spatial fossils

The ever brilliant BLDGBlog revisits the field-trip they got to take two summers ago to the secretive compound that manages the constellation of satellites that form the global positioning system for military and civilian applications.

Surely being treated to such a tour could inspire many tangential musings on place and time and the technological triangulation behind translating this vast array with many moving parts into something reliable and useful. The visitors, however, choose not to reflect on the navigation aspect but rather how GPS coordinates are being used more and more in large-scale architectural projects and how the errors in mapping—precision that’s only off by millimetres but still nonetheless present and preserved—are being set in stone, fossilised as it were in big building programmes. Such cosmological footprints are found in the unburied strata of the Earth and, as in the reflection, evidence of solar flares and sunspots in the growth rings of trees. The philosophy is not lost on the team that runs GPS neither, realising that this fifty-thousand kilometre wide array could also be used a massive detection field for the aberrations of space-time due to encounters with gravitational waves or dark matter. Every sub-system on Earth that accesses and makes decisions based off of this satellite telemetry is a part of this experiment and exotic, cosmic discontinuities may be leaving subtle footfalls everywhere.

gonwanda-projection

Mental Floss has a semi-regular special series entitled Afternoon Map that invites one to pour over imaginative cartography and charts visualising demographics. With some concession to sea-levels and icecaps to keep geo-politics recognisable, contributors at Open Culture share the land masses aligned as Pangea with modern borders included. What is most amazing about such a venture is to think how much has changed before and since with continental-drift and we know a little bit about how those puzzle-pieces fit together.

rat-race

A sufficiently academic study from the University of Geneva demonstrates that while life’s stressors may be an enabling factor when it comes to indulging those things that we seek, as profiled by Boing Boing, that same drive does not yield any increased relish for said awards. It is a bit disheartening and telling that striving on an everyman’s level is equally alienated from the goal, whether or not we invite any middle-man. What do you think? Is this about our own expectations, guilty pleasures and the measure of success, or the motors of progress and productivity?

subway special

Down in the underground, Neat-o-Rama features a brilliant gallery from Russian photographer Andrey Kruglikov capturing beautiful images of the metro stations of Moscow and Saint Petersburg. These stops are surely inviting and reminiscence of when no expense was spared for public convenience. Would that all spaces might be so house-proud. It is an interesting time to reflect on this grand artistry when residents are apparently hording subway tokens as a hedge against the declining rouble.