Begone, Leave Me To My Amogus

I have not managed to find anyone who thinks that in the wild, but it is so damn funny.

>look inside

"A Scottish field once home to mono-crop barley has become a pollinator’s paradise after intervention from a local trust saw bumblebee numbers increase 100-fold.

Entitled Rewilding Denmarkfield, and run by the Bumblebee Conservation Trust, the project has also seen a sharp increase in the number of species passing through the rolling meadows after they were reclaimed by dozens of wildflower species.

The area north of Perth is about 90 acres in size, and surveys of bumblebees before the project began rarely recorded more than 50. But by 2023, just two years of letting “nature take the lead” that number has topped 4,000, with the number of different bee species doubling.

“This superb variety of plants attracts thousands of pollinators. Many of these plants, such as spear thistle and smooth hawk’s beard, are sometimes branded as ‘weeds’. But they are all native species that are benefiting native wildlife in different ways,” Ecologist Ellie Corsie, who has been managing the project since it began in 2021, said.

“Due to intensive arable farming, with decades of plowing, herbicide, and pesticide use, biodiversity was incredibly low when we started. Wildlife had largely been sanitized from the fields. Rewilding the site has had a remarkable benefit.”

Similar increases have been recorded in the populations of butterflies, with a tripling in the number of these insects seen on average during a ramble through the field.

The numbers of both insects are now so high that Rewilding Denmarkfield offers bee and butterfly safaris to visitors.

Local residents told the Scotsman that on spring and summer days, the field is awash with color, and hums with the sounds of bees and birds. Even as multiple housing developments expand around the Denmarkfield area, the field is a haven for wildlife."

Bioformers - Onua

Altmode: Mining Excavator

This is a stylized map. It’s derived from a very popular kind of map called a “T and O map”, which first are found in Iberia around ~600 CE and then became very popular in Europe. Here’s an early one (12th century edition of a 7th century book describing them):

A larger, later, and more detailed one (1300):

And a modern map with the outlines of the T-and-O superimposed:

So what is a T and O map? They were a way to conceptualize the world. Pre-1492, conventional wisdom was that there were three continents: Europe, Asia, and Africa. Asia was the largest and went at the top, with Europe to the bottom left and Africa to the bottom right. The shaft of the T was the Mediterranean, the left side of the crossbar was the Don River, and the right was the Nile River. And at the center? Jerusalem.

Here’s the thing: For most of human history, most people haven’t needed maps to get around. They were either travelling between locations they or someone in their party knew, or they were moving slowly enough (i.e. on foot or by cart) to be able to stop and ask directions. So maps weren’t navigation–they were either for education (Ptolemy’s 2nd cent CE description of the world, which was turned into many, many maps in the Middle Ages) or, far more common, for religious symbolism. Between ~500 and ~1700, the purpose of most maps was to show Christians their place in the world. T and O maps put Jerusalem at the center because it was where Jesus was crucified, and they put Asia at the top because that was where it was believed the Garden of Eden was located.

8th century T and O map from Italy. Adam and Eve are visible in the center top:

The really interesting thing about T and O maps, imo, is that they’re deliberately not accurate. People were certainly capable of making recognizable maps of the world, but they were choosing to go with this more stylized version.

1482 world map based on Ptolemy’s writings:

T and O maps, then, are deliberate. They include only what the map maker thought was important, and that is almost always a religious function.

Our modern maps, meanwhile, evolved out of a combination between the Ptolemaic maps and portolan charts. Portolan charts are navigational maps. They frequently only featured the coastline and ports, but overlaying the map is a set of rhumb lines, or paths with constant bearing with respect to true north.

One of the earliest surviving portolan charts, from 1325 Italy:

Portolan charts, by modern standards, are vastly more accurate than T and O maps, and are visibly a better representation of the Earth than a Ptolemaic map. But from the concerns of a medieval cartographer, they’re very bland and boring. There’s no representation here of important cities, religious locations, or classical allusions. It’s just a map of coastlines.

Back to the Clover Leaf map. In 1492, Columbus changed (among other things) map making. The assumption until 1498 (when it became apparent that this was not Asia and it was not a minor collection of outlying islands) was that the world had three continents–at least three accessible to human explorers. After 1500, mapmakers engaged in a race–sometimes a war–to represent the new discoveries first and most accurately. The result was a series of increasingly recognizable world maps.

There are a ton, and thanks to that and (mostly) accurate records about who went where when, you can start to date post-1492 maps based on what areas of the world they do or do not show. But the most relevant one for this post is this one:

This is a 1582 world map, which depicts a reasonably accurate Europe, Africa (including Madagascar, discovered by Europeans in 1500), and most of Asia. Japan is still difficult, as is southeast Asia; Australia is missing entirely. Over in the Americas, while most of South America is decent, North America has some struggles in the northern and western regions. Baja California is an island and everywhere north of that is missing entirely. In the south, there’s hints that the cartographer was thinking about Terra Australis Incognita–a long theorized ‘counterweight’ to the Northern Hemisphere continents. In the 1500s, various voyages attributed Tierra del Fuego, Indonesia, and Australia to the continent. Its relationship to Antarctica seems to be completely coincidental.

This is a pretty typical late 1500s map.

It’s drawn by the same cartographer as the Clover Leaf map.

Heinrich Bünting wrote a book, called Itinerarium Sacrae Scripturae (Itinerary of Sacred Scripture), in which both maps are featured, along with many, many others. The book uses current knowledge along with the Bible to talk extensively about the Holy Land–which explains why Bünting put such an allegorical map in his book to begin with.