Stamp of the day: Compass

Sometimes you get a feeling of being lost, in a country, in the woods, in society.... when you do it is good to have a compass, whether it is a real one or an inner one. Compasses stands for direction, continuity and safety, at least for me. In these days, when GPS has taken over the world´s all traffic direction, lighthouses are endangered and people don´t look at maps anymore.

I would not part from my compass (or map), and keep it with me when traveling. Sure, I use my GPS, but electronic devices can malfunction. My compass does not, even though a magnet could affect it and set you on a wrong course (NEVER put your radio under the deck of the kayak, and the compass on top.....).

This is a new stamp from the Swedish Post Office.

Emigrants from Sweden

The summer has turned over and autumn is closing in on us again here in the Northern hemisphere. Daylight is still 14 hours and 30 minutes, when the winter is here we´ll have the shortest days with 6 hours and 7 minutes. The migrating birds have started to group together already.

But, no need to ponder on that now. On the other topic now, Emigrants from Sweden to America, as it was in the 19th century. The book series about a Swedish group of people who were leaving a poor life in the rural Småland, written by the Swedish author Vilhelm Moberg, has been reprinted. What´s interesting are the book covers, embroidered by a Swedish needleworker, Karin Holmberg.

I think they are beautiful, and maybe very Swedish. LS, what do you think?

Stamp of the Day: Lighthouse (Svenska Högarna, Sweden)

Anybody that has read Tove Jansson's books about the Moomin Trolls knows that she has a special relationship to the sea.  The book Moominpappa at Sea ('Pappan och havet' in Swedish) takes place during a summer at a lighthouse far out in the archipelago on a little island, remote, scary, and beautiful.  Lighthouses are amazing buildings, sturdy by design, but isolated and lonely.  To get up to the action, the light, you have to step and step and step upwards through dark stairs, like a tunnel through a mountain.

These days lighthouses are endangered.  Most have no living people in them, and many have stopped shining.  Some are for sale. Some are taken by the oceans.  And most ships has GPS monitors that take you through the night.  Just 100 years ago, a blip in the time on Earth, there was just the sea, a boat, and a light at the distance, and nothing else to rely on.  Well compasses too, of course.  And sunrise and stars.  

Now it is all electronic, and abysmally insecure, unfortunately. A few irate or unresponsive electrons (=no juice!) and you are met by a black screen.  Few people in the past had a non-functioning compass (unless you put an iron rod next to it), but I think we all have swore over bad GPS directions or digital maps that suddenly show you driving in a river when in fact you are on a street in a city.  GPS is so convenient and insecure at the same time, it is scary.  It is like a teddy bear that can be lost at any time, and then what do you do.

Today's stamp is from Sweden, and shows the lighthouse at Svenska Högarna (which means 'The Swedish Mounds', which is here on Google Maps. It is out in nowhere, in the Baltic Sea between Sweden and Finland.  Tove Jansson could have used this as her lighthouse for her book, that is for sure. It is one of the few lighthouses in Sweden that still has staff year-round.

The immensity of it all still lingers...

Just some updates on what is going on on the Sourlands 8 days after hurricane Sandy.

It is SNOWING.  Many, many centimeters. We are having a freaking snowstorm, another nor'easter storm. I just heard the snowplow go by on the road outside, which is a very good sign.  (Both that it is a plow and that it is on a truck, i.e., trucks can get into the neighborhood now).

Our neighbors have their power back, it was fixed tonight.  We got internet back around the same time, which is pretty amazing.  The power and internet companies must actually have collaborated. Most likely the neighborhood is now accessible by fire trucks and the like.  They weren't this morning, but if they fixed the lines, then now, after 8 days, we can feel safer.  One road is probably still closed, but they are working on that too. Many of our neighbors do not have power yet though, because their powerlines were ripped out of their houses when trees feel on them.  It will take longer for them and I feel really sorry about all their troubles. The township has gotten lots of letters and calls from us about the situation, and it actually made a difference.  Good.

Bad news - Election results show that the two open seats on the township committee were won by the two republicans.  They won with only 50 votes more than the Democratic candidates, out of over 9000 votes cast.  Incredible. So, two more years of republicans running the town.  (Voting results for the Somerset county is here, and yes, Obama won in the county too.)  There is always The Swedish Party as an alternative for disillusioned Americans  :)
Very good news - Obama won the presidency again.  As someone said 'The republicans made sure that Obama would become a 2-term president'.  Presidents here can only be elected for 2 terms, so now he can focus on doing the right thing and not get reelected.  Like, put some bank fraud CEO's in jail, etc. :)  Mitt Romney seems to have disappeared instantaneously.  

The NJ railroad system suffered horrible losses.  Just look at the railroad bridge after the storm in the photo above (more info here).  Apparently they lost 1/3 of their locomotives and 1/4 of their passenger cars in the storm.  Imagine that.  That must be many hundreds of locomotives that are gone, so the commute to New York City will be hell for many months for many people.

I believe that the mental effects of Sandy will live on for decades in New Jersey.  People will try to be more self-sufficient.  Have more gasoline and generators ready. Get water bottles. Take weather reports seriously.  Value friends and family more.  Not trust township administrators and politicians as much.  Friends and relatives of friends of mine have lost everything.  Whole houses that washed away, and all that is left is a foundation.  Some people got their cars flooded.  Trees on roofs that cracked houses.  Horrific storm night memories, with fear of breaking windows in high-rises in NYC.  Children that lost everything.  It is just so incredibly sad, and maybe a fact of life because weather does exist and always have, but it seems so incredibly wasteful and sad.  I am sorry I am harping on on this, the hurricane I mean, but the rest of the world goes on, and we see it and are reminded about Sandy all the time.  Even if electric and internet and gasoline is soon back to normal, the New Jersey world has changed, permanently.  And so have we.

And finally, just some images to really show how big this storm was. 

(Image by NASA - more photos of Sandy from NASA here)

 

(Image by wunderground.com, a weather website)

(Image by NOAA)

Art by Ai Wei Wei

When we were in Stockholm in April we went to see the art exhibit by Chinese artist and government critic Ai Wei Wei.  I knew very little about him before I went, only that he had been imprisoned by the Chinese authorities and thereby disappeared for months.  The art installation was held in a former harbor magazine, a gallery named appropriately Magasin 3, and it was a suitable place right in the harbor, a place for international trade and global influxes and outfluxes over centuries.

Here is a selection of some works that I found particularly interesting.


The exhibit showed many of his pieces, which are often everyday objects remade by local artisans with special techniques and painstaking, time-consuming efforts.  When you walk into the exhibit you see 96 large, white Chinese porcelain vases standing on the floor.  When you walk around them, you realize that they have Chinese art on them on the other side, increasingly broader and broader patterns.


The vase design is a copy of the most expensive Chinese object ever sold, an ancient vase with the design called "Ghost Gu Coming Down the Mountain", which is also the name of this installation from 2005. Fascinating! It just makes you stop and think about design, partiality, copying of value and how you can take something unique and make a pattern out of it.  I loved it.


Similarly, was a giant heap, maybe 1.5 m tall (5 feet) of handpainted porcelain sunflower seeds.  From a distance it looks like plain gravel, but when you get really close you see the ceramic pieces up close, each individual, each different, but from a distance they all looked the same.  Just like when you look at people or countries from a distance - everybody looks the same, but up close we are all different. It is a matter of scale and distance.


A World Map made out of cotton fabric, stacked high and cut out with precision into each continent...  I never imagined that it would be so different to see the continents stack high, instead of seeing them just marked on a piece of paper.  Another fantastic thing is that you could walk around and see the world from the North, the East, the West, and sometimes below or at the crustal level if you crouched a bit.  Such a simple piece of art and so thoughtful and thought-making. I love it!


The Norwegian coastline from the North, as seen through Ai Wei Wei's cut fabric in his World Map.

Stamp of the Day: Then and Now

Then: Phone booth.  Now: iPhone

Then: Printed maps. Now: GPS.

Then: Ice boxes.  Now: Refrigerators

Then: Black and white TVs.  Now: Flat-screen TV.

Then: LPs and record players.  Now: iPods.

The technological development during the last 50 years is featured on these Australian stamps.  I can write a million words on this, about its pros and cons, but that will have to wait.  In the meantime, I'd like to point out that phones used to function without having to have batteries or being plugged into an electrical outlet, maps work when the power is out, and I don't think anybody would like an icebox in their regular kitchen.

Bacon bits and pieces on the internet

Oh, hi again everybody!

Life is going on as usual, and some new and old things on the internet...

knit bacon (yes!) and hamburgers [Core 77]

others make fantastic art out of subway maps [Core 77]

or octopi out of sausages,

make food out of the throw-away parts (which reminds me of the one time my grandfather tried to make porridge out of potato peels, not a success, and I was retold the story as a little kid by my mom) [NY Times]

some whiskey needs special fungi... great science story [WIRED]

and as usual, Shorpy manages to find the best end photos.

PS.  This is post 2050 on this blog.  That is a good number too, as is 44 and 33. Right LA?

Here it comes (hurricane eye is 6 hours away)

It is still over North Carolina, but we here in New Jersey are getting some winds and lots of rain now.  Only one outside cats (Smokey) have been seen.  We grilled tonight, probably the only people in the township that bothered to try to light a grill fire.  Mmm, grilled turkey breast.  If the power doesn't go out tomorrow, then we will post how things are... I am pretty happy there are no hurricanes in Sweden.

The hurricane is coming...

Irene is not one of the biggest, but it is aiming right for us...  Sunday will be wet and windy.  Let's hope basement stays dry. (Map from Weather Underground.)

Stamp of the Day: Vattenvägar ('Water Ways')

A Swedish stamp from 2001 on the rivers of northern Sweden illustrates all the water that has fallen and now is on its way to the oceans again.  On the map above, the mountains are on the left side, and the Baltic Sea are on the right side. Vattenvägar, literally 'water roads', are the term used for old traveling routes on water in Sweden, and includes lakes, rivers, streams, brooks, and canals.  A lot of timber was moved along these rivers in Sweden, from the inland forests to the saw mills along the coast of the Gulf of Botnia in the Baltic.

EH snapshot: Godahoppsudden Askö Södermanland

Travel report from EH, out kayaking in the Baltic archipelago of Sweden.
" Vi paddlade nära Julafton och rundade Godahoppsudden... (Julafton är en fyr nära Trosa)"

Translation: We kayaked near Christmas and around the Cape of Good Hope... (Christmas is a light house near Trosa and Askö).

Topography

Topography, originally uploaded by and copyrighted by  Calsidyrose.

Isn't this amazing? An old map of a Colorado River canyon, originally from 1895 and published in the J W Powell monograph. Click on the photo to read more about this map. When I first saw it I thought it was a cross section of a strange wooden stem of a liana, they can look similar in close-up.

Old times - pressed, printed, papered, and nearly pulverized

An old map of southern Manhattan (New York City) from late 1700s was recently found, but it was tattered and yellowed and fragmented and on its way to destruction.  But with some restoration and preservation tricks it is now nearly like new - check out before and after here, and use the zoom to see details. Incredible how you can change paper for the better...

Back then New York itself was just a village at the very southern tip of Manhattan, down near Battery Park and Wall Street. A great book has been written about how the nature looked like on Manhattan when the Europeans arrived - Mannahatta by Eric Sanderson.  There were meadows, springs, small ponds, hills, and saltmarshes. Bears roamed on Manhattan and there were several indian villages.  Today it is a concrete jungle.  Fascinating...

Danger on the rail

Back in the late 1880s, railroading was a dangerous business. This map from the Spatial History Lab at Stanford University shows the number of accidents in Colorado during just 12 months in 1883-1884, with at least 100 accidents. It seems like most accidents happened at the Division Points (Denver, Pueblo, La Junta, and Salida), where there were large stations, with extensive railyards and a lot of switching trains back and forth.  Maybe those accidents weren't as bad as those happening out in the high mountain passes (such as Marshall Pass, up at 11 000 feet (over 3300 m) or so). Check out this amazing map of the Denver & Rio Grande Railroad's route up and through the Marshall Pass. The Marshall Pass is the home of the story about the famous phantom train, and has had many accidents over the years, like this one:

"Salida Record, Sept. 30, 1904: Yesterday evening train number 69 which leaves Salida at noon ran away down the western slope of Marshall Pass and as a result fourteen coal cars and the engine are a pile of wreckage at the bottom of the embankment. That no lives were lost is remarkable considering that this is as bad as any of the previous wrecks that have occurred at this exact spot, the last one having occurred about a year and a half ago when Harry Goldwater and Nelson Van Pelt lost their lives." (link)

  

Don't you find it remarkable that this text from over 100 years ago is using exactly the same grammar and words you might find in a newspaper today?  Or maybe, the person typing this in modified the text?  I don't think so though. This would not be true for Sweden, where the language was much more old-fashioned a hundred years ago, and quite different in both grammar and word choices. I wonder if this had to do with that the people that moved out west generally had less education and/or often immigrants and therefore needed 'simpler' grammar in their newspapers to understand better.  There is a nice absence of snobbishness and pretentiousness in these newspaper paragraphs.  Just the news, please. 

Just because of my thoughts above I had to look up a British newspaper from 1904 (Suffolk Free Press), and the grammar is more elaborate, just like I thought (I know, this is just one of hundreds of articles that day, so my statistical sampling is very poor...):

"On Wednesday afternoon a sad and terrible accident occurred to a little boy near Pentlow Mill. The little lad's name was Samuel Clarry aged 6 years, he was crossing the railway line opposite the flood gates near the Mill. His companions were on the other side of the metals and Clarry in his eagerness to join them did not notice the approaching train and essayed on to the line. In an instant the engine was upon him, the buffer knocking him down. The poor lad's right arm being completely severed from his body and his head frightfully mangled.  There have been many narrow squeaks at this place but this is the first fatality. P.C.Kent said the path over the railway was used a great deal during the summer as it led to the flour mill and to the overflow from the mill where children went to paddle." (link)

Of the places marked on this accident map, we visited Denver, Golden, Georgetown, Salida, Otto (which doesn't exist anymore, not even on Google Maps), Gunnison, Black Canyon, Montrose, Silverton, and Pueblo (now a horrific, run-down urban place).  Railroads, past and present, are really engraved into the Colorado landscape and history, and I don't seem to be able to stop writing about them.  Imagining the old times and tracing the steps of history fascinates me, and even more so in places where you can really see the old.  You can't really imagine steam trains in New York City anymore.

 

I think it is interesting to note that there wasn't one single accident on the southernmost route from Silverton to Pueblo on this map (this is the line going through Durango, Chama, Antonito, and Alamosa).  Either they 'forgot' to report accidents, the mapmaker didn't have any data, there weren't any trains that year (I doubt that), or the southern engineers were masters at running trains.  That accident free route is the Denver & Rio Grande Railroad narrow gauge line that we rode, both from Durango to Silverton (will be posted here later), and from Antonito to Chama (see here). There weren't any accidents on this line in 2010 either, that I know of.

In memoriam: Benoit Mandelbrot

I remember the 1980s and the book CHAOS, and the amazing fractals therein.  The most famous was (is?) the Mandelbrot fractal, discovered by and named after Benoit Mandelbrot, who died yesterday.

From the New York Times article:

Dr. Mandelbrot traced his work on fractals to a question he first encountered as a young researcher: how long is the coast of Britain? The answer, he was surprised to discover, depends on how closely one looks. On a map an island may appear smooth, but zooming in will reveal jagged edges that add up to a longer coast. Zooming in further will reveal even more coastline. “Here is a question, a staple of grade-school geometry that, if you think about it, is impossible,” Dr. Mandelbrot told The New York Times earlier this year in an interview. “The length of the coastline, in a sense, is infinite.”

Where you are...

It is time for our little visitor map to be reset, which happens once a year, but before that happens, here is the visitors during the last 12 months to this blog.  You are really spread around the world!  27 000 visits or so in a year, that is about 75 readers a day.  Thanks for all your visits!

More about the volcano eruption

A huge ash cloud is moving in over Scandinavia and Britain, and as of Thursday night all air traffic has been canceled in large parts of western Europe.  Check it out on this map of flights in the air. See, not one plane over Scandinavia and the British Isles.  The airplane's jet engines can get destroyed if they get volcanic ash, consisting of mostly glass, and etc, in them.  The sunsets are nice too because of the extra pollutants, here are some photos of the setting sun in Europe from today.

We live in interesting times, indeed.

Report from a gringa in Costa Rica

(that is apparently what we are called, white woman = gringa)

LA and I got up at 3.30 AM at home, took a cab to Newark at 4 AM, arrived at the airport at 5.30 AM, left on a plane at 7.30 AM, suffered through a very bumpy ride to San Jose, Costa Rica, arrived right before noon (local time), waited in line for immigration control for 45 min, then got picked up by our driver for a ca 300 km car trip to a biological research station in the southwestern part of the country, but the boss (who was not part of the trip...) of the driver insisted that he should take the new, improved, longer and 'faster' route with us, so off we went, along the coast, driving and driving and driving by our poor driver, darkness fell at 6 PM, up hills with hairpin curves, got towed up one hill by three friendly Costa Rican's in a Toyota 4x4 because the roadwork people had left the roadbed just in soft gravel, which our Toyota Corolla we were in couldn't handle (I would like to have seen that happen in NJ), and then arrived at our destination at 9 PM (not 7 PM as planned) and 450 km later. And if you tell the youth today that, they won't believe you. Except for LA who was in the backseat and lived through it all. Actually, it was just tiresome, not dangerous or horrible at all. Sens moral: don't trust the boss when it comes to directions or travel advice.

So here we are, 17 hours after we have left NJ, in a cabin surrounded by rainforest sounds. We haven't seen anything of the forest yet since it is dark but we saw some other cool things on the way here. Frigate birds, kiskadee (yellow and black bird, catches insects in the air), a sign for DING car mechanics, lots of black vultures, some kind of large cat (maybe twice the size of Ella), pelicans, flowering trees in bright yellow, purple and white, immense palm oil plantations, and smelly factories where they extract the oil, very funny and skinny cows with long hanging ears, egret herons, and I have also learned many words in Spanish. And some I just suddenly remember, like el gato. Costa Ricans are extremely friendly - they all stop when you need directions. So far we have only found 4 ants in our cabin room. It looks like a wonderful research station and the accomodation is great. I wonder what kind of frog or bird or insect is making that funny sound outside? Time for bed, it has been a long day. Photos will have to wait until I have some.

Another year starts - blog visit statistics

Our global readership: 30,258 visits to this blog in the last year. Now the Clustermap on the right side will be reset to map visits again. The total number of visitors since Aug 2007 is 60,106. Here is where you were from during the last year:

Friends, family, and all others, many thanks for your visits.

Where am I? Where do I want to go?

I have a new on-line toy. If you haven't seen Biogeomancer, try it! You can search for any place name in the world and get the it mapped on a Google map, and get the latitude and longitude coordinates too. Amazing, I just found out there is only one 'ärla' place in the whole world. A place I know very well. And 'Vattungarna', which means 'the small water islands' or something like that, occurs in three places, all in the Baltic archipelago, twice in Sweden and once in Finland. It is one of the most beautiful places I have ever been.

You can zoom around, move the map, check it mapped on satellite or as a topographic map and find new names of places that you have never heard of before such as (in Swedish): Inre Håkansskär, Tjockö, Velen, and Flaten. For you English-speaking, how about these (from United Kingdom): West Ella, Horkstow, Scunthorpe, and Swinhope. Happy geography hunting!