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If the earth stood still, the oceans would gradually migrate toward the poles and cause land in the equatorial region to emerge. This would eventually result in a huge equatorial megacontinent and two large polar oceans. The line that delineates the areas that hydrologically contribute to one or the other ocean would follow the equator if the earth was a perfect ellipsoid. However, due to the significant relief of both the continents and the ocean floor, the hypothetical global divide between the areas that hydrologically contribute to one or another ocean deviates from the equator significantly. Analogous to the well-known U.S. Continental Divide, this would be the border separating two giant hemispherical watersheds of the new circumpolar oceans. Interestingly, the highest point on this global divide would not be the highest altitude on the entire globe. The highest elevation of the global divide in the Colombian Andes would be about 12,280 meters, whereas the altitudes of the famous equatorial volcanoes of Chimborazo (Ecuador) and Kilimanjaro (Tanzania) would be 13,615 and 12,786 meters, respectively. Both volcanoes happen not to be located on the global divide line. The lowest point on the new global dividing line, with an elevation of 2,760 meters, would be situated southwest of Kiribati Island in the western Pacific.

(src Witold Fraczek, Esri)

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With the development of cartography, the history of landscapes has taken more and more importance to delineate the development of social settlements. As cited from [1] the illustration, let us take the famous depiction of Napoleon’s march on Moscow published by Charles Joseph Minard in 1861 ( a detailed description can be found in Tufte ). The author engages the readers in the exploration of the fate of Napoleon’s army in the Russian campaign of 1812-1813. Beginning at the Polish-Russian border, the thick band shows the size of the army at each position. The path of Napoleon’s retreat from Moscow in the cold winter is depicted by the dark lower band, which is tied to temperature and time scales. Tufte identified six separate variables that were shown within Minard’s drawing. First, the line width continuously marked the size of the army. Second and third, the line itself showed the latitude and longitude of the army as it moved. Fourth, the lines themselves showed the direction that the army was travelling, both in advance and retreat. Fifth, the location of the army with respect to certain dates was marked. Finally, the temperature along the path of retreat was displayed. It can also be noted that, despite of the schematic character of the drawing with its rudimentary cartography, Minard depicted some features of the underlying territory (specifically, rivers and towns) he deemed essential for the understanding of the story.

(src Adrienko et al.)

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I was reading the New York Times, where I discovered an interesting article standing out again from the crowd of tech reviews. I’m always attracted by the searticles that describe Italians and Italian researches, since the objectivity of  NY Times journalists make easier to understand the real value of that piece of work. In this case the article was digging some years ago (nine to be precise) into “La Repubblica’s” archive which explained why the @ symbol was firstly used by italian merchants. A Florentine merchant named Francesco Lapi used the symbol @ in a letter written 473 years ago today, on May 4, 1536. As prof. Giorgio Stabile (Full professor of   Science’s  history at “La Sapienza” university, Rome) explained to The Guardian in 2000, Francesco Lapi’s letter was sent from Seville to Rome and described the cargo on three ships that had just returned to Spain from Latin America:

“There, an amphora of wine, which is one thirtieth of a barrel, is worth 70 or 80 ducats,” Mr. Lapi informs his correspondent, representing the amphora with the now familiar symbol of an “a” wrapped in its own tail.The Spanish word for amphora was “arroba,” and the Oxford English

Dictionary explains that the unit was approximately 25 pounds of a solid or about 3 gallons of a liquid. In modern Spanish, the @ symbol on keyboards is still called an arroba — as a Google image search illustrates. The word “arroba” itself was a Spanish corruption of an older Arabic word.

(src)

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