How Did Cartographers Create World Maps before Airplanes and Satellites? An Introduction Regular readers of Open Culture know a thing or two about maps if they’ve paid attention to our posts on the history of cartography, the evolution of world maps(and why they are all wrong), and the many digital collections of historical maps from all over the world. What does the seven and a half-minute video above bring to this compendium of online cartographic knowledge? A very quick survey of world map history, for one thing, with stops at many of the major historical intersections from Greek antiquity to the creation of the Catalan Atlas, an astonishing mapmaking achievement from 1375. The upshot is an answer to the very reasonable question, “how were (sometimes) accurate world maps created before air travel or satellites?” The explanation? A lot of history — meaning, a lot of time.
Unlike innovations today, which we expect to solve problems near-immediately, the innovations in mapping technology took many centuries and required the work of thousands of travelers, geographers, cartographers, mathematicians, historians, and other scholars who built upon the work that came before. It started with speculation, myth, and pure fantasy, which is what we find in most geographies of the ancient world…”
The New York Times – “For $29.99 a month, a website called PimEyes offers a potentially dangerous superpower from the world of science fiction: the ability to search for a face, finding obscure photos that would otherwise have been as safe as the proverbial needle in the vast digital haystack of the internet.
A search takes mere seconds. You upload a photo of a face, check a box agreeing to the terms of service and then get a grid of photos of faces deemed similar, with links to where they appear on the internet.
The New York Times used PimEyes on the faces of a dozen Times journalists, with their consent, to test its powers. PimEyes found photos of every person, some that the journalists had never seen before, even when they were wearing sunglasses or a mask, or their face was turned away from the camera, in the image used to conduct the search…Unlike Clearview AI, a similar facial recognition tool available only to law enforcement, PimEyes does not include results from social media sites.
The sometimes surprising images that PimEyes surfaced came instead from news articles, wedding photography pages, review sites, blogs and pornography sites. Most of the matches for the dozen journalists’ faces were correct. For the women, the incorrect photos often came from pornography sites, which was unsettling in the suggestion that it couldbe them. (To be clear, it was not them.)…”
A Face Search Engine Anyone Can Use Is Alarmingly Accurate - The New York Times
Boris Pahor (1913-2022)
Slovenian author Boris Pahor has died at the age of 108 (!); see, for example, the reports at Deutsche Welle and France 24.
He is best known for his novel Necropolis; see the publicity pages from Dalkey Archive Press and Canongate, or get your copy at Amazon.com, Bookshop.org or Amazon.co.uk.
Light Topics, Real Philosophy: Some Lessons from Writing about the Philosophy of Cover Songs (guest post)
“Aristotle or Kant simply could not have thought about music this way.” (more…)