into a reverie about the wonder this map represents. Imagine that men in a chilly corner of northwestern Europe boarded little wooden ships and sailed across the entire globe, to Siberia and Patagonia and Sumatra and Madagascar. And not only did they sail to these places, they worked out, by staring at the sun and stars through little brass instruments, where on the globe they were, rendering the whole planet into an image that can be taken in at a glance. They were the first humans to know the shape of our world.

Imagine the voyaging that lay behind this extravagant listing of all the ports in South America.

I believe that this is what birthed the modern world. What made our age different from all that came before was the mapping of the whole globe and the connection of the planet into a single system through which goods and ideas could flow. European expansion was a violent cataclysm accompanied by much death and disaster, but it was also creative in the deepest and most profound sense: it changed the world.

Much was lost: peoples, cultures, dreams of strange worlds over the horizon inhabited by monsters or angels. But without the knowledge that lies behind this map, and the voyages that produced it, we would not be here.

The Hereford Mappa Mundi, 1300 AD

Behold the largest surviving medieval map (158x133 cm), which has been kept for centuries at Hereford Cathedral in England. It has the common form for mappa mundi, with East at the top and Jerusalem in the center. Around the edge are some scenes of heaven and hell.

Jerusalem.

The British Isles.

Italy, Sicily, and Crete with an enormous labyrinth.

Scandinavia, with a giant named Gansir and a bear.

Babylon.

Samarkand.

Constantinople and the Golden Fleece. In the imaginations of these western Christians, Constantinople was not such a great place, shown smaller than Paris or Rome.

Paradise, surrounded by a wall of fire, with angels looking on.

Beasts in the exotic east. Wikipedia has a large image if you feel like exploring on your own. Some people who think the author of The Travels of Sir John Mandeville (a fantasy travelog written around 1360) used this map have put a cleaned-up version online, with all the places mentioned in the travels highlighted.

I love these maps because they show that some medieval people were not, in their minds, confined to the local or the recent. Their thoughts roved across the world, imagining golden kings in Africa and strange beast men in far Asia; they told stories of King Midas, the Argonauts, Troy, and Alexander the Great. Their world was large and growing larger.

Building a New City for Hong Kong Refugees

Tyler Cowen posted something on his blog about investors from Hong Kong seeking to build a "charter city" in Ireland and got this response from Mark Lutter:

Thanks for sharing the article about the Victoria Harbor Group. We, me being Chief Strategy Officer, are in discussions with Ireland. However, it is important to note that the information mentioned is dated. As any early stage company, our ideas have rapidly evolved. While the term we are using is ‘International Charter City’, we are not pursuing full scale autonomy. Our priority is to acquire land and build political support in the host country to build a city for the Hong Kong people with the target population being 50% HKers and 50% citizens of the host country.

Our key assumptions are as follows

1. The next 10-15 years will see 1m to 2m Hong Kongers migrate, the first mass migration of high skilled labor in the last 40 or so years.

2. There is value from coordinating this migration, keeping network effects, ensuring housing supply, etc

3. We see this as an opportunity to build the city of the future, cutting edge urban design, welcoming of new technology, self-driving cars, drone delivery, etc.

4. We are in discussions with several countries, not just Ireland, which we will make public when possible. We prefer English speaking countries with common law traditions, but are open to considering others.

5. Our goal is to acquire 50,000+ acres within 2 hours of an airport to build a new city for several hundred thousand residents. Obviously this depends on the political support in the host country. Smaller countries like Ireland would have smaller developments.

6. Political support from the host country is crucial. We are not asking for independence or autonomy. Of course, we wouldn’t say no to tax and regulatory relief, but that is less important than land availability and domestic buy in.

7. The city will fit in the national plans of the host country. The Hong Kongers excel in finance and manufacturing, as well as education and healthcare. While little manufacturing is done in Hong Kong, Hong Kongers own many factories in the Guangdong province. Any country looking to revive their manufacturing base could do so by attracting a bunch of talented HKers. Additionally, a good location could become a top 10 global financial center in 10 years by attracting HK financial talent.

8. We believe this is a great opportunity for any country which wants to attract a talented, hardworking, entrepreneurial population.

9. I have seen a lot of charter city projects and this is the first one I wanted to become part of the leadership team of.

There's a fascinating possibility, but count me as skeptical that this will really come off.

It did set me wondering what countries might be interested in this project. I  have rejected most of the places that came to mind because they already have racial tensions between Chinese and others: the Phillippines, Malaya, Australia, South Africa. New Zealanders are too eco-conscious to want a million more people of any sort. I have a hard time seeing the Irish accepting this; they like being Irish and are comfortable enough not being rich to be hard to bribe.

Canada? The Canadian west coast already has a big Chinese population and it seems like a natural destination. People have already suggested this in the comments to Cowen's post, so the idea has occurred to others. It seems to me British Columbia could have this if they wanted it.

Jamaica? They could use the money, and they are not much concerned about race. But I guess that would mean clearing the locals off 50,000 acres, since the island is already densely populated.

What about some parts of the US? All those business boosters in Texas might like the idea, and the race problem they worry about is Mexicans. An old rust belt state, like Michigan? One of my favorite offbeat ideas has always been to let a few hundred thousand extra refugees into the country on the condition that they settle in Detroit. I can't see California finding the room, since they have trouble finding the room for new apartment buildings. On the other hand a new thriving city in the Central Valley might take some of the pressure off the Bay Area, and people from Hong Kong are already used to conserving water.

Anyway for anyone interested in geography and city building it's a fabulous thing to daydream about.

Height

Fascinating Times piece by Alanna Mitchell about geographers' attempts to measure the height of things, which is a fiendishly difficult problem. We measure height from "sea level", but of course the sea goes up and down with the tides, which vary across the month and the year, and it can be swelled when a flood of water rushes in off the land, and so on. Plus, its surface is distorted by the shape of the earth's crust beneath it. Those maps you see of the very bottom of the deep ocean are actually made by mapping the surface, which distorts according to how far it is above solid rock.

And once you have decided on some arbitrary height as "sea level," you then have to project this imaginary line across the land. Older map-makers did this by assuming that the earth was a perfect sphere, but this turned out to be so far off that even nineteenth-century geographers began making corrections for the flattening of the sphere at the poles. But even assuming the earth is a smooth ellipsoid is wrong, because the earth is not a perfectly even anything. Therefore, all our maps are wrong, and they are more wrong the farther you get from our old reference, the north Atlantic Ocean.

The US is currently creating a new model of height from which everything will be measured, based on data from satellites, that promises to be the most accurate ever. Floating in space, satellites are just a lot more stable than the heaving ocean, and thus a lot easier to measure from.

Part of a Cut and Fill Map of the Anacostia River in Washington, DC; red means cut down since 1894, green means built up

I know something about this because archaeologists have long tried to understand what has happened in our cities and other much disturbed locations using something called "cut and fill analysis." Let's say you have a reasonably accurate contour map of your city from 1890. You might think that by comparing the elevations of that map with those on a modern map, you could figure out which locations are now much taller, because they have been built up by fill (which is more than 50 feet thick in some parts of DC and New York), and which are now shorter, which means that the old ground (along with the archaeological sites) has been cut down. This is extremely useful for planning your archaeological dig, and some locales, like DC, have started requiring it as part of preliminary archaeological studies.

Sadly, it often does not work. Washington, DC was one of the best-mapped places in the 19th-century world, but our efforts to do this are regularly off by 10 feet or more. One of my favorite maps ever is the 1892 US Coast & Geodetic Survey Map of the district, so accurate that a small cellar hole I once found in Rock Creek Park, about 2 feet deep and 12 feet across, shows up on the map as a wiggle in a contour line. Yet comparing this with modern maps does not give you the correct depth of fill – in my experience it has in fact never given the depth of fill to within a foot. This is because the standards of elevation, and the methods used to project them across the landscape, have changed so much that it requires detailed local knowledge to convert between the old and the modern systems.

One day maybe some mathematician will work out a formula for comparing maps of this period to modern ones. For now, though, the state of the art is that you make your cut and fill analysis, then go out and do a bunch of mechanical soil cores, and use the cores to correct your map. Even this is difficult because it often happens that Core A will show your model is off by 4 feet, while Core B 200 feet away will be off by 2 feet or 10 feet. As I said, these maps are in some ways wonderful, so I don't think these are just errors; they show that we don't understand how they thought about the globe well enough to compare their maps to ours.

Evidence that the Wuhan Coronavirus is Seasonal

Interesting map from Kevin Drum, showing that the first coronavirus outbreaks occurred in a narrow band of temperature and humidity, which is the pattern you see with seasonal viruses.

On the other hand it looks like Florida is exploding right now, so who knows?

Amazon in Queens and Arlington, Virginia

In announcing that it will create major corporate centers in Queens, New York and Arlington, Virginia, each with 25,000 employees, Jeff Bezos said,

These two locations will allow us to attract world-class talent that will help us to continue inventing for customers for years to come.

The rationale for this whole exercise was that Amazon plans to grow at a rate that they think will outstrip the supply of skilled labor in Seattle, and the deciding factor in picking these locations was that they think they can hire thousands of programmers and other professionals to work in them. (Well, there was also the billions in tax incentives, but mostly likely all the cities and states on their list made similar offers.)

And this explains why around the world mega-cities continue to swell while smaller cities languish. Companies headquartered in smaller cities -- Kellogg's, Corning -- have terrible trouble recruiting executives, largely because executives are married to other professionals who can't find jobs in a small place. The way for big corporations to thrive is to locate themselves where there are lot of educated workers to choose from.

Lakes and Islands

Interesting map from the 1850s that has been wandering around the internet.

Where You Live and Where You End Up

New detailed research shows that the neighborhood you grow up in has a huge impact on  how much money you earn as an adult:

Nationwide, the variation is striking. Children raised in poor families in some neighborhoods of Memphis went on to make just $16,000 a year in their adult households; children from families of similar means living in parts of the Minneapolis suburbs ended up making four times as much.

The local disparities, however, are the most curious, and the most compelling to policymakers. 

There are two adjacent neighborhoods in north Seattle with dramatic differences; children who grow up poor in Northgate earn $5,000 more a year by their mid 30s than those who grew up in adjacent, very similar-looking census tracts, even though they attend the same middle school. As to why:

The researchers believe much of this variation is driven by the neighborhoods themselves, not by differences in what brings people to live in them. The more years children spend in a good neighborhood, the greater the benefits they receive. And what matters, the researchers find, is a hyper-local setting: the environment within about half a mile of a child’s home.

Income, this research makes clear, is not everything. Some low-income families and neighborhoods raise many children who end up in the middle class, while others raise many who end up in prison.

This data has been published online as the Opportunity Atlas, mapped by census tract. Here, using my own neighborhood, is a great example of the things you can do with it. Above is the map showing how much people who grew up poor in each neighborhood earned as adults. You'll need to click on it to see the scale. This is pretty much a map of how locals would assess the quality of each neighborhood. But look closely at the rectangular census tract just to the left of the word "Catonsville."

Now look at it on the map of how much black people who grew up poor in each neighborhood earn as adults.That census tract transforms from a pretty good place to grow up to a bad one.

Winters Lane, from Google Streetview

What distinguishes that tract in the mind of a local is that it includes Catonsville's traditionally black neighborhood along Winters Lane, which has been a black neighborhood since the 1870s. Black kids who grew up in that traditionally black neighborhood do much worse as adults than those who grew up in that big, pale yellow block of Arbutus, even though they attended Catonsville schools, generally considered to be superior to those in Arbutus. But those who grew up in the more heavily black area of Lansdowne, east of Arbutus, have done even worse.

You have to be careful about these maps because of the scale. In some census tracts there will be so few children of one ethnicity or another that a couple of successful or drop-out kids could badly skew the result. But it's still fascinating to play with and ponder.

Un-Gerrymandering Pennsylvania

The Pennsylvania state supreme court ruled a month ago that the Congressional district map dreamed up by Republican state legislators was unfair and illegal. Since the legislature has not gotten around to making a map that would satisfy the court's demands, they court made its own map, above. Below is the previous map. CNN calculates that this will have a small effect on the election, perhaps helping the Democrats win one or two additional seats.

In France, the Geography of Globalization

In France these days one of the hottest intellectuals is a geographer who studies urban real estate markets. Christophe Guilluy has published three books in the past five years, and been consulted by all the major candidates for president. A summary of his work:

At the heart of Guilluy’s inquiry is globalization. Internationalizing the division of labor has brought significant economic efficiencies. But it has also brought inequalities unseen for a century, demographic upheaval, and cultural disruption. Now we face the question of what—if anything—we should do about it.

A process that Guilluy calls métropolisation has cut French society in two. In 16 dynamic urban areas (Paris, Lyon, Marseille, Aix-en-Provence, Toulouse, Lille, Bordeaux, Nice, Nantes, Strasbourg, Grenoble, Rennes, Rouen, Toulon, Douai-Lens, and Montpellier), the world’s resources have proved a profitable complement to those found in France. These urban areas are home to all the country’s educational and financial institutions, as well as almost all its corporations and the many well-paying jobs that go with them. Here, too, are the individuals—the entrepreneurs and engineers and CEOs, the fashion designers and models, the film directors and chefs and other “symbolic analysts,” as Robert Reich once called them—who shape the country’s tastes, form its opinions, and renew its prestige. Cheap labor, tariff-free consumer goods, and new markets of billions of people have made globalization a windfall for such prosperous places. But globalization has had no such galvanizing effect on the rest of France. Cities that were lively for hundreds of years—Tarbes, Agen, Albi, Béziers—are now, to use Guilluy’s word, “desertified,” haunted by the empty storefronts and blighted downtowns that Rust Belt Americans know well.

Guilluy doubts that anyplace exists in France’s new economy for working people as we’ve traditionally understood them. Paris offers the most striking case. As it has prospered, the City of Light has stratified, resembling, in this regard, London or American cities such as New York and San Francisco. It’s a place for millionaires, immigrants, tourists, and the young, with no room for the median Frenchman. Paris now drives out the people once thought of as synonymous with the city.

Yet economic opportunities for those unable to prosper in Paris are lacking elsewhere in France. Journalists and politicians assume that the stratification of France’s flourishing metropoles results from a glitch in the workings of globalization. Somehow, the rich parts of France have failed to impart their magical formula to the poor ones. Fixing the problem, at least for certain politicians and policy experts, involves coming up with a clever shortcut: perhaps, say, if Romorantin had free wireless, its citizens would soon find themselves wealthy, too. Guilluy disagrees. For him, there’s no reason to expect that Paris (and France’s other dynamic spots) will generate a new middle class or to assume that broad-based prosperity will develop elsewhere in the country (which happens to be where the majority of the population live). If he is right, we can understand why every major Western country has seen the rise of political movements taking aim at the present system.

The same problem looms over all the rich nations: where will middle class jobs come from in the future? And how can the prosperity of thriving urban centers be spread across the nation?

The Long-Term Impact of Roman Roads

Some economists ran the statistics comparing the distribution of major Roman roads with city populations 1200-1850 and with the amount of light you see across Europe in a satellite image.

They find a strong correlation between Roman roads and population density even today.

Which is interesting, but I am not sure it says much about Roman roads. It does say something rather dramatic about the population structure of western Europe over the past 2,000 years: most of the great Roman cities are still great cities, and within the empire few new places have appeared to rival them.

To test for the impact of Roman roads in particular you would have to somehow identify territories that are very similar except for the presence or absence of a road, and I am not sure how that would be done. Anyway these guys did not do it.

Geography and Politics in America

If you think you don't know anybody who voted for the other candidate, you're not alone. America is more and more divided into neighborhoods with one overwhelming political preference:

Of the nation’s 3,113 counties (or county equivalents), just 303 were decided by single-digit margins — less than 10 percent. In contrast, 1,096 counties fit that description in 1992, even though that election featured a wider national spread. During the same period, the number of extreme landslide counties — those decided by margins exceeding 50 percentage points — exploded from 93 to 1,196, or over a third of the nation’s counties.

That's somewhat misleading because it treats all counties the same from tiny to huge, but as the chart shows the same trend is apparent when you consider the number of people who live in landslide counties.

One reason for this is that American politics is overwhelmingly about culture, not economics or really any other other particular issue, and one important cultural divide in America is between cities and rural areas. What is weirder to me is that many suburbs have also taken on very strong political tones; viz., Montgomery County Maryland  is overwhelmingly Democratic, while Orange County California is Republican. And then there is the way whole cities have taken on partisan styles, like Austin being the most liberal city in Texas. What explains those things I have no idea.

Today's Place Name

I give you Midnight Thicket, Delaware.

Some Strange New Data on European Genetic History

A new article in Current Biology by George Busby et al. purports to show a lot of comparatively recent genetic mixing among the populations of Europe and West Asia. (This is a completely different phenomenon from the great ancient invasions I have written about before.) Some of the data they present makes sense; for example, you can see a minor flow of genes from northwestern Europe (Franks) into the Basque population around the year 1000, and a significant flow of genes from central Asia into Turkey between 1000 and 1500. They identify the entry of Slavs into southeastern Europe via two clusters of genes, one similar to modern Lithuanians and the other to modern Germans, that entered between 700 and 1200. Everybody invaded the west Caucasus.

But what is one to make of the supposed flow of "southern Italian-like" genes into Britain between 500 and 1000 AD? Or of genes from "Armenian-like sources" into Orkney? Or Mordovian (relatives of the Hungarians) genes into Norway? Of "Cypriot-like" genes into northern Italy?

I think there is something wrong with their statistics, but I don't really understand their methods well enough to say what. One issue is that they rely on randomly sampled modern populations to generate their base lines, rather than trying to identify people who have resided in a particular area for generations. Another is that particular historical events may confuse the notion of where genes "originate." Surely the "southern Italian-like" genes they identify in Britain and Orkney are more likely to be Viking genes carried to southern Italy by Normans in the 11th century and later; I wouldn't have thought that the Norman conquest of southern Italy and Sicily involved enough people to leave a clear genetic signature, but who knows? I can't think of any other explanation.

What I really believe is that there has been so much mixing of populations across west Asia over the past 2000 years that it will be all but impossible to tease out the actual percentages of genes that Group A contributed to Region B at any particular time. But the data do show lots of mixing; there is no population in Europe or West Asia, not even the Basques or Norwegians, that seems to have remained "pure" since classical times.

The Power of Earthquakes

The results of post-earthquake satellite mapping in Nepal:

According to the early analysis, a region 75 miles (120 kilometers) long by 30 miles (50 km) wide lifted upward by as much as 3 feet during the earthquake.

No wonder so many buildings fell down.

This reminds me of the extraordinary power of the 2011 Tohoku earthquake that caused Japan's great tsunami:

The earthquake moved Honshu (the main island of Japan) 2.4 m (8 ft) to the east.

The Pennsylvania Elbow

Searching a topographic map of Pennsylvania this morning I stumbled across this splendidly weird feature that I have dubbed the Elbow. I know nothing about this place, but it ought to be inhabited by people who moved there in 1738 and haven't taken kindly to outsiders ever since.

Today's Interesting Fact about American Geography

The modern West is the most urbanized part of the United States. About 90 percent of Westerners live in areas defined by the census as urban. Utah, where most people live along the Wasatch Mountain Front, is slightly more urban than New York State.

--Timothy Egan

Wealth across the US in 1870

The head of the US census bureau in the 1870s was a pioneering statistician named Francis Amasa Walker. Among his most ingenious experiments was the 1874 Statistical Atlas of the United States, which presented a huge amount of data from the 1870 census in map form. The map above shows per capita income, ranging from white (under $175) to orange (over $1300). You can see that the North was a lot wealthier than the South. Partly this was the result of the Civil War, but a map from 1860 would actually not look much different. Note that there just weren't enough people in south Florida to even make the map.

Walker's impressive performance at the Census Bureau landed him a professorship at Yale, and he went on from there to become President of MIT from 1881 to 1895. He also lands a spot on my list of People Who Deserve Credit for Admitting Past Errors. When he superintended the 1880 census, he discovered that there had been major errors in tabulating some statistics in 1870, and he went out of his way to publicize this even though it invalidated parts of his own famous atlas.

What if the Ice Melted?

National Geographic posted nice maps of the world showing how the planet would look if the polar ice caps melted completely, raising sea level 216 feet (65 meters). You can see that this would hardly bring life to a halt; after all, it has happened many times over the past billion years. Most of the world's land area is still there, and increased rainfall might reduce the area of desert. We would endure. The problem is, what happens to the billions of people who lived in the areas now under water? Where will they go? How will they eat? Above, eastern North America. So long, Florida, Louisiana, Long Island, Delaware. Catonsville, incidentally, survives; the elevation of my house is around 460 feet.

Europe. Sayonara, London, Amsterdam, Venice, Hamburg and just about all of Denmark.

Asia. This is the real catastrophe; the low-lying land of Bangladesh, southern Burma, the Mekong Delta, and northeastern China is home to more than a billion people, and it is the exceptional fertile soil of those low-lying areas that feeds them.

Even under the direst climate change scenarios, this would take over a thousand years to happen, so we have plenty of time to prepare.

The (Alleged) Ostrich-Egg Globe of 1504

This is said to be the oldest globe that depicts the New World. Carved on an ostrich egg, it shows a fairly convincing South America but just a few islands for North America. Its date is said to be 1504, based on a recent analysis. Since Balboa is generally said to have been the first European to see the eastern Pacific, in 1513, I wonder how anybody in Europe knew that Panama was only a narrow isthmus in 1504.