A Land Beyond the Stars is a new website created by the Geography and Map Division of the Library of Congress and the Galileo Museum in Florence.
As well as the interactive version of Waldseemüller's 1507 map the site includes a wealth of information and videos explaining 16th century understanding of cartography & astronomy. The interactive map itself contains a number of options to learn more about the Universalis Cosmographia map.
These options include detailed explanations of the map's main five sections, translations of the Latin text and explanations of some of the map illustrations.
Note : Martin Waldseemüller's 1507 map 'Universalis Cosmographia' has the 'America' place-name on what is now called South America.
The name was used by Waldseemüller in honor of the Italian explorer Amerigo Vespucci.
THERE’S A PLACE where the internet, Wi-Fi, and GPS do not exist.
Communication is haphazard: Sometimes messages arrive different times at the same place, the same time at different places, or not at all.
It’s not North Korea, or a time portal to the 1980s.
It’s anywhere, today, under the ocean.
photo : Salvo Emma
For scientists talking to submarines, robots, and other instruments, data travels at dial-up speeds of single bytes per minute—far slower than the megabits per second we use in the office or at home.
Oceanographic researchers have gotten around the problem by connecting devices to tethers of fiber optic cable or copper wires, which provide enough bandwidth to stream images of the Titanic or weird creatures that live around underwater volcanic hot springs.
But the heavy cables can also get tangled, dragging down the vehicles they connect.
photo : Salvo Emma
But a group of scientists from Europe and the United States are trying to cut the cable on underwater data.
They foresee a wireless communications network that would allow sleek, torpedo-shaped autonomous underwater vehicles to scout the murky depths, collect information, talk to each other, and then return to a central point to dump their data at regular internet speeds.
Creating the Internet of Underwater Things
The SUNRISE Project - the dawning of sound science of the deep
In the past two years, their collaborative project—called Sunrise—has drawn upon the skills of more than 40 marine researchers and computer scientists from eight European nations.
They have explored Roman marble columns laying on the seafloor off Sicily, looked for lost shipping containers in a Portuguese harbor, and mapped a portion of the seafloor with the Portuguese Navy—all using networks of underwater modems.
Underwater robots can explore seas and rivers, gathering in groups to solve problems together, if they learn to cooperate.
A group of robots - each carrying a particular set of sensors - will scour the seabed looking for a lost object or a chemical leak.
By working together, they can collect a lot of information in a short space of time.
Later this month, another field test will use three autonomous underwater vehicles to run surveillance on aquaculture pens off Calabria in southern Italy.
They’ll later dock to a small wireless modem, and upload data to researchers back in Rome.
“We call it the internet of underwater things,” says Chiara Petrioli, professor of computer science at University of Rome La Sapienza and the Sunrise project coordinator.
“What we wanted to do is not only communicate underwater, but also take the first steps to develop low-cost actuating and sensing technologies that can be interconnected with each other and can complete smart complex tasks.”
SUNRISE Redeployable System
The first way to make that happen is to boost both the bandwidth and speed of existing underwater acoustic modems, which wirelessly transmit information through water with sound waves.
The second is to use so-called optical modems that transmit information through visible or infrared light beams.
They have a lot of bandwidth, but only work for short distances.
University of Porto
At Northeastern University in Boston, electrical engineer Stefano Basigni is trying to pack more data into acoustic wavelengths.
“The ways to achieve higher speed have to do with the design of the actual transducers, and the way you perform channel modulation,” said Basigni, who is part of the Sunrise group.
“You stuff more bits into the acoustic wave.”
To test that technology, Basigni and his colleagues have set up a demonstration project in Nahant, a small fishing community on the northern edge of Boston Harbor.
Normally, ocean scientists would lay cables out to a monitoring station that collects and records data on marine life, pollution, and water quality.
“We deploy our instruments today, and then in a week, if the lobster fishermen haven’t destroyed their equipment, we would go back and retrieve the equipment,” says Basigni.
“Now, with this kind of (optical modem) communication, as soon as the sensor has the data, it sends it back to me.”
photo : Marco Merola
Once Basigni and others figure out how to better connect underwater instruments through a wireless network, they see applications beyond collecting scientific data.
Say, opening underwater gates at the harbor mouth and guiding ships to their dock, livestreaming a tropical reef exploration, or following a pod of migrating whales in real-time.
The researchers are experimenting with a mix of slower, but longer-range acoustic modems and the short-range high-bandwidth optical modems.
“Once the networking has been perfected—and it will be—it is a matter of imagination,” says Basigni.
photo : Salvo Emma
But boosting data capacity and speed isn’t enough.
They also have to get the devices to talk to each other.
The Sunrise team in Italy is using an Esperanto-like language called Janus with their underwater drones.
They are planning a real-world test in several months off the coast of the Italian port of La Spezia to perfect the protocols, and to use a new method of recharging the batteries of autonomous underwater vehicles in floating docking stations.
photo : Salvo Emma
These real-world experiments are difficult to pull off.
The underwater world is rough on electronics, salinity and temperature differences make communications unreliable, and foul weather can send seasick oceanographers back to their cabins.
Still, these systems are getting better, according to Louis Whitcomb, professor of mechanical engineering at Johns Hopkins University and an expert in underwater acoustic communications.
Whitcomb just returned to Baltimore from a 45-day oceanographic expedition north of the Arctic Circle to explore an underwater mountain and its sea life.
The underwater drones he was using had to surface every few minutes and send back their location in 64-byte data packets once per minute—with each package taking six seconds to transmit.
In plain English: It was super-slow.
“We’re not going to be able to push HD TV over an acoustic modem anytime soon,” says Whitcomb.
“But we have a range of technologies and we will see the development of vehicles that will bridge these communications regimes.” Whitcomb sees a day when fleets of underwater drones can scan distant waters, return and dump their data into high-speed modems.
That makes exploring Mars look relatively easy.
Somali Piracy: Resetting the Stage? A series of attacks in 2015 may serve as an indication that the stage is
being set for piracy’s return off the coast of Somalia. At
least 9 merchant vessels, five dhows, and one fishing vessel reported
being approached or attacked by Somali pirates. The five dhows were all
successfully hijacked by pirates. While these incidents may
serve as an indication that Somali pirates retain the capability and
intent to return to piracy, it is not clear what that might look like. Though it is unknown if a return of Somali piracy would resemble the
same pattern as in years past, Somali pirates remain a serious threat to
the well-being of seafarers.
Even with maritime piracy at a 21-year low, experts are warning of a
potential resurgence in East Africa among other risks.
"Suddenly, the opportunity is improving," anti-piracy expert John
Steed said about Somali piracy. "No one has tried it yet, but the
potential is there for it to come back."
The last wave of Somalia piracy peaked in 2011 with 176 attacks.
Shipping
patterns 2000–2015: ships moved away from the Somali coast
It declined to almost nothing by 2015, thanks to an increased
foreign naval presence and industry precautions like posting
armed guards, moving faster, and following certain routes when
passing through the area.
At the end of last year, the industry
issued new recommendations that reduced the size of the danger zone.
All piracy attacks in 2015 - grey dots represent regional vessels.
Heading into 2016, however, IHS Inc. said Somali piracy was a major risk thanks to
instability and unrest in the region.
"The two conditions that led regional politicians to [support
pirates], namely a lack of alternative economic opportunities and
a threat to their control of their territory, are currently being
recreated in the Galmudug region of central Somalia," the risk
consultancy warned.
A photo taken on January 4, 2010 shows an armed Somali pirate keeping vigil on the coastline near Hobyo, northeastern Somalia.
AFP | Mohamed Dahir
Oceans Beyond Piracy (OBP) also warned of a piracy "reset" in its
mid-year report.
Steed, the
non-profit's regional manager for the Horn of Africa, walked
us through some risk factors.
—"Naval forces are getting [drawn away]. There’s a great deal of
work for them to do, particularly with the migration problems and
the issues higher up the Horn [of Africa] …. The days of the
European naval force may be coming to an end."
—"Ships' captains are under pressure from the companies to go
slower and in some cases closer to the coast."
—"No one has helped build the Somalis a decent coast guard or
maritime police …. In the main part of Somalia and all down the
east coast, there is no real Somali seagoing capability."
—"[Somalis] see these big international trawlers, as they see it,
stealing their fish, and that breeds animosity amongst and
support for the pirates who go out and sometimes capture fishing
boats."
Also mentioned in the OBP report:
—As 2015 progressed, private security teams were used less and
less frequently by ships in the area, and when they were
used, shipping companies increasingly opted for smaller and
cheaper teams.
Although the European Union recorded no
Somali pirate attacks in 2015, OBP says it has confirmed
5 small hijackings and other pirate-related
incidents.
The
Siraj and Jaber dhows were hijacked close to the Somali shore in
2015.
Globally, another reason to worry about piracy is the increasing use of kidnapping.
Southeast Asian pirates "have altered their tactics to take
advantage of the high ransoms that they can receive from
kidnapping crew," risk consultancy GardaWorld wrote in a recent
report.
That region has seen 12 maritime kidnap incidents in 2016
compared to zero in 2015.
West Africa has seen a similar trend. "Kidnap for ransom has
increased significantly in the waters off Nigeria, with hijacks
for product theft now comparatively rare," GardaWorld wrote.
Pottengal Mukundan, director of the International Maritime
Bureau, called this a "disturbing" shift.
East Africa, too, is seeing the same trend.
The number of
seafarers taken hostage in the area climbed from 17 in 2014 to
108 in 2015, according to OBP.
Currently, there are at least 36 seafarers being held hostage in
Somalia.
Twenty-six of them, the crew of NAHAM 3, have been
held there for nearly five years.
At least that's the thinking behind the AuthaGraph World Map, this year's grand prize winner of Japan's prestigious Good Design award,
an annual competition hosted by the Japan Institute for Design
Promotion that highlights innovations in a variety of sectors, including
home appliances, cars, industrial goods, and architecture.
It shows there are no "four corners of the earth" by arranging several
world maps without visible seams around a world map with color.
You can
see Antarctica at the right bottom is close to not only South America
but also Africa and Australia. It introduces as well how the map is made.
Tokyo-based
architect and artist Hajime Narukawa developed the map to be an accurate
representation of our spherical planet—no easy feat, it turns out.
You
mean the one we have up on our wall, filled with pins to mark our
travels, isn't good enough?
Well, no—it isn't.
AuthaGraphic Projection
An original method for maintaining areas proportions is called "iso-area-mapping." And
an original mapping process by combining different projection methods
via intermediate objects is called "multilayer-mapping."
These ideas
for mapping aims to reduce errors during projecting a sphere to a
tetrahedron because a simple optical projection from a sphere to a
tetrahedron causes huge distortions therefore useless
The 16th century gave us
many innovations and discoveries that we still happily use today: the
graphite pencil, bottled beer,
the Copernican model of astronomy.
And then there's the Mercator
projection, the map drawn by a Flemish cartographer back in 1569 that
remains the go-to textbook illustration of our world despite not being
very accurate.
Because of how a map transfers a spherical shape onto a
two-dimensional plane, the Mercator projection actually distorts the
size of entire continents: Greenland is depicted as about the same size as Africa, when in reality it's about as big as Algeria, and Antarctica is seen as a giant globe-spanning mass lurking across the bottom of our
world, when really it's as long across as the continental United
States.
Comparison/ Rectangle or Accuracy
AuthaGraph
map is able to transform an entire sphere to a rectangle as Mercator
projection does while it substantially keeps sizes and shapes of
continents as Dymaxion map does.
On the AuthaGraph map, continents
are drawn on angles, rather than the straight-across model of Mercator.
So not only does it more accurately represent the size of continents
and oceans, but also the distances between them.
But its real innovation
is in how the map can be transformed onto a three-dimensional globe
without losing that accuracy.
Using an assembly kit, users can follow
five steps to fold the map from its two-dimensional rendering into
various shapes before landing on the sphere, mirroring the process
Narukawa and team went through to arrive at the model, and looking at our world in new ways
and with different regions at its center.
“The map can be tessellated
without visible seams,” reads Good Design's description of the awardee.
“Thus the world map provides an advanced precise perspective of our
planet.”
the World without Ends It is able to tile the AuthaGraphic world map without gaps and overlaps.
The way of tessellation has seamless connections between maps as if it is an Escher’s tiling.
Same as fishes and birds in his painting, six continents are never fragmented and seven oceans keep their continuous networks.
It had been thought the world is on an infinite plane since geometries of a sphere and of an infinite plane are similar.
Walking on both surfaces, we do not meet an end.
A geographical network in the map is able to expand to any directions on the tessellated maps.
Thus the world map reproduces the spherical world without dead end on a plane.
The best part?
The map is available for purchase
in various forms, including a wall map, a composite poster of 40 maps
that are continuous in multiple directions and the aforementioned
foldable globe.
World Map Re-arrangements On the tessellated maps it is able to frame a view field covering a full set of a world.
The frame functions as a viewer which enables user to slide and rotate and then to frame a new world map with a preferable region at its center.
They provide a new angle of perspective to equally view the world so as to be free from existing perceptions defined by usual phrases such as “far east”, “go up north”, “Western”.
There's still work to be done, however, before we can
call the AuthaGraph truly accurate: A small footnote on the Good Design
website notes that the model needs to increase the number of
subdivisions used in mapping areas and distances—that is, breaking it
into smaller and smaller sections—for it "to be officially called an
area-equal map."
ISS Long-term Tracking An orange line on tessellation-world composed by 49 maps tracks a journey of International Space Station (ISS) for eight hours.
Its coordinates are provided by ‘Cerestrak’, a website distributing ISS’s orbital data.
NASA and the US department of defense issue the original data.
The coordinates are defined by calculating the data to reflect corrections of the orbit. It has past 140 years since ‘Around the World in Eighty Days’ (Verne) was published.
Satellites fly across the world in hours while they play leading roles of telecommunication and remote sensing such as observing weather, environmental pollutions and natural resources.
The tessellationworld map shows such rapid movement of a satellite in one line.
Still, it's close enough that back in 2015, Japan
adopted the map for use in their textbooks.
Your turn, U.S.A.
Find out everything you wanted to know but never dared ask about foils, with this 3D presentation.
With a montage of real images of the boat sailing, and 3D computer modelling, it illustrates very clearly how they are operated and function on an IMOCA 60 like Safran.
These funny foils, shaped like Salvador Dali’s moustache, will no longer hold any secrets from you.
Armel sitting on the moustache
Hugo Boss moustaches
courtesy of VPLP / Guillaume Verdier
This is one of the major new features of this 5th generation Imoca monohull.
Since their arrival on the scene the foils have caused a lot of ink to flow and unleashed great passion. Indeed, there are both supporters and opponents of these new appendages, whose very shape is reminiscent of the moustaches of a famous Spanish painter. An unquestionable architectural development, foils are nonetheless a daring challenge for those who have opted to equiptheir steed with such a device.
