Memnison Journal

Coming Anarchy also highlights multiple historical places with the same name; Albania, Iberia, Alexandria,  various African nations, and Guinea.  They don’t have one for Galicia, but they ought to.

From the Coming Anarchy site: projected maps of Europe in the future and the former Yugoslav areas, along with their tag on microstates.  Personally, I strongly doubt some of this; France has been doing a thorough stomp of its minority groups (linguistics-wise, especially) for the last 100+ years to Make Everyone Parisian, and the Bosniak [...]

I can deal very well with a President who is a Geography geek (like yours truly).

Some GIS professor thinks that by using his systems for tracking flora and fauna that he’s figured out where Osama bin Laden is.   I think it’s crap, but he might find the ghost of Marlon Perkins.

Old WW2 era military airfield in the Arizona desert, which has been open on and off since then, now as a Arizona National Guard Heliport.

Many countries have come into being and changed their public names since they became a separate nation.  For this one, I’ll give you the old colonial name, and you tell me the modern name.  Note that some of the places I’m giving you were eaten up by a larger local state and don’t exist as [...]

In the same vein, there are names for countries that are given to them by their neighbors that don’t connect easily to what we’d call those countries in English. For example, a lot of tribes might call themselves ‘The People’, while a neighboring tribe would call them ‘those horse-stealing thieves to the West’.    The tribe [...]

Many countries are called something in English that the people who actually live in those countries would never use (we don’t use Vereinigte Staaten von Amerika or Meiguo).   The English names for these countries (or recently former countries), please: (Scoring:  give yourself three points for each correct guess, and No Googling or Wikipediaing – [...]

Silliness in boundaries, where fusses first created before 1750 have made the boundaries between India and Bangladesh a serious mess of someone-else’s problem.  Of course, this all should have been settled out long ago…

They’re teaching Meredith cartography in 4th grade; she brought home some materials with her and asked me to put them in recycling.  “That’s *baby* cartography”, she said with a grimace.   Wow.  Well, she takes after her old man on that one…

My ex (elsewhere on LJ) long ago told me about the great parking goddess Squat.  Deb Geisler said something that reminded me of this, and I found that Squat has online devotee organizations: Temple of Squat (reformed) (traditional)

I’d pay attention to the Georgia / Russia if I were you guys.   There’s more than you think at stake.

…another thing about cheap oil is the whole notion of producing something on the other side of the world for consumption here…and how that goes to pieces when the price of shipping / oil rises dramatically. The cost of shipping a 40-foot container from Shanghai to the United States has risen to $8,000, compared with [...]

Not everything works that well.  Here’s a posting about a set of ghost towns (some of which I had heard about, like the Walled City of Kowloon), and another about technologies that failed, such as webTV and the Newton.

At various times, I get into research projects; some simmer on for decades in various forms, and some break off and pick up speed because I happen to run into something that really fuels the fire, so to speak. My library here is largely one that I use for reference. I have a huge amount [...]