About 3 years ago I gave my sister the book “The Society of Mind” by Marvin Minsky. The book was annotated inside with my notes and had a sheet with a new game I came up with that I called “On the Margins”. The goal of the game was simple - each one of us reads the book and while reading annotates, inserts comments, drawings. The goal of the game was to collaboratively read the book and exchange our thoughts on the margins. The output of the game is the living memory of our thought process and growth as humans. Once you read/reread the book, it is considered a game “round”. The game can have infinite numbers (as long as there is a space on the margins) of rounds. This week the book has arrived from Canada. We are on the game round 5 of “On the Margins”, Marvin Minsky edition. In my opinion, “On the Margins” is a perfect game for a pandemic. Here are the rules I wrote in 2017:
** If you want to play with me “On the Margins” with an exciting book, I am totally down.
Sword of Damocles’s head mounted display created by Ivan Sutherland and Bob Sprouli.
“The basic tool for the manipulation of reality is the manipulation of words” Philip K. Dick
It is hard to represent our spherical world on a flat piece of paper. Cartographers use something called a “projection” to morph the globe into 2D map. The most popular of these is the Mercator projection. Every map projection introduces distortion, and each has its own set of problems. One of the most common criticisms of the Mercator map is that it exaggerates the size of countries nearer the poles (US, Russia, Europe), while downplaying the size of those near the equator (the African Continent). On the Mercator projection, Greenland appears to be roughly the same size as Africa. In reality, Greenland is 0.8 million sq. miles and Africa is 11.6 million sq. miles, nearly 14 and a half times larger.
Here is a handy app “The True Size” that showcases the true geographic sizes. It was inspired by an episode of The West Wing (this is really good!).
Futher Reading:
True Size of Africa: http://kai.sub.blue/images/True-Size-of-Africa-kk-v3.pdf
[All Maps Lie - 2020 | Course Website: https://all-maps-lie-2020.netlify.app/#/)