Cartes et espaces
A long-term timeline of technology by Max Roser
A couple of days ago, I stumbled on LinkedIn on this image showing a long-term timeline of technological development by Max Roser, founder of Our World in Data.
The graphic is impressively synthetic, and deals beautifully with exponential time scales, both prior and after the modern epoch.
But I am not convinced that […] Continue Reading…
I rarely travel by plane but, when I do, I can’t help checking that little screen of bad LEDs at least five times an hour, to see the map of locations miles below. Many of them I’ve never heard of, and most of them I’ll never see. Their names appear on the screen like as many alchemic ingredients: Athens, […] Continue Reading…
“Zeroworld”, a recent episode of the WNYC podcast Radiolab, examined the possibility of division by zero. The discussion turned mostly metaphysical and got many listeners so angry that they went on to rant on Reddit. I understood this episode more as a fun thought experiment than as a formal proposal. But it also reminded me of some of […] Continue Reading…
LaTeX started as an ASCII thing for English speaking nerds. Only later did people start to use it all over the word, in many languages from Cezch to Hindi. We now have XeTeX and LuaLaTeX. But like the serpent Sesha in the Hindu mythology, some of that early ASCII universe remains, notably in the BibTex part of things.
BibTeX […] Continue Reading…
This graphic appeared in social media lot in the last days
I wondered how it would render on polar coordinates. So I made an R script to do so. The script is reusable for other data sources as I show below. So reuse, enjoy, and make useful.
The plotting function
seasonplot <- function(tsdata,maintitle,source,legxleft,legxrigth,legytop,legybottom) {
# drawing paremeters
[…] Continue Reading…
This blog entry is work in progress… Please be patient, more content is comming soon. Meanwhile, you can read other posts.
Concepts are encoded in most artworks, at least in all that make it to the museum and visiotors bother to see and acedmics to write about. I focus here on major examples.
Psyche and knowledge
Sigmund Freud
The ego (Ich), the […] Continue Reading…
Railway track gauge in Eurasia and North Africa. Source: openrailway.org
A look at the global map of rail track gauges immediately reminds you of the current invasion of Ukraine. There is a material substrate of the putinist nostalgia of the Muscovite Empire. Far more than a purported linguistic or cultural proximity of the ex-Soviet states, this substrate of steel […] Continue Reading…
I’ve had the pleasure to write a foreword of the French translation of Ananyo Bhattacharya’s biography of John von Neumann, translated by Anatole Muchnik and now published by Quanto.
You can read the French introduction and have a peek at the book’s first chapter (PDF).
In agreement with Ananyo, here is the English translation.
As you read the biography of […] Continue Reading…
English translation transcript of my conference given in French at the CERN Globe on September 22nd, 2022, and based on the eponymous book from 2019.
You can see the conference in French on the CERN Globe webpage.
Tonight, I propose to talk about two ideas, two concepts. The first one you already know: the concept of utopia. The other […] Continue Reading…
Figure 1 Overlapping territories of First Nations in the perception of their members. Screenshot from the geomatics site https://native-land.ca/ .
Unstable borders are a cartographer’s nightmare. The simple task of reporting on demographic changes quickly becomes a headache in a country whose municipalities merge, divide, and even change their spatial contours according to the projects of their inhabitants and councillors, […] Continue Reading…
