Curiosity: The view from Gale Crater

Go have a look, if you've got the bandwidth.

Saying it again: some forms of progress really are worth the trouble!

Happy Birthday, terri_osborne!

Hoping that today's a good one for you and yours, and that you end up enjoying many happy returns of this day!

Eleven Nations?

Every so often, you come across a map that makes you stop, think, scratch your brain-casing for half a minute - or perhaps five minutes - and leaves you either more or less confused about your place in the worlds.

One such map came to my attention two days ago, by way of one of my acquaintances at the National Capital Freenet. Pointing to an article in the Tyee, that attention was drawn to a map done up for an author named Colin Woodward, so that he could present his case that North America from Mexico's southern border up to the Arctic Sea was not quite made up of three nations, but rather eleven cultural groups.


And this puts me back to discussions I've had with joe_szilagyi, james_nicoll and a couple of other people about the possible futures of North America in general, and of the USA and Canada in particular. Some of those discussions were echoes of the Ex Unum Pluribus project, others of the US of Canada/Jesusland map.

I'm not really convinced that either of those latter two options are going to happen. Certainly not as proposed. If the like happens, it'll be by a series of incidents and accidents will only look inevitable after the fact in the eyes of historians.

Still, it's useful on occasion to look at where you are, but through other people's eyes. Especially as a student of speculative fiction.