Animated Map Shows How It Took 200,000 Years for Human Population to Reach 1 Billion, and Only Another 200 Years to Get to 7 Billion

Last night, during a talk on his new book Raising the Floor, longtime labor leader and current senior fellow at Columbia University Andy Stern told the story of a king and a chessmaster engaged in pitched battle. “If you win,” said the overconfident king, “you may have anything you desire.” Lo, the chessmaster wins the game, but being a humble man asks the king only to provide him with some rice. The king smugly agrees to his eccentric conditions: he must place a grain of rice on the first square of the chessboard, then double the amount of each successive square. Once he reaches the middle, the king stops and has the chessmaster executed. The request would have cost him his entire kingdom and more.

Stern used the story to illustrate the exponential growth of technology, which now advances at a rate we can neither confidently predict nor control. Something very similar has happened to the human population in the past two-hundred years, as you can see illustrated in the video above from the American Museum of Natural History.


Evolving some 200,000 years ago in Sub-Saharan Africa, and migrating across the globe some 100,000 years ago, modern humans remained relatively few in number for several thousand years. That is, until the technological breakthrough of agriculture. “By AD 1,” the video text tells us, “world population reached approximately 170 million people.”

After a very rapid expansion, the numbers rose and fell slowly in the ensuing centuries as wars, disease, and famines decimated populations. World population reached only 180 million by the year 200 AD, then dwindled through the Middle Ages, only picking up again slowly around 700. Throughout this historiographic model of population growth, the video infographic provides helpful symbols and legends that chart historic centers like the Roman Empire and Han Dynasty, and show major world events like the Bubonic plague.

Then we reach the world-shaking disruptions that were the birth of Capitalism, the Atlantic slave trade, and the Scientific and Industrial Revolutions, when “modern technology and medicine bring faster growth.”

That’s quite the understatement. The growth, like the grains of rice on the chessboard, proceeded exponentially, reaching 1 billion people around 1800, then exploding to over 7 billion today. As the yellow dots—each representing a node of 1 million people—take over the map, the video quickly becomes an alarming call to action. While the numbers are leveling off, and fertility has dropped, “if current trends continue,” we’re told, “global population will peak at 11 billion around 2100.” Peak numbers could be lower, or substantially higher, depending on the predictive value of the models and any number of unknowable variables.

original article here

Why Making Accurate World Maps Is Mathematically Impossible

Jorge Luis Borges once wrote of an empire wherein “the Art of Cartography attained such Perfection that the map of a single Province occupied the entirety of a City, and the map of the Empire, the entirety of a Province.” Still unsatisfied, “the Cartographers Guilds struck a Map of the Empire whose size was that of the Empire, and which coincided point for point with it.” But posterity, when they lost their ancestors’ obsession for cartography, judged “that vast Map was Useless, and not without some Pitilessness was it, that they delivered it up to the Inclemencies of Sun and Winters.” With that enormous map, in all its singular accuracy, cast out, smaller, imperfect ones presumably won the day again.

With that well-known story “On Exactitude in Science,” Borges illustrated the idea that all maps are wrong by imagining the preposterousness of a truly correct one. The Vox video “Why All World Maps Are Wrong” covers some of the same territory, as it were, first illustrating that idea by slitting open an inflatable globe and trying, futilely, to get the resulting plastic mess to lie flat.

“That right there is the eternal dilemma of mapmakers,” says the host in voiceover as the struggle continues onscreen. “The surface of a sphere cannot be represented as a plane without some form of distortion.” As a result, all of humanity’s paper maps of the world–which in the task of turning the surface of a sphere into a flat plane need to use a technique called “projection”–distort geographical reality by definition.

The Mercator projection has, since its invention by sixteenth-century Flemish cartographer Gerardus Mercator, produced the most widely-seen world maps. (If you grew up in America, you almost certainly spent a lot of time staring at Mercator maps in the classroom.) But we hardly live under the limitations of his day, nor those of the 1940s when Borges imagined his land-sized map. In our 21st century, the satellite-based Global Positioning System has “wiped out the need for paper maps as a means of navigating both the sea and the sky,” but even so, “most web mapping tools, like Google Maps, use the Mercator” due to its “ability to preserve shape and angles,” which “makes close-up views of cities more accurate.”

On the scale of a City, in more Borgesian words — and probably on the scale of a Province and even the Empire — Mercator projection still works just fine. “But the fact remains that there’s no right projection. Cartographers and mathematicians have created a huge library of available projections, each with a new perspective on the planet, and each useful for a different task.” You can compare and contrast a few of them for yourself here, or take a closer look of some of the Mercator projection’s size distortions (making Greenland, for example, look as big as the whole of Africa) here. These challenges and others have kept the Disciplines of Geography, unlike in Borges’ world, busy even today.

Original article here.

Hommlet in Blue

I've posted info and maps on Hommlet before (here). But since I'm running this online now, I've been revisiting some of the old material and updating it somewhat. One thing I've done is, like the Keep on the Borderlands maps, convert the Village of Hommlet map into the old school blue format. Just for consistency sake. Heck, there's dozens of iterations of the map out there, but I didn't find any blue ones, so I went ahead and did it up myself.

Hommlet

Keep on the Borderlands - completed

The online Roll20 group has finished the Keep on the Borderlands and is moving on to the Temple of Elemental Evil, so I will be going back in to the old B2 Keep on the Borderlands map posts and updating them with the DM maps.  The index page can be found here. I've also included the battlemap I made from the Cave of the Unknown map by Druvas.

Cave of the Unknown

Not to take away from Druvas' original[since I'm a fan of the old style blue maps], it just didn't mesh well with the other battlemaps I was using so I put this one together. 

Ron Glass RIP

Browncoats everywhere are lowering their flags to half-staff today as word has come out that Emmy-nominated actor Ron Glass has passed away at the age of 71. One of Glass’ agents is confirming his passing and friends have already been reporting that he is thought to have passed away peacefully at his Los Angeles home yesterday.

From wikipedia;
Ronald E. "Ron" Glass (July 10, 1945 – November 25, 2016) was an American actor. He was known for his roles as the literary Det. Ron Harris in the television sitcom Barney Miller (1975–82), and as the spiritual Shepherd Derrial Bookin the short-lived 2002 science fiction series Firefly and its sequel film Serenity.

Happy Thanksgiving 2016

Now more than ever, it's helpful to count blessings and look at the good things in the world.  Doing so provides energy and inspiration for the days ahead.

The following is from the folks over at Popular Science.

"Every Thanksgiving, Americans gather to celebrate family, give thanks, and stuff our faces until we all feel sick. Tragically, filling up too fast on a good holiday meal means you won’t manage to grab seconds or thirds of all the best dishes on the table. You need to maximize your food intake—here’s how.

Note: This advice is not conducive to a healthy everyday diet. But then again, neither is Thanksgiving.

1. Prepare

Getting ready for the big meal is a matter of balance. To consume as much as possible, you’ll need to start on an empty stomach. But if you’re starving, you’ll eat too quickly instead of pacing yourself.
“Fasting is typically not a good idea,” says registered dietician Leslie Bonci. Instead, she recommends that you follow your regular meal schedule, but stop eating four to six hours before the main event.
Exercising earlier in the day is also a good idea. Physical exertion can stimulate the appetite. And a brisk walk or run helps move food through your digestive system and empty out your stomach in preparation.
Finally, it’s easier to eat a lot if you’re relaxed. So immediately before the meal, take some deep breaths, think calm thoughts, and avoid confronting your ornery uncle (you can argue with him after you’ve defeated your turkey).

2. Choose wisely

Once you’ve girded your loins for the overeating challenge, there’s nothing to do but begin. The choices you make now will determine whether you fill your stomach to maximum capacity, or give up long before dessert. That’s because certain types of food make you feel more full than others.
An over-full feeling isn’t just caused by a stretched-to-capacity stomach. Your body also triggers feelings of fullness by releasing hormones and enzymes as you eat. For example, the more you chew, the fuller you will feel. (That said, do not chew less in an attempt to reduce fullness. It will increase your odds of choking, and death by asphyxiation is not a fun way to end a Thanksgiving meal.)
Because of this, certain substances, such as the fats and proteins in turkey, will make you feel full sooner than others. “Once you start eating protein, the secretion of enzymes and hormones starts that satiety cascade,” Bondi says, “and having fat as part of the meal triggers satiety. If you’re trying not to over-consume, front-load with protein.”
And if you are trying to over-consume?
“Potatoes, stuffing, rolls require minimal effort,” Bonci says. “You can do maximal damage with those things because they layer nicely—you can pack in more without feeling too full.”
So you start with the carbs, and only then load the turkey onto your plate. While you’re at it, you should also delay your consumption of fiber-rich foods like veggies and whole grains. They fill you up faster because that fiber soaks up water and takes up more room.
Liquids also occupy precious stomach real estate, so don’t consume a large glass of juice or bowl of soup right away. That said, fluids will help food move through your stomach as you eat, so sip some water or other liquids throughout the meal.

3. Take a break

The human stomach is stretchy. If you cram food and drink into it, it will expand to a maximum volume of two to four liters—the equivalent of one or two 2-liter bottles of soda. Once you’ve filled your gut to capacity, the meal is over—right?
Not so. As fast as you put food into it, your stomach processes that content and starts moving it into the intestines. So when you feel like you can’t eat another bite, press pause. If you’ve been loading up on simple carbohydrates, you’re in luck: The stomach can empty itself of low-fiber carbs in a mere 30 to 90 minutes.
But veggies and whole grains will throw a wrench into the process. “Something with fiber takes longer to leave the stomach because the fiber holds fluids,” Bonci says. Thirsty fiber not only makes you feel fuller faster, but also moves more slowly through your system, making that feeling of fullness last longer.
And protein like turkey sticks to your ribs for much longer: It will take closer to four hours to pass through your stomach.
Luckily, you don’t have to wait for your stomach to empty out entirely before you go back to the buffet. Even a little reduction in food volume can help. Give yourself half an hour to recover, and you might find that you’re ready to pack in more chow.

4. Recovery

At this point, you probably feel bloated and sick. All you want is to curl up on the sofa, holding your stomach and groaning. Ignore that instinct and get to your feet.
If you take yourself from a sitting to a standing position, you’re going to move food more quickly.
“Part of the digestion of food is movement,” Bonci says. “If you take yourself from a sitting to a standing position, you’re going to move food more quickly and feel less uncomfortable sooner than if you just sit down.”
You don’t have to start running laps around the living room, but even a slow walk can make you feel better. The nerves around your stomach are the ones that complain to the brain about how full you are. Once your body pushes that food from your stomach into your intestines, the uncomfortably full feeling should ease up.
Adding liquid will also speed up this process. “Drinking will help to move things down,” Bonci says, “instead of everything sitting there going nowhere like a traffic jam.”

5. Dessert

Sweet foods don’t make you feel full as quickly as savory ones do. So after the meal, dig in to some pumpkin pie—after all your hard eating, you’ve earned it."

Veterans Day

Honoring and remembering all the brave veterans who fought..to give us a safe and peaceful place to live in.