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BIG FLUFFY DOG posted:"Please sir these are Icelanders flat land scares and confuses them. We have to put them in the swamp to make the transition as easy as possible for them." To be fair flat land scares and confuses me too. First time I left the East Coast and got out at a truck stop in Kansas, it was like the sky had become a living entity that wished me ill.
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Sep 1, 2020 16:08
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showbiz_liz posted:To be fair flat land scares and confuses me too. First time I left the East Coast and got out at a truck stop in Kansas, it was like the sky had become a living entity that wished me ill. Did you puke your guts out like the Martians in Expanse when they first landed on earth and had to use the horizon to orient themselves instead of a wall pattern in an enclosed base?
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Sep 1, 2020 17:09
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MeinPanzer posted:If you were anywhere in the Roman Empire, the 2nd c. AD is the canonical blessed century. Good emperors, economic prosperity, all round good times. Unless you were a slave. This feels like such an absurd thing to say what with the times being as they are, but in most places on Earth, the late 20th and early 21st centuries are among the very best for the vast majority of people that ever lived. Unsurprisingly this is also a huge talking point for Neoliberal apologists of the more senselessly optimistic variety.
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Sep 1, 2020 17:11
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Aside from the possibility of getting caught in a war, there's just the whole general quality of life thing where it sure is great to have toilets, the ability to regularly wash, a food surplus, access to more entertainment than has ever existed before, the potential to have some say in government, and even access to better healthcare than ever before even if it could draw you into horrible debt. I think there's some philosophical arguments you could make about how you could enjoy the more physical labor jobs where your labor bears direct fruit, and if you're working as a peasant then you might even have a better work schedule depending on your modern day job, but that's very relative. Also, even when you're calculating by the amount of war, I think even at its most peaceful, Rome was constantly raiding its neighbors and getting probed on the frontier by raids that it didn't always have a timely response ready for. Heck, there were even a fair amount of revolts and rebellions, and the 2nd century saw the total demise of Judea as the result of one big revolt.
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Sep 1, 2020 18:14
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Pope Hilarius II posted:Unless you were a slave. Yep. One of the joys of knowing history is how much the past loving sucked for most people. You don't want to live any time pre-antibiotics as a nice baseline.
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Sep 1, 2020 18:27
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Cable Guy posted:jlyphs.... 
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Sep 1, 2020 18:29
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SlothfulCobra posted:Aside from the possibility of getting caught in a war, there's just the whole general quality of life thing where it sure is great to have toilets, the ability to regularly wash, a food surplus, access to more entertainment than has ever existed before, the potential to have some say in government, and even access to better healthcare than ever before even if it could draw you into horrible debt. I think there's some philosophical arguments you could make about how you could enjoy the more physical labor jobs where your labor bears direct fruit, and if you're working as a peasant then you might even have a better work schedule depending on your modern day job, but that's very relative. Rome was in a state of constant war for almost its entire history. Like the famous story of how Numa built a temple and said that its gates should remained closed when Rome is at peace and open when it was at war. It was closed his entire reign, opened for the first time after his death and never closed again.
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Sep 1, 2020 18:36
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Not quite, the doors were closed a number of times. It is true the Romans were at war quite often, though if you lived in the empire most of those wars didn't affect your life at all. Many of the major Roman cities were unwalled for centuries because there was no credible threat to them. When they started building walls again during the later 200s, that was a sign of bad times.
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Sep 1, 2020 18:41
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Phlegmish posted:Yeah if you're going to criticize Scandinavians it should be for their obsession with building everything out of wood. I get that you have a lot of forests, but you have to realize things are going to burn down sooner or later That's an odd thing to fault the Danes for, though, since most old Danish houses are either brick or timber framed houses.  I assume the janky legend is supposed to mean: Lodge cabin = log cabins Western cottages = timber framed houses Eastern cottages = different kind of timber framed houses? Mineral structures = brick or stone buildings But in general you have log cabins where there's softwood forests, timber framed houses where the trees are hardwood and stone structures where there are more rocks or clay around than tall, straight trees.
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Sep 1, 2020 19:29
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If even 1% of current Belgian housing stock is timber framed, I'll eat my figurative hat. Is that an archaeological map or something.
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Sep 1, 2020 19:57
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What does adobe count as here? Mineral? It was popular as a building material in in Serbia until after WW1.
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Sep 1, 2020 20:03
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Flipperwaldt posted:If even 1% of current Belgian housing stock is timber framed, I'll eat my figurative hat. Is that an archaeological map or something. Obviously it's about vernacular architecture, a map of current building techniques would look something like this: 
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Sep 1, 2020 20:20
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This is completely irrelevant, but I'm confused by the weird non-existent lake they added to Finland.
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Sep 1, 2020 20:21
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Jasper Tin Neck posted:Obviously it's about vernacular architecture, a map of current building techniques would look something like this: You forgot bricks. Bricks aren't concrete. Also you should add the USA and colour it "cardboard".
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Sep 1, 2020 20:22
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Carbon dioxide posted:You forgot bricks. Bricks aren't concrete. You don't use bricks in brutalist tenements though
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Sep 1, 2020 20:34
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Carbon dioxide posted:You forgot bricks. Bricks aren't concrete. Building all-brick walls is slow and because time is money, expensive.
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Sep 1, 2020 20:40
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Kennel posted:This is completely irrelevant, but I'm confused by the weird non-existent lake they added to Finland.
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Sep 1, 2020 21:10
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Jasper Tin Neck posted:Building all-brick walls is slow and because time is money, expensive.
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Sep 1, 2020 21:36
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Kennel posted:This is completely irrelevant, but I'm confused by the weird non-existent lake they added to Finland. It's weird that they have some lakes showing but others are completely omitted as well, if they have the Ukrainian lakes showing they should also include lakes that are larger than them like Peipus (Estonia), Saimaa (Finland) and Vänern (Sweden). Like it is now it's just weird, what's the criteria?
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Sep 1, 2020 21:42
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Jasper Tin Neck posted:Obviously it's about vernacular architecture, a map of current building techniques would look something like this: I would love to see a non-jokey one for the whole world.
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Sep 1, 2020 21:52
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Jasper Tin Neck posted:I'm under the impression that pretty much every recently built building with a brick exterior you'll see is brick cladding held up by concrete, a timber frame or cinderblocks. All-brick exterior walls are assholes when trying to achieve anything even close to a modern standard of insulation in a temperate or boreal climate. Concrete is a godsend, and anyone talking poo poo about Soviet-looking apartment blocks knows in their hearts they should be saying "let them eat cake."
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Sep 1, 2020 23:55
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showbiz_liz posted:To be fair flat land scares and confuses me too. First time I left the East Coast and got out at a truck stop in Kansas, it was like the sky had become a living entity that wished me ill. There was a post in some long lost thread that was talking about Japanese tourists in the plains states generally getting weirded out by the vast expanses and it being common enough to be something of "a thing" and I could believe it*. South florida in particular is flat as hell but at least there's trees and even in the marshes and prairies there's hammocks to serve as landmarks for dead reckoning. The midwest plains are just desolate *If anyone has any idea if it actually is a thing, please let me know
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Sep 2, 2020 00:15
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Milo and POTUS posted:There was a post in some long lost thread that was talking about Japanese tourists in the plains states generally getting weirded out by the vast expanses and it being common enough to be something of "a thing" and I could believe it*. South florida in particular is flat as hell but at least there's trees and even in the marshes and prairies there's hammocks to serve as landmarks for dead reckoning. The midwest plains are just desolate Theres a fairly good travelogue/history book called Great Plains by New Yorker writer Ian Frazier he wrote in the 80s that has a fairly significant section of the book devoted to this.
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Sep 2, 2020 00:32
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Edgar Allen Ho posted:I really wanna see this dance 
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Sep 2, 2020 00:44
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Apparently enough japanese tourists have freakouts in Paris that the government has a hotline for them.
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Sep 2, 2020 00:45
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I wrote this up for a history email chain I’m doing with some friends, and it struck me it might be of interest here. It’s based off a phrase I read in The Anarchy, by William Dalrymple, about the East India Company. Early in the time of the East India Company (1660s), Charles II married into the Portugese royal family and obtained as dowry the "island of Bumbye." This, of course, is Bombay, modern-day Mumbai. But the thought struck me when I read it: "Bombaby, modern-day Mumbai, isn't an island...is it?" A short google map search confirms that it is, not, in fact, an island:  So what happened here? Basic research tells me that Bombay started off as a chain of seven smaller islands, and was joined together by the English through a series of massive land reclamation projects. It began in 1782 under British Governor William Hornby, with the aptly named Hornby Vellard (apparently a bad spelling of the Portugese word vallado, or embankment). According to some sources, Hornby did this against the will of the EIC. The Hornby Vellard connected the islands of Bombay and Worli, and is wonderfully illustrated in the below painting:  'Bombay Views', James Wales, ~1790s. For context: The islands were leased to the EIC by Charles shortly after he was gifted them. Not only did he not really want them, he didn't know where they were (the map was lost in transit), and when the British showed up, no one had told the Portguese currently residing there about the change of ownership. After some messy diplomacy, the British took control and soon leased them to the EIC. It seemed weird to me that there wasn't much talk about what a massive project this must have been. It's also hard to find a map from the 17th century of the islands that depict them separately, most searches turn up this generic Wiki image:  How did we get from those seven islands to the map above? Well, that Mumbai map encompasses much more territory now than those islands. So let's focus on this area:  Of note: Worli, in the upper left, and Colaba, in the bottom left. The original seven islands only make up a small isthmus of modern Mumbai, but it still seems odd to me that such a large project would go relatively unremarked upon. A small ring of islands may provide a wealth of shipping opportunities, but it would be hard to base what will become the 7th-largest city in the world off that, and the amount of work needed to connect all of those seems daunting. I found some maps from the 17th and 18th centuries to try to understand further:  Demonstração da Fortaleza de Mombaim (Map of the Fortress of Mumbai), 1635 This is a Portugese map of forts along "Mombaim", and at best, there are four islands depicted here, though this area is a scale comparable to modern-day Mumbai. The upper-left island is what we're looking for, rotated for clarity we see this:  (it's not entirely to scale, but you get the gist) Why, if Bombay was a series of islands, is it depicted here as all one mass? Keep in mind the reclamation didn't start until 1782. Later maps continue this trend:  "Fryer's Map of Bombay," 1672.  “Plan de Bombay et ses environs.” Jacques Nicolas Bellin, 1764. Weirdly, here is a (quite beautiful) map from 1843 showing the separate islands. (The reclamation was finished in 1838!)  Island of Bombay and Colaba, Robert Murphy, 1843 The closest I've seen to a map depicting the island nature of Bombay before reclamation is below:  Bombay Harbor circa 1678, shortly after the British took hold. Zoom in:  Right on the map, Mazagon, Mahim, Bombaim, Colaba, all recognizable areas from the seven-island map. But...as four islands? So is it a bunch of loving islands or not?? Well, it turns out everyone was right! They were also wrong, sometimes on purpose! The entirety of the Bombay islands are subject to tidal and monsoon flooding. Depending on the time of year, or even time of day, you could walk from one island to another on dry(ish) land. The main entryway for water was through the gap between Worli and Bombay. Some areas were better connected than others, but all accounts indicate that the area between islands (green in the above map), was actual land. So why the hell do we have all this talk of island chains and reclamation? Compare the 1635 Portguese map of four islands to the British map from 1678. The Portugese saw Bombay as a single island on their map of fortifications for the harbor. Looking at the land, much of what would be "under water" is depicted as beachy areas full of palm. At the time, they seemed to only consider it to be one piece of land, and as a larger part of their territory, fairly unimpressive. It was apparently good for harvesting coconuts for fiber and food, as well as palm leaves, but what they cared about more were the waterways surrounding it. The natural swampy areas were also used for salt production on a regular basis. But then in the mid-1600's, a King you don't have a ton of contact with marries off your land, and a bunch of Brits show up at your door. What changes? Apparently the map you use! Surviving Portugese maps are scarce, but this alternate version of Bombay makes it clear that, at times, it was portrayed as four separate areas:  "Ilha de Bombaim e zonas limítrofes," date unknown. We can see this matches up closely with the British Map from 1678. There's a good reason for that: The 1678 map was copied from existing Portugese ones! When the British show up demanding the "island of Bumbye," if you are Portugese, you're going to favor the map that shows Britain only getting one out of four possible islands. The British? They much preferred the earlier, one-big-island idea. Even the copied British 1678 map indicates that all four are connected by swampy, barely-covered land. It was in the British's best interest to insist upon the largest possible definition of "Bumbye." Disputes over this definition occupied much of the 1660s, with Britain going hard on their stance: "They would have Mahim and Bombaim to be two several islands, but cannot well make it out, I never took boat to pass our men when I took the possession of it, and at all times you may go from one place to the other dry shod; I cannot imagine how they can make them two islands." - Humphrey Cooke, First English Governor of Bombay (see linked article below) With plenty of remaining territory surrounding (and surmounting issues arising in said territories), and little care for the dispute back home, the Portugese did eventually relent and Britain took possession of all the islands, including Mahim, the one most in dispute. To pat themselves on the back, maps depicting Bombay during the time of the EIC tend to show it as one land mass, as in the Fryer and Bellin maps above. But the mystery isn't over yet! We still have the map of seven islands, and if Bombay was already one land mass, what sort of land reclamation was really going on? Well, like I said earlier, everyone was both right and wrong, it was all a battle of land semantics. While the British definitely considered it one piece of land, it wasn't actually very functional that way. The Portugese, like the indigenous people before them, accepted Bombay for what it was and tried to make the best of it. The British decided to really double-down on things and turn Bombay into one single island, above sea-level at all times. But it seems weird that they would wait almost 100 years before building that beautiful vellard, and doubly weird that the EIC...would tell Hornby not to build it? Contrary to what Hornby and later writers would want you to think, the EIC attempted several different major reclamations before the 1780s, mostly focused on that gap between Worli and Bombay now occupied by the Vallard. By the early 18th century, most of the waterways were drained and Bombay had become a single island, but it never became particularly useful land. Matters elsewhere in the EIC's territory drew attention away from these projects, and the newly formed fields never produced enough on their own to offset the costs of creating them. It wasn't until the mid 1700s that density became an issue, and the urban growth of Bombay gave the reclaimed land a new purpose. Since the first one hundred years were kind of a wash financially (to be clear, the shipping from Bombay was still stellar, just all the work put in to reclaim the land was bust), it made more sense to frame the reclamation as a project of urban growth. After said growth, in the mid-19th century, a retrospective eye was cast back by a newspaper editor named Robert Murphy, who traced the history of the city. His research was used to create a new map of old Bombay, depicting all seven islands in the harbor (see the Murphy map above). Without a need to argue over who gets what island, it made a much better story that Britain arrived in Bombay to see several disparate islands, begging for unification. As the city's population exploded due to external unrest in the mid 1700s, the islands were brought together in a massive victory for urban planning. (Just ignore the fact that newly reclaimed land was given away without many restrictions and without much regard to layout, leading to severe overcrowding). In truth, there is little evidence in the EIC's very well-documented files indicating Hornby requested or completed his vellard. Most documents show it existing well before he came around, and he, at best, patched it up a few times. So in the end, Bombay is a land of contrasts. Both one island and several small ones, depending on the time of day, season of the year, or strength of the Portuguese. Modern histories in Mumbai still declare that the city would not exist as it does without the reclamations that took place. What I find most interesting is how distorted the true history of the city actually is. What seemed at first to be a story of a massively overlooked engineering project turned out to be a much more bizarre story of land use disputes and using maps to alter history. While significant reclamation projects did take place, the British were so underwhelmed by their results they seemingly buried them in their balance books and allowed a grumpy governor to steal the spotlight with a project he never actually did. Regardless, Bombay was transformed. The British took possession and somewhat literally "drained the swamp," Later, what was a small harbor town producing salt and coconuts was able to become one of the largest cities in the world, giving us the movies that Hollywood is too cowardly to make, like forums-favorite Enthiran:  It’s interesting to come across something so innocuous in the reading and wonder why it’s not a bigger deal, then to find that the lack of information about something that should be remarkable is because...it’s not all that remarkable to begin with. I have to give a big citation to this article. I stumbled upon it after writing half of this up, and it really opened the door for me. Most of everything I found came from reverse image searching maps to find out where the hell they originally came from.
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Sep 2, 2020 03:49
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That was a fantastic read, thanks!
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Sep 2, 2020 05:53
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Well now I'm convinced that Mumbai doesn't actually exist
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Sep 2, 2020 06:28
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Jasper Tin Neck posted:Obviously it's about vernacular architecture, a map of current building techniques would look something like this: Nope.
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Sep 2, 2020 06:58
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Jasper Tin Neck posted:Obviously it's about vernacular architecture, a map of current building techniques would look something like this: This is the europe skateboards dream of, dont let it happen. A entire continent covered in concrete
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Sep 2, 2020 07:51
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Very interesting effort post about land reclamation in colonial India, going to need you to engage in a little thesis defense here though.lessthankyle posted:
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Sep 2, 2020 09:12
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That was an extremely interesting post! I particularly liked your analysis of the differences in Portuguese and British notions of what "land" is. But yeah, Salsette is totally an island.
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Sep 2, 2020 15:31
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lessthankyle posted:It seemed weird to me that there wasn't much talk about what a massive project this must have been. See also: the Great Salt Hedge  This bad map is Wikipedia’s.
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Sep 2, 2020 15:59
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An excellent deeply researched post felled only by forgetting what the blue parts of a map mean. 
BIG FLUFFY DOG fucked around with this message at 16:14 on Sep 2, 2020 |
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Sep 2, 2020 16:11
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Platystemon posted:See also: the Great Salt Hedge
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Sep 2, 2020 16:19
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Mixed salt/freshwater islands are tricky, O.K.? Is this an island? 
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Sep 2, 2020 16:20
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Platystemon posted:Mixed salt/freshwater islands are tricky, O.K.? 
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Sep 2, 2020 16:26
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dwarf74 posted:Depends on what that blue dotted line means Its a natural canal called the casiquiare so I'm going to say yes it is an island. Manmade canals don't count imo.
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Sep 2, 2020 16:29
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My opinion is that an area stops being an island if the waters encircling it have significant differences in surface elevation. Manhattan is an island. Livingstone “Island” is no such thing.
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Sep 2, 2020 16:38
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If this is an island then I guess Mumbai can be one too.
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Sep 2, 2020 16:46
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