Skip to main content

Borders

Where do ideas come from? Where do they go when they are gone?

Friends laid to rest Harper Lee in Alabama this week. Wayne Flint gave the eulogy that Lee requested - "Atticus inside ourselves" - based on 2006 racial justice tribute to Lee at Birmingham Pledge Foundation (YouTube). If a reader has text of those remarks, as an American, I would be grateful to read them. Lee's Monroe County - adjacent Creole Louisiana - bleeds about as far south as you can go in North America without slipping into the Gulf of Mexico, the Caribbean Basin and West Indian triangular trade currents carrying trans-Atlantic African-American crimes against humanity.

For followup: map attribution. Complete TinEye reverse image lookup. Slate animation (2015). Transatlantic Slave Trade Database (home)
My father is an attorney. When I was young and first read TKAM I thought he was Atticus Finch. Or, at least that it was his job to be Atticus Finch. America and I could be more like them. I daydreamed through CliffNotes in sophomore English. Today I make maps TPAB. Maps as geopolitical art, science, signals, business, documentation, and culture.

Murder Accountability

Where on/in the grids are the most dynamic spaces? The frontiers, estuaries, "borderlands", crossroads, oases, bazaars, river valleys, hostels, cities, interdisciplinary seminars, interactive labs, studios, confluences, vibrant ecologies and economies. How do we safely unlock energy? Promote growth, justice, life, and liberty? Where are the places that deny these rights and privileges? Where are what stories?

Transatlantic Slave Trade Database (home)

It's not enough to celebrate our differences. Crip/Blood, Red/Blue, Republican/Democrat are different but grossly inadequate for billions of people to express themselves. Just two choices? They are mental models so misleading they are ~false. The American political spectrum is richer, itself more vibrant than Red/Blue. DNA is more expressive than that. It's not just okay that we're richly different. Diverse. It's great. It's essential. It's stable. It's robust. It's beautiful. It's (more) true.

2012 county-level USA Presidential election on a red/blue color spectrum, rather than red/blue binary color codes. Mark Newman, Complex Systems, Michigan (source)


But maps are not the territory. Not the people. Maps are damn lies. Like statistics. They are (necessarily) incorrect. Politically. Statistically, they have margins of error, have hidden sampling biases, and should be salted. Visually, they encourage false precision and sweeping, necessarily untrue generalizations. But if they promote American life, please redeem their lies.


American Nations Series 

Map: Financial Times (Jan 2014). Separately: US Geological Survey of Caribbean plate (pdf). Following unreported/underreported Saudi Arabian oil refinery project via Secretary Clinton's State Department circa 2010 (details).
TPAB: Aspect flipped, colors inverted. Source: Mark Newman, Complex Systems, Michigan (source)

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Tamaulipas

Before the 2016 US Presidential Election, and for the fifth consecutive year, Texans reported immigration and security as their highest priorities ( San Antonio Express ). 2000 miles northwest of Texas, on the same international border, Californians ranked employment and the economy as principal concerns ( USC ). Many people might assume differences between the state governments and cultural histories of California and Texas, together 20% of the US population ( Census ), explain their wildly different perceptions of national issues related to Mexico and drugs. But you have to understand the difference in Mexico between those two border areas - California and Texas - and how that might influence different Americans perceptions of "the problem" of Mexico and or drugs. Breitbart Media brands Breitbart Texas and Cartel Chronicles did not emerge from a political vacuum. They emerged from the 21st Century's hottest global drug war zone outside Afghanistan's Helmand River ...
Post a Comment
Read more

Good Morning America

Chicago Tribune runs moving testimony about conscious consumption of alcohol . Not Eliot Ness nor untouchability necessary. Hypothetically, some of best public health outcomes are the consequence of self-examine. Not doctors. Honesty about basics. What we eat and drink. What we look like in the mirror. That's a policy hypothesis. Also personal hope. The opinions, hypotheses, and errors below are mine. Not my employer nor anyone else. The most important hashtag in 2016 is #ChicagoIguala . That tag simply expresses the common insecurity linking North American lives, deaths, and drug war along a violent north-south interstate highway network. Chicago, Illinois USA (2.6M) and Iguala, Guerrero, Mexico (110k). Two North American towns. One US metro, one Mexican suburb. Google estimates it t akes 35 hours to drive between them . Compressed into a unique ID, #ChicagoIguala says in Twitter-friendly short-hand: "North America Free Trade Agreement" (Clinton, 1994) in legally, hi...
Post a Comment
Read more

Operation Anvil

Latest homicide map is linked here . Overall goal: explain why the Americas have such low rates of successfully prosecuted murder compared to EU and APAC . And why - as murder rates declining - are solved murder rates declining in the United States? For a quick summary of the state of homicide within the United States: http://gritsforbreakfast.blogspot.com/2010/06/homicide-clearance-rates-on-decline.html http://anepigone.blogspot.com/2013/01/rates-of-unsolved-murder-by-state.html To start: where are the murders? Latest homicide map is linked here . Next, I want to map stories to these cities. Later, add more data sources (eg, unsolved murder data). MAP STORY https://github.com/Corollarium/geograpy2 STORY about Operation Anvil in Honduras: http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/01/06/a-mission-gone-wrong http://www.cepr.net/blogs/the-americas-blog/blaming-the-victims-us-ambassador-to-honduras-doubles-down-regarding-ahuas-shootings http://www.nytimes.co...
Post a Comment
Read more