Lake Superior greeted us with light breezes and lovely views of the Pictured Rocks meeting the water and sky, as we hiked in what’s called the Chapel–Mosquito area. We squeezed in the hike before the assault of Labor Day visitors, and actually met only a few other hiking parties as we worked our way around the Grand Portal Point area.

I have no recollection of ever taking the tourist boat that leaves from Munising (probably deemed too expensive), but I think the time to do that is late afternoon, to catch the best light on the banded sandstone.

Two turkeys on the roadside down by Star (east of Shingleton) ignored us as we drove by on our way “out”, and a pheasant (the same one I saw several weeks ago?) clucked our return.

It’s a bird’s life.

From atop Brasstown Bald, we descended the old road, now known as Wagon Train Trail, enjoying unwinding vistas, and watched over by the Brasstown tower.

The way cool thing about anthropological archaeology is that anything interesting can be considered within the field. Poetry? Yup. History? Yup. Climate change. Yup. Keeps me coming back!

This colorful image is from a report by Margo Schwadron, on the web from the venerable journal Antiquity, examining prehistoric settlement of the south Florida Everglades. Given the effects of small fluctuations in sea levels on this terrain, where people lived should directly reflect when that spot of ground was a) above water, and b) accessible.

Love those smeary-appearing “tree islands”. Just imagine how many bugs would attack you if you visited them.

What you’re looking at here is a moderately high-resolution aerial photo (more or less) of an eroded hill-peak down in the Mixteca Alta (see this page), with some shapes drawn on it (thank you Illustrator). The shapes variously represent temple-mounds (the white squares), residential terraces (those long shapes rather like bacilli), and retaining walls (the long grey wide lines).

The whole mess is a map of a residential and civic-ceremonial architectural cluster slopped across a ridge, part of a now-abandoned community that extended across a spider-shaped set of ridge tops beyond the portion shown here, and had several thousand residents in its heyday. Occupation spanned the Classic and Postclassic (roughly), but now the hilltop is pretty eroded making discerning the architecture not only difficult while standing there, but hair-pullingly difficult if you’re trying to make this map—my task for today!

Today we transitioned from the Midwest home! Miles and miles of I-75 and I spotted this sign, long enough before dusk to know we’d get home before dark, and could breathe a huge sigh of relief.

Remember those not-so-cute ducks from last spring? (This one’s for you, rmj.)

Several webbie pages of interest: jcb sent me a link to this page, on information aesthetics. Really. Information display to the max. And on that page, I found a link to this page, which has a nifty changing map of nations, states, and empires across the Middle East over the last 3K years. Makes me think my black-and-white Word tables are—well ,I admit it, I knew it already—borrrrrrrr-ing.

Maps fascinate me. After all, they take a planetary sphere and reduce (usually a piece of) it to a flat version that is instructive and compelling (at least the good ones do). Essentially, a map is a kind of propaganda, the product of a suite of choices that prioritize certain things and disguise or eliminate others.

Cartographers control multiple mapping elements, especially projection, orientation, scale, and symbols. Scale, orientation, and symbols are straightforward concepts. Scale is the simplest—a map may have a single scale, or the scale may vary in certain directions; the accuracy of that scale is also variable. We often think of orientation as “which way is up?�?, but myriad choices may be made; AAA strip maps would prioritize the route in the layout. Symbols allow distilling of complex ideas and information constituting the pictorial language of the map.

Projections are trickier. Here’s the fifty-cent definition of cartographic projection: the representation, on the plane, of all or part of the terrestrial ellipsoid. Projections are grid systems (where’s the datum?) that in effect generate geographic addresses, and introduce systematic distortions. Map projections affect area, shape, direction, distance, and scale, such that not all can be accurate simultaneously.

When building, drawing, or constructing a map, you have to first select your projection—in effect, you first choose what to prioritize, then orientation and scale.

Of course, with new programs like Google Earth (with interactive projections), hand-held GPSs for the masses, and even augmented reality, cartography and projections are increasingly complex and in flux.

All of this is by way of the fact that I came across this Boston Public Library interface that lets you look close-up at a 2nd century map by Ptolemy, published in 1482, and other maps. Click on “Open in Map Viewer�? for the closeup and then zoom in!

Today it is the rage to use this to make a graphic version of the links on your web page. Mine’s above and here’s ababsurdo’s.

I wonder if the recipes are the little grey bunch at the bottom…?

And don’t ask me what tag clouds are….

One thing I’m grappling with these days is how to graphically portray scale and time. It’s a gnarly problem. Here, Alain Pavé shows overlapping scales of interactions for entities ranging from teeny things smaller than genomes to ecosystems and biospheres, all wrapped up in a single package, that at least on first blush, looks accurate. (Just how small are the smallest organisms anyway?)

Obviously, using two axes is an obvious solution (time on y and scale on x). I’m pondering adding a z axis, with a third variable (e.g., another kind of scale, for example size in extent—hectares—vs population). Hurts my head to try and actually generate that figure, however.

Fortunately, my bright, wise hubby, the Genius Wizard, has just purchased the latest Edward Tufte, so a guide is at hand….

* Pavé, Alain. 2006. “Biological and Ecological Systems Hierarchical Organization,” in Hierarchy in Natural and Social Sciences. Edited by Denise Pumain, pp. 39–70. Dordrecht: Springer. Figure 2, page 48.

Some climatology types have examined the effect on agriculture in the US—specifically premium wine grape areas—by a continued trajectory of increasing temperatures over the next century. The figure they used is 2–6°C. This is Figure 2-f, showing where the prime areas will shift to—that is, those areas lacking extremes of heat and cold. They make the point that wine is economically significant with 3.5 million tons of winegrapes out of approximately 6 million tons of grapes harvested each year. By converting them into wine, their value increases greatly, with concomitant deleterious effects if their production drops this much.

This is your world, and the projection is not pretty. Note how few premium grapes will come from California. In short:

… areas marginally suitable for winegrape production in the current climate were nearly eliminated and the area capable of consistently producing grapes required for the highest-quality and highest-priced wines declined by >50%.

Don’t trust my word; download the original here.

And, no, I haven’t seen Al Gore’s movie yet. Have you? What’d you think?