April 2006 (no, the drought’s not so bad the trees have no leaves).

Clever (perhaps) title, but it’s not a crawl…. According to the Georgia Conservancy:

Georgia ranks 3rd, behind Texas and Florida, in the amount of farm land and open space converted to development.

I not sure if they mean as a percentage of land in the state or sheer number of acres (the truths and subterfuges of statistics…). Either way (and I think it must be the latter), this is scary. Those are all big states, so it’s a massive land area.

Some years ago I tried to get a handle on the impact development has had on archaeological sites here in Georgia, which is particularly rich in prehistoric occupation. Look here if you’re interested. If you’re really interested, there’s a 2005 update (unfortunately, not available online as near as I can tell) by Steve Kowalewski in SGA’s Early Georgia, summarized in this press release.

We made a run across southeast Michigan at midday, doing a bounce shot off the TJ’s in Ann Arbor (picking up a near-dead laptop the Guru hopes to rehabilitate from Cousin S), ending up in Grosse Pointe Woodse (seems like all three words should have terminal “e”s…).

Dinner tonight: northern cuisine from Mexican Town. Mmmm.

(And, yes, that’s really what they call it.)

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….