Secretly Incredibly Fascinating - Maps!

Episode Date: January 16, 2023

Alex Schmidt is joined by author & comedy writer Dennard Dayle (1900HotDog.com, book 'Everything Abridged') and comics & comedy writer Brendan McGinley (1900HotDog.com, comic series 'Citizen X') for a look at why maps are secretly incredibly fascinating. Visit http://sifpod.fun/ for research sources, handy links, and this week's bonus episode. (Alex's podcast hosting service requires a minimum of 5 characters per episode title, so that's why this episode's title has an exclamation point)

Maps. Known for being geography. Famous for being worldly. Nobody thinks much about them, so let's have some fun. Let's find out why maps are secretly incredibly fascinating. Hey there, folks. Welcome to a whole new podcast episode, a podcast all about why being alive is more interesting than people think it is. My name is Alex Schmitz, and I'm not alone. My guests today are Denard Dale and Brendan McGinley. And I'd like to think we are all colleagues, all three of us, because we all write monthly humor columns for the wonderful comedy website 1-900-HOT-DOG. All three of us are over there. I'm also putting our author photos on the social media pages because they're really illustrations by Rusty Shackles. They're amazing. And these guys write a bunch more stuff too. Brendan McGinley writes comic books such as his independent anthology titled Dose and original stories

like his historical fiction comic series Citizen X. You can find more of Denard Dale's comedy writing in The New Yorker. And he's also an author. His latest collection of short fiction is titled Everything Abridged. Also, I've gathered all of our zip codes and I've used internet resources, such as a wonderful map at native-land.ca. I want to use that to acknowledge that Denard and I each recorded this on the traditional land of the Canarsie and Lenape peoples. Acknowledge Brendan recorded this on the traditional land of the Muncie-Lenape and Wappinger and Skatt Lenape peoples. Acknowledge Brendan recorded this on the traditional land of the Munsee Lenape and Wappinger and Skattakoke peoples. And acknowledge that in all of our locations, native people are very much still here. That feels worth doing on each episode,

and today's episode is about maps, which is a topic chosen by supporters of this podcast. about maps, which is a topic chosen by supporters of this podcast over at SifPod.fun. A whole bunch of folks have suggested this, in particular Dan Startin and Brendan Kelly. Thank you both, Dan and Brendan, and thank you everybody who voted for this. It was a wonderful topic to find out about. It's also a humongous topic. There are so many maps across all of the history of the world. It's also easily one of the most humongous topics ever tackled on this podcast. So I set aside some nitty gritty cartography textbook kind of stuff. I really wanted to focus on the stuff that's probably the most relevant to you, what our maps are like right now, where our maps have brought us and where they've gotten us to

this point, and where maps could take us in the future. So please sit back or sit in whatever position helps you prepare to revise your mental picture of Greenland. Either way, here's this episode of Secretly Incredibly Fascinating with Denard Dale and Brendan McGinley. I'll be back after we wrap up. Talk to you then. Tamar and Brendan, it's so good to have you both on. And of course, I always start by asking guests their relationship to the topic or opinion of it. So either of you can start, but how do you feel about maps? All right. So I have incredibly minimal relationship with real maps, but I have interacted with more fake maps than I can think of. I read a lot of fantasy books and you can pretty much almost gauge how involved the author was with the process by how ornate and just mercator lined their their fake world's map is and i play video games which have pretty much become subservient to their maps in the current

development model like every um three degrees off from horizon zero dawn game that comes out is again you can sort of look at its map and say okay we're gonna have a good time here or uh this is gonna be two hours it's gonna lie in steam forever the other thing with me and maps is um the best gift i've gotten as an adult actually is a map of middle earth that my uh sister got me oh it's it's great it has um this sort of hand drawn look to it uh it's something i definitely would have spent too much money on in high school nice yeah i am a i'm a map neophyte and a map enjoyer i'm really now appreciating those fantasy world maps so much like i feel like they love drawing that mountain range, right? They want that mountain range to look gnarly and very impassable and all kinds of little

triangles in it. They love it. Oh, yeah. They are very, they always want to get that like inverted V. Yeah. Like the cursive swoop. And that is the mark of a great heir of Tolkien. Yeah.

Well, Brendan, how about you? Everything I know about maps I learned in the last minute and a half from Denard. So I would be lost in any city other than New York because I navigate through like mental snapshots. So it wasn't till Grand Theft Auto that I actually learned how to be like 360 map orientation. I'm not even joking. It is how I was able to then visualize maps rotating in my head. And then I read a great book called Island of Lost Maps a few years back, and that's my entire history. Cool. What's the book like? It's about a map thief, but it tells the history of maps and their desirability through this guy stealing from a library. I think I read about

him doing the episode about libraries. Cause I was like, what is the most valuable library theft ever? And it was a guy stealing old maps. Yeah. I remember that. He's not even the only map library thief. There's like three. Man, I can only... The returns on library thieving have to be great. Like all the value and none of the security. Third century objects, but the security guards are armed with loud voices and determination. I want to know, though, that none of these guys is a gentleman thief. They're all like tweed elbowed schlubs.

All these guys look like your art professor. I was imagining a lot of like dingy British car parks when I was reading about this. A lot of like a guy getting out of the library, pulling over in a car park and just looking at this map inside his not cool jacket. Yeah. looking at this map inside his not cool jacket yeah well yeah there's a lot of stuff here about regular real maps which are also wild i'm really glad patrons picked this but on on every episode our first fascinating thing about the topic is a quick set of fascinating numbers and statistics and this week that's in a segment called I do want to start the stats and numbers.

I just want to start to talk about maps. All right. That name was submitted by Alan Sigismund. Thank you, Alan. We have a new name for this segment every week. Please make them as silly and wacky and bad as possible and submit yours to SifPod at gmail.com. Also, I said this last week.

If you've submitted to SifPod on Twitter, I'm winding down Twitter. So please email it. But there we go. That was an old school one. Usually it's a little more recent pop. That was a little barbershop quartet. Fallout has broken my brain. Did he choose it because of Fallout or is he just a general wartime music? If folks don't know, this is a song by the

Ink Spots, which is an old group, and I only know it through the Fallout games. So I think it's a Fallout reference, but I don't really know. Yeah, I'm glad we were talking about video games so much because it's a very video game-y song to me. Yeah. Even though it is an actual song from the past. The first number here is a number about Google Maps and Google Earth. It is 2005 because that's the year when those launched. The Google Maps service, the Google Earth service, 2005. And Google built it by acquiring some technology and services from smaller developers and then packaging that all together into a service. And I couldn't find like a super specific, accurate number, but anywhere from 54 to 70 percent of smartphone users are apparently using Google Maps. So in general, it's the dominant map of the world today.

That is cool. I remember when it came to Google google earth that was a really popular high school sort of diversion just poking around that thing seeing how thoroughly going around yeah yeah yeah it was cool it was it was it was something different here's a number for you had to download like 100 megabyte file because they couldn't make it available online oh and then you could just spin the globe on your with your mouse yeah it was a real nice benefit of having a computer with a cheesy alien on the back oh like you could all just gather around your friend's gaming campfire and uh you know see see which cities it was easiest to violate local privacy in what kind of great or horrible or in between moments must have been captured by those cars mapping things on the ground over time like

that's a it's kind of interesting idea to me like were there any pickpocketings or worse crimes or i don't know babies being saved from burning buildings captured in that footage i think we'll pretty much get into that yeah because there's that street view service too Babies being saved from burning buildings captured in that footage. I think we'll pretty much get into that. Yeah, because there's that Street View service too. But there's so many layers to Google making a really comprehensive document of the earth. And I'm putting a takeaway within the numbers here because takeaway number one. The whole modern world essentially uses the same single map, and that often makes life weird. I'm going to steal it. The ultimate heist. Like your jacket, you put it in, just

starts glowing. Like he's got something in there. i'm gonna make an nft of the vector files and just rocket to mars yeah in terms of making things weird isn't there that um sort of eternal flame war over how big countries appear on the most popular maps yes and and google's playing into it they recently started offering both a Mercator projection, which stretches everything out, and then a sphere where you just see the Earth in its general shape. But yeah, the Mercator projection, it makes stuff nearer to the poles look a lot bigger, especially Greenland is probably the most famous fake big place. It's not actually that big. But what about when it's flat because the Earth is flat?

Oh, well, Kyrie, that's a great question. The thing is... I'm just saying teach the controversy. Let the kids decide. Yeah. This Google service here, I feel like it's intuitive once mentioned, but Google has created an unprecedented map on a lot of levels of this world we live on because we have these street view cars and then aerial shots and satellite shots of what the Earth looks like. A quick next number here is more than 20 million, because according to the company Google, they claim to process more than 20 million new pieces of Google Maps and Earth information every day.

of Google Maps and Earth information every day. And they say that breaks down, you know, if you just break out 20 million things a day, that's more than 200 new pieces of information per second. So in the runtime of this podcast, they're going to get thousands and thousands of new updates to the information they've got. That is hard to wrap my head around. One of the cool benefits of the pre-apocalypse, post-apocalypse is when they got all of our information, they got really interested in little boondoggles too. And I'm glad that mapping everything is one of those things that they are dedicating their ownership of the earth

to. I know one or two people because I used to have some kind of charisma that work into various alphabet subnooks. And I remember that even though there is no money in it, they had these crazy inventive ideas to just tackle the general global mosquito problem. And it's one of those things that to me is inspiring and uninspiring at the same time. It's inspiring because like, okay, so some of these smart people are being put to work that isn't just turning money into more money or my data into money. And it's also uninspiring because it's like, oh, you really do own the world because now you just have a vested interest in the general state of your property. Like when they see a widespread malaria problem, they're like, oh, look at the backyard. Everything's dug up.

We've got gophers now. My species is getting bitten by mosquitoes all the time. I own the species. And yeah. Unfortunately, the best they came up with was the Peter Thiel solution to disrupt the nation's blood supply and claim it all for themselves. But tech is really good at driving industries out of business. So I think the mosquitoes are probably as their days are as numbered as the millennials. This thing of Google, it is true. They've like accidentally or on purpose made themselves in

charge of the earth. And so it leads to a bunch of immediate problems because they launched that in 2005. And the next number here is 2007. That is the year when Google Earth changed its data to support the British military fighting in Iraq. According to Slate, British troops were doing operations against Iraqi insurgents back and forth, and they got a hold of a bunch of documents the insurgents were using, which included paper printouts of Google Earth images of British bases and installations in Iraq. And so then the British military convinced Google to redo their images of the city of Basra with like an archive data set from before the war. And Google said that's the only time they had done that before, like alter Earth data to support a government's request.

But then people started digging and found out that Google Earth gets a lot of its images from third party providers. And tons of those are subject to national security laws where governments convince them to like blur things out or leave things out. And so so this Google Earth map of the whole world is also like constantly censored or altered for various security reasons. That's one of the more late William Gibson things I have heard in a while. And that's from 15 years ago. Yeah, that is fascinating. You even call it secretly incredibly fascinating. Hey, this documentation got a lot less fun.

It's like, oh man, I wasn't ready for today problems. I was thinking like, all right, let's find out about some of our old mistakes. These were lines drawn by dead terrible people. And there's a whole nother scale to it too. This next number is another story, also 2007, yet another almost immediately after Google Maps launched problem. Because in 2007, Google was in two huge international territorial disputes, two whole situations where like different countries said, you're not depicting our ownership of land properly. Oh, boy. countries said, you're not depicting our ownership of land properly. One of them is the Israel-Palestine conflict. Because Google Maps, either accidentally or on purpose, they are labeling of the Temple Mount in Jerusalem, which is also known as Haram al-Sharif. As of 2007, they had labeled that as

occupied territory. And based on that labeling, Google Maps seemed to be taking a pro-Palestinian stance by calling it occupied territory, this mountain in Jerusalem. And so this drew praise online from many Palestinian groups, including the Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigade. And then Google did not comment, but they relabeled it to a more neutral label to not take such a side. You know, if one group's already sort of feeling you, you're not going to win the team that's already pissed by backpedaling. The ship has sailed. Everyone's already calcified their ideas. The think pieces for the next six years are written. It's done. True. Yeah. And they kind of ran into that with this other thing,

too, because the other dispute was a dispute over land between the governments of India and China. There's land that's in the Indian state of Arunachal Pradesh. And then according to China, it's part of the Chinese region of South Tibet. This whole chunk of disputed land, Google Maps marked it with a dotted line border. That was their choice for dotted line is disputed. Who knows, you know? And then they basically got criticism and praise from both countries because people either perceived the dotted line to be supporting their claim or rejecting their claim. And so then both China and India were upset with Google. I feel like you're giving us the risk map for World War III.

Like this episode is going to have ardent relevance in about eight years. And everyone's going to be like, yeah, if you get around the three Yahoos chuckling about it, it's a great portrait of life just before everything exploded. You know, in the old days, before we were divided between like the wolf and bear clans, this was one of the last documents about this situation at the time. Yeah, that person who suggested music from the Fallout games for the stats that they did not realize how in tune it would be. Yeah, boy, oh boy. Yeah, they were pretty plugged in. Yeah, they were pretty plugged in. And then with the Temple Mount in Jerusalem, they just started putting multiple labels on the same place.

And this is 2018, the WNYC radio show and podcast on the media investigated. They said as of then, if you search capital of Israel or if you search capital of Palestine, you get Jerusalem either way. They were like, we'll solve it that way. They invented a moral relativist map. Even more so with China and India, because as of 2018, Google Maps just started serving the map each country wanted within that country. Oh, no. So if you're a user in India, Google Maps says that territory is part of India. If you're a user in China, it says that territory is part of Chinese South Tibet. That was going to be my next question.

Isn't that going to make it worse in the long run, though? Isn't everyone going to be like, no, it's been in Google for like 20 years. I don't know what you want. I agree. I think Google was making it better for Google specifically. They were like, we're out. it out guys and then little plastic wrist cannons come in you know yeah like intuitively i would assume the one upshot of cyberpunk cowboy land would be that the government wouldn't get the final vote and once again history has taken charlie brown's football and yanked it from my feet. And I don't even get like a little dog with an airplane as a, as compensation. I just, it's, it's all football kicks all the time.

Yeah. That, it really just jumped out to me as I researched maps that 2005 is a watershed for everybody on earth's experiences of maps, right? Like there were some GPS systems and stuff before that, and we've had satellites before that. But like basically a switch flipped and we entered a cyberpunk future specifically with how we look at maps and read maps and understand maps. Like now there's one global map

run by a weird company in the Bay Area and Chelsea, Manhattan, you know? Like weird. That's a weird change from how it was before that for all of time. I can't go. I can't believe Google is going to be in the third axis and we're going to all have to be being allied. Thinking about that break point in the human experience, because the way you're putting

it to me, or at least the way that my monkey brain understands it, there's basically one cartographer that matters right now. Yeah, like I have an iPhone and it keeps getting me to try to use Apple Maps and I just use Google Maps instead. And, you know, obviously this could change. Some competitor could come along and knock Google off the top of the roost. But as far as I can tell from the vague numbers you can get, more than than half of internet users are using Google Maps if they use a map. And, you know, like two thirds of people are online in the world. It's a pretty substantial chunk of the human population is using one map the same way. That is big. And I think the winner in like a tech category always has

a lot of inertia. So they will have to do some dig level stuff to be unseated from map dominance yeah yeah the more useful you get like the website name yeah cool yeah dig comes from behind we all slept on dig reddit's over. Throw it into dig. All right. Off of that, we're going to a short break, followed by the big takeaways. See you in a sec. I'm Jesse Thorne.

I just don't want to leave a mess. This week on Bullseye, Dan Aykroyd talks to me about the Blues Brothers, Ghostbusters, and his very detailed plans about how he'll spend his afterlife. I think I'm going to roam in a few places, yes. I'm going to manifest and roam. All that and more on the next Bullseye from MaximumFun.org and NPR. Hello, teachers and faculty. This is Janet Varney. I'm here to remind you that listening to my podcast, The JV Club with Janet Varney, is part of the curriculum for the school year. Learning about the teenage years of such guests as Alison Brie, Vicki Peterson, John Hodgman, and so many more is a valuable and

enriching experience. One you have no choice but to embrace because yes, listening is mandatory. The JV Club with Janet Varney is available every Thursday on Maximum Fun or wherever you get your podcasts. Thank you. And remember, no running in the halls. Well, there's one more number here and it'll lead into a new takeaway. I think it will relieve that like monolithic map feeling. Because the last number here is 2015. And 2015 is the launch year of a wonderful website

called native-land.ca that comes up on the show every week. But I want to highlight that and more within. Takeaway number two. There is an amazing modern cartography practice called counter mapping. And that's pushing for a bigger and better understanding of our world. The overall practice of counter mapping is people making like maps that are very intentional and political and on purpose about like highlighting people in places and cultures that get, you know, sort of sort of ignored by regular maps, in particular, imperialist maps of the past. That is cool. That is an excellent trend. I think to a certain type of reactionary or revanchist, those are the fantasy maps. Yes.

And not their favorites. Yeah. And not their favorites. They're not like, I hope my sister gets me a print. No. Because it's this umbrella term for all sorts of ways of mapping the world in a way that does not serve or promote dominant power structures. I like that we thought about, you know, somebody reactionary probably doesn't love these.

I hope they can also understand that these are both a somewhat new way of thinking about cartography and also totally the regular way. Like just the map making we have, like there's like, oh, we'll make one map for the borders of countries and one map for roads and one map for like, this is the parts of a national park, you know? So this is another map that this is like totally straightforward and normal. You don't need to be upset about it. So that tricky, introspective reactionary vote. I like it. So that tricky introspective reactionary vote. I like it. Yeah. Hey, I'm sure all 10 of those guys are scratching their chin right now. Like he he's got me. Got him. Got me. Yeah.

Native-land.ca was created by Victor Temprano. He self-describes as a settler. He says he was born on the traditional land of the Katsi people and raised and living on the land of the Okanagan people in what's also called the Canadian province of British Columbia. And he founded and runs a web development startup called Mapster. So their company does all sorts of services for online businesses that want to incorporate maps in what they're doing. As a hobby, he built native-land.ca and then has turned it over to a nonprofit led by indigenous people. And their current executive director, Christine McRae, she says, quote, the map is supporting indigenous peoples as they take back the narrative and have both the ability and the platform to be able to share their stories. In doing so, we're able to know a truer history of the place that we live in, end quote.

Which is just true. I'm sorry. I have a relevant story about a map. Ooh. Yeah. It just occurred to me. So I went to high school in Connecticut on Mohegan land and very close to where the Mohegan Sun now stands, which was formerly Fort Shantuck. So my cross country team, we had shirts with this map of the cross country course around Fort Shantock. And then halfway through high school, that land was awarded back to its original actual owners. And that map ceased to exist. So I had a shirt of a map that became irrelevant in, I would say it was restored to its proper place. Wow. That's fascinating. Yeah. And I like the idea of your team all wearing shirts of where you're usually running. Somebody can see it and be like, I'll find them there

later. That's cool. You can't get lost. Oh yeah. Everybody look at Brendan's back. We need to return to the school. If you're behind me, you're going pretty slow. And there's more counter map types, too. Another one I hadn't known about, this is the Pan-Inuit Trails Project. And The Guardian covered this. It was developed by a professor at Cambridge University. Because it turns out Inuit peoples all over the Arctic, they used and shared lots of different trail systems and still use some of them. And according to Professor Michael Bravo of Cambridge University, those trail systems

were passed down the generations by a combination of physical maps and oral storytelling. And so this Cambridge team is like collecting and digitizing both of those things. Because, you know, on a lot of even just general maps, I feel like the Arctic is a big white blob. It's just like it's snowy up here. And so this is trying to counter map that and show that there's all kinds of traditions and routes and people up there. Oh, do you know what they use like for trail markers

when it is obscured by snow and ice i think it varies apparently there's a lot of details in it about like good safe places to sleep and like places where the ice is particularly thick usually i don't know how they like physically indicate that uh like in life but it might be a lot of hey turn at the red mailbox but in an arctic sense you know what i mean just verbal descriptions where to go you know all these all this border data we focus on these days is useful but more maps of like go here to die less yeah would be a great utility i don't know why we're dickering over names of things when we could just have don't fall through the ice and get a good night's sleep. Sounds like a good day. Yeah.

How about that? Yeah. There's even another example here. This is all the way on the Southeast Asian island of Bordeaux, which is partly Indonesia. of Bordeaux, which is partly Indonesia. There's indigenous people making counter maps of forests, because there are some companies planning on logging those forests for timber. And so on the company map, the forest is just a green blob, right? It's like, here's the trees, we'll cut them down. And so counter mappers are building maps that show like, all kinds of different native land use in the forest and how like specific portions played

into specific customs. Apparently also some of the maps show disputes between native peoples over like which peoples have which parts of the forest because native people are not a monolith either. That's kind of another one, like this wish for a map of where to go, where to be. Like they're just adding detail to a forest that usually doesn't get it. It's so interesting that you look at something that you think would be sort of objective data about, you know, this is geographic terrain. And it's like, no, the meaning is derived from the value that a different person finds in it. I'm not building up to a joke. I just think it's fascinating that you can't even perceive your biases in your what you would call concrete data.

Yeah, there's all this passive storytelling that goes down in like these mediums we think of as purely, I know, information or data driven. We do mental rabbit hole of like, wait, so are we going to end up with the temple on the mount situation again, but between these two tribes and within the counter mapping project? I don't know. Yeah. Then they have to support one or it's like how far down does this go yeah right you don't want it to result in like two groups saying like obviously don't cut it down obviously don't cut it down and then they start punching each other right like that's not great once again the logging company is the good guy in this situation. If you can't agree on your forest, we're just not going to have a forest. And then you can think about what you've made us do. And one more example here, this one involves some national borders, but in 2018, there was

an academic paper where they studied and collected a lot of migrant stories from Mexico and from Central America. And the paper, they also published a set of hand-drawn maps made by migrants. Nice. Because those maps, like, they asked them, like, hey, just map your journey and experience of this. And so there was a bunch of interesting information. Like, they drew special river crossing locations, like, particularly safe places to rest. One migrant drew in the location where they

got kidnapped in their journey. But the whole goal was to help people understand that immigration is a human thing and involves actual people. And so these maps were something they published because that's different from a map where there's just a black line for the U.S.-Mexico border and then two different blobs of color. Autobiographical maps. That is a really great way to make a point. It almost makes the standard political maps that we look at in these situations feel like the old here be dragons kind of things. Like we are someone else's here be dragons.

Yeah. Like there's a whole reductivist aspect of that. Like we are someone else's here be dragons. Yeah. Like there's a whole reductivist aspect of that. You know, we like to think of ourselves as over and we are not so much. And I'm pretty sure we picked the projection that makes America look just a teensy bit bigger. You know, it's said that America is so big you can fit four Americas into it. Whoa.

Yeah. That'll show America. Yeah. America will think twice before messing with America again. That's a pretty good segue to the last takeaway here, because there's one more takeaway for this main show, and it's takeaway number three. Two guys made important cartography advances that also warped the world's understanding of itself.

And this takeaway, it's really the story of two guys. It's a guy in the 100s AD named Claudius Ptolemy. And then a guy in the 1500s AD named Gerardus Mercator. And that second guy, Mercator, we've talked about him a bit because he's the creator of the Mercator Projection, which stretches out the world map and makes the places closer to the poles, such as the United States, look a lot bigger than it is. Yeah, congratulations to Ptolemy, who, honestly, because I always mispronounce that, I wish I had known his first name was Claudius growing up.

Like, I really would have embarrassed myself less on school assignments just saying Claudius to a room full of people. But he gets to choose his legacy. That's it's not for my convenience. I do. I feel like Ptolemy really benefited from kids getting excited about Pteranodons and other flying dinosaurs. Like the P-T pronunciation. A lot of us, that's where I picked it up. I would not have known it otherwise. I wonder, in the moment, did Mercator feel like the sequel?

Like he was, I'm the second coming of maps, basically. Yeah, possibly. This guy Ptolemy, we'll talk about him first, because he was pushing a style of map making that really until like the 1300s and 1400s was not the predominant European approach. There was Ptolemy and then 1300s, 1400s on. There was a focus on geographically accurate maps. But before that, and for many years around it, people were just making like maps that told a story they wanted told. And the goal was not to accurately depict the shape of land and where things are even, especially maps that just like put something at the center of the world that was very popular in many cultures all over the world. Dropping a map was kind of like your nation's like boasting track. Yeah, a bit. Yeah, like cool horns at the beginning and then like, we are the Middle Kingdom and that's China telling its story. You know, like that was map making in a lot of places.

The map braggadocio track. I like that as a statement. I also like that point. I really do like that point about everyone just putting their country in the middle i think that's something we in this telling of history generally put on china but that feels like a universal imperial kind of thing like i'm sure i'm sure the ancient egyptians weren't putting themselves on like the bottom right corner of the map, you know? I mean, it's a globe. You can start anywhere.

Is this true? Did they all agree on that? Even like a Mercator projection map, the shape of it is technically a cylinder, right? Like it's flattened out. But like when we make it flat in a book or on a wall, we're picking a place to cut it. And in the U.S S we pretty much put the U S and the upper left, because that feels like the start, you know, but that's, that dividing line can be anywhere. And, and that's all, that's even us putting ourselves at the center today.

Yeah. Yeah. It's a little bit more. How much of that is centrism and how much, how much, sorry, how much, how much of that is, is, is just, this is the part of the map you're going to be looking at the most. So we're going to maximize your view? Oh, yeah, that can be a thing, too. Either way, it's absolutely a thing that most places centered themselves, not just China. Like, a Smithsonian says that there is an oldest surviving regional map in the world, and it's from the ancient kingdom of Babylon. regional map in the world. And it's from the ancient kingdom of Babylon. 2,700 years ago, somebody made a clay tablet of a, they say it's a map, but it's a circle labeled Babylon in the middle. And then just a loose drawing of a river and a sea and then Assyria in the corner, the

word Assyria. So it's a map that is not really intended for you to find anything. It's a map that lets you tell yourself, we're the middle, and there's some other stuff. Great. So that's history's first Tolkien map. Yeah. Yeah, basically. It's about that detailed, yeah. It's just your relationship with the world.

Yeah. Geography, too. Like, apparently in traditional Japanese maps, they would place Mount Fuji at the center of the world, because that's the significant peak in Japan. There's also the Pitjantjatjara people, the Pitjantjatjara people who are in Australia's First Nation people. And they traditionally depict Uluru as the center of the world. When I was in school i was told that's called ayers rock but like there's been a lot of peoples too who just said whatever

the biggest physical thing in our place is that's the middle of the world obviously like look how big it is makes sense oh yeah and they're also with like early map making along with people just saying like this is a map of how i think the world works or what I think is important. There were also types that didn't even try to claim to be about geography, especially in medieval Europe, long after Ptolemy, there was a style called Mape Mundi. And that's a Latin name for just illustrated diagrams that would teach something. Some of them taught like about the origin of a scientific idea or belief. Most of them taught Christian morality. Like it was nominally a map, but it was just like a almost chutes and ladders diagram of how to go to heaven with Jesus in one part of it and like hell in another part of it. So until the 1300s, 1400s, map making was like not really about geography for most people.

So you're telling me they knew about New Jersey back then? We all laugh in New York State at New Jersey. It's a beautiful state. I didn't say whether it was heaven or hell. Look at them with their lower rent and smiles. Both the people we're talking about here, Ptolemy and Mercator, they both accomplished a lot and were very confusing and misleading about it in the end. So Ptolemy, he was primarily an astronomer and he used that science to help him make like better maps and a more geographically accurate map than other people had made before, especially by measuring the shape of the Earth.

He also helped advance the true idea that the Earth is spherical. We were joking about the flat Earth before, but for thousands of years, we've known it's spherical. And he was also a person living in Roman Egypt. He was also culturally Greek. He wrote in Greek, and his last name's Ptolemy. That's a Greek name. But because of all that, he had a huge influence on Europe. And from then on, when people started to make medieval maps that were relatively geographically accurate and relatively a world map approach, that's often described as a Ptolemaic map in the scholarly

work. This is a really innovative guy who was very important to map making. However, there were a couple of big flaws with his work. And one of them was that cartography was not really his goal. His top priority was astronomy, and then number two was astrology. And according to Matthew Edney, professor of cartography at the University of Southern Maine, Ptolemy really got into cartography because he wanted to make better horoscopes. A key part of his horoscope drafting was to learn someone's birthplace and then triangulate their birthplace against where the stars and planets are. And so that's why he was working on this.

He was not ultimately super interested in good map making for its own sake. That is incredible. I don't want to step on anyone's spiritual toes because I know that astrology matters, matters to some people, but it doesn't to me. And I've got coal somewhere here in my heart. So this is kind of like finding out that algebra only exists for pokemon cards like if you if you told me like oh you know alchemists were playing around trying to get gold and then they found out a way to you know easily derive aluminum i'd be like oh that's great that's how chemistry got invented but it's like i must invent cartography to better make up star signs. Yeah.

There's no path from that. Yeah, that is. That's so much work. He could have just made it up. He could have derived a science. Yeah, it's such a stacking of science and magic. Like so many people until basically now working in science. If I remember right, Isaac Newton was very interested in alchemy.

He really wanted to get that going and then came up with a bunch of real stuff along the way. And this is the guy, he's like, I'm a serious astronomer and a wacky astrologer, which is why I'm a serious cartographer. It's a really funny pyramid to me. Yeah, you never know where your stack of inches will take you. With Ptolemy, so he's doing horoscopes. He also, you know, he lived in the 100s AD. He just lacked a lot of the tools we would get later for getting geography right. And so the other big problem with his maps is he's saying like, this is the most geographically accurate map yet. And it just isn't.

Like, there's a lot of guessing in the 100s. It's the way it is. And, you know, a lot of people following him did guessing, too, and made major errors. For example, colonizers on the west coast of what's now the U.S. thought California was an island because they got confused by Baja, California. And then they just thought it was a whole separate landmass. So there becomes a whole tradition of Ptolemaic maps with wrong landmasses. And you can see why. Makes sense.

Man, the insane enterprise that's sailing anywhere is for most of human history. I would hate to be on the error-proofing team. Yeah. We thought we were going to Virginia. Everyone here has katanas. What's happening? But like running while they say, I'm getting chased by guys with katanas.

Because then the other guy here, Gerardus Mercator, we're jumping to the 1500s AD. Gerardus Mercator was a Flemish polymath. He lived mostly in modern Germany. One fun fact about him, he never sailed on a boat in his lifetime. He never really went to sea, even though he was kind of in charge of basically the map we have today of the oceans. But Mercator, his big advance was when you're making a world map, But Mercator, his big advance was when you're making a world map, you can make it flat in a book or in a poster or something if you stretch the top and the bottom out. And he came up with this while he was working for wealthy patrons in feudal Germany, publishes an 18 page world map in 1569.

And his 1569 map is a huge hit in Europe. It sparks many further maps relying on his system. The way most of us use Google Maps today is a Mercator projection. But as we've discussed, this has many drawbacks and the main one is that it distorts the sizes of land and in particular making places like Greenland

and Northern Europe look much bigger than they are. And then it drastically shrinks places like Latin America, most of Africa, and most of South Asia. And that also indirectly psychologically contributed to the colonization of a lot of those places and the invasion of a lot of those places. Because one thing that boosted that was people saying, look how small it is.

I mean, it's not a big deal if we rolled in there. Yeah, I think Northern Europe looked at that inherent flaw in the Mercator system and said, this is fine. We're cool. There are no bugs. There are only features. Yeah. The last seven centuries have just been some idiot drunkenly bar fighting, not realizing

he's taken on somebody twice his size. Let's go. Yeah, well. Let's go to latin america yeah the mercator like beer goggles basically yeah sure the biggest misconception is probably the sizes of greenland and the sizes of the continent of africa because it turned like on most mercator maps greenland looks about as big as the entire continent of Africa. It turns out the continent of Africa is 14 times larger than Greenland. And I'm going to link a site that just has a picture of the actual sizes of those places. Greenland looks like a medium sized African country if you put it on top of the continent of Africa. It doesn't look that big at all. And it's even like, I grew

up with classrooms where we had this projection on the wall. Google Maps began operation in 2005, but they didn't offer aspherical Google Maps until 2018. I know Google Earth, you can kind of go see it if you want to, but like a lot of us still just use basically a Mercator way of getting around the world. The other reason this map is flawed is that Mercator was very distracted and not really a cartographer. According to the book On the Map by Simon Garfield, Mercator had only ever made a few maps in his whole life when he made this 1569 map that became the world map. And according to Syracuse University professor Mark Monmoneer, And according to Syracuse University professor Mark Monmoneer, Mercator's work was funded by various rich patrons. And he made this map as just one component of an attempt to document the whole history and cosmology of the world for a German duke.

Like he wanted to write basically the ultimate reference material. And he ended up just like doing this map on the side as he did it. and he ended up just like doing this map on the side as he did it and the other other distraction was that there were huge religious wars in europe at the time and in the in the 1500s it was catholics and protestants battling it out constantly the catholic church banned a lot of mercator's historical writing because it acknowledged that the protestant reformation happened it would just mention martin luther stuff, and they were like, banned. And he also spent many years of his life in various Catholic-run prisons because they objected to either his published work

or to letters that they intercepted that he tried to send people. So he was like a super distracted amateur historian and accidentally made the world map. Catholic Church is really the Google of its day. His side hustles, side hustles between trials, Galileo style before the Catholic Church is how he ends up changing the world. That is motivational in a crazy kind of way. Wow. Believe in all your little projects.

So has anybody ever made an earnest attempt to map the world? Or is this just always something people do on their way to the crazy store? I think the answer is no. Yeah, they're just busy at the crazy store or running a search and advertising company online. And then they accidentally make a map of the world. Yeah. So you said he was trying to make a comprehensive, like, history of the world kind of image or? Yeah, like a multi-volume stack of books. It was a German Duke hired him in the 1560s. And he was also taking jobs as a math teacher.

And also he was taking jobs in the engraving industry. So just working many jobs all at the same time. And then he said, like, with your patronage, German Duke, I'm going to write a multi-volume history of the world and also like a Christian cosmology of creation and everything else. Dude, this Kickstarter would have been. I'd say like, Brendan, when you said he was like Google, he was kind of trying to do what Google does and provide all the information in the world. That's a really interesting guy. Yeah. And so that's Mercator and Ptolemy. Like I, I find them both really interesting. They legitimately advanced cartography and also messed it up. And that's, that's a real influence on

all of our mental picture of the planet. I'm like still trying to get myself to shrink Greenland, and it's hard to do. I think we should get those two together. Do a collab map, you know, like Zoolander style. See if we can get the best of both idiots. I want to see their map where you can only see people who make over a certain income. It's like a heat map population thing, but it's only the wealthy. Newport, Rhode Island is the size of Greenland. Greenland is actually the size of Delaware.

The Cayman Islands are just a USSR blob in the whole middle. It's all pink. folks that is the main episode for this week my thanks to denard dale and brendan mcginley for being on board for a stats and numbers song that references the fallout video games that's a really fun franchise about the end of the world is how how I would describe it, and I hope people enjoy it. Anyway, I said that's the main episode, because there is more secretly incredibly fascinating stuff available to you right now. If you support this show on Patreon.com, patrons get a bonus show every week where we explore one obviously incredibly fascinating story related to the main episode. This week's bonus topic is a special pair of stories.

You get how a part of Google Maps was made by sheep, and an astounding theory about the first maps ever made by humans. Visit SIFPod.fun for that bonus show, for a library of more than 10 dozen other bonus shows, and to back this entire podcast operation. And thank you for exploring maps with us. Here's one more run through the big takeaways. Takeaway number one, the whole modern world essentially uses the same single map, and that often makes life weird. Takeaway number two, there's an amazing modern cartography practice called countermapping, pushing for a bigger and better understanding of

our world. And takeaway number three, two guys, Ptolemy and Mercator, made important cartography advances that also warped the world's understanding of itself. Those are the takeaways. Also, please follow my guests. They're great. Denard Dale and Brendan McGinley are both monthly columnists for 1-900-HOT-DOG. 1-900-HOT-DOG, wonderful comedy website, patron-supported. I particularly recommend Denard's work on comics, such as the Nemesis comic series, and a new piece by Brendan that is a holiday catalog in a way that may feel familiar to you. Brendan McGinley also writes many comics. Find them at brendanmcginley.com. Denard Dale also writes comedy for The New Yorker, and his new book is titled Everything Abridged. Many research sources this week. Here are some key ones. And I just kind of wove the

information in a lot of spots this week, but a lot of reading went into this episode. In particular, the book On the Map by journalist and author Simon Garfield. Also, the Oxford Map Companion by Patricia Seed. Plus more writing by Syracuse University geography professor Mark Monmoneer and by Matthew Edney, professor of cartography at the University of Southern Maine. Find those and many more sources in this episode's links at sifpod.fun. And beyond all that, our theme music is Unbroken Unshaven by The Budos Band. Our show logo is by artist Burton Durand. Special thanks to Chris Souza for audio mastering on this episode. Extra, extra special thanks go to our patrons.

I hope you love this week's bonus show. And thank you to all our listeners. I'm thrilled to say we will be back next week with more secretly incredibly fascinating. So how about that? Talk to you then.