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Two additional lectures on global demography have been uploaded on the GeoCurrents YouTube channel. The first covers the period from 700 to 1500, focusing on the Black Death of the mid-fourteenth century and its repercussions. The second lecture covers the period from 1500 to 1700. The first part of this lecture focuses on the depopulation […] The post Two Additional Global Demography Lectures Uploaded appeared first on GeoCurrents.
Two new lectures in the series on global demography have been uploaded on the GeoCurrents YouTube channel. The first, number 5 in the series, looks at the ancient world, and the second (#6) looks at late antiquity and the early medieval period (roughly 400-750 CE). The second of these lectures focuses on the Mediterranean world, […] The post Two New Demography Lectures Uploaded on YouTube appeared first on GeoCurrents.
The previous GeoCurrents post examined critical rankings of the best Bob Dylan songs, which I graphed in terms of Dylan’s age when he wrote the songs in question. In this last of three posts on Dylan, the same technique is used for other rankings of his songs. The first graph depicts Dylan’s song that have […] The post Does Creativity Decline with Age? The Case of Bob Dylan (Part 2) appeared first on GeoCurrents.
In a recent lecture on declining birthrates, I mentioned pronatalist worries about a corresponding decline in our ability to solve problems and address crises, due mainly to the aging of the population. Creative thinking, according to this argument, is primarily an attribute of youth. Most environmentalists find this thesis unconvincing if not absurd. Creativity, they […] The post Does Creativity Decline with Age? The Case of Bob Dylan appeared first on GeoCurrents.
The fourth GeoCurrents lecture on global demography has been uploaded on YouTube and can be found here. It examines population issues that arose after the development of agriculture, as well as those following the initiation of horse-based nomadic pastoralism. It first looks at the spread of neolithic farming into Europe, noting that the expanding agricultural […] The post Demography Lecture # 4: Historical Population Patterns and Processes with the Spread of Agriculture and Nomadic Pastoralism appeared first on GeoCurrents.
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Last year I was in Brattleboro, Vermont and saw an interesting map on display. It is part of the Brattleboro Words Project. The project “connects community members to the Brattleboro area’s unique history, the art of audio storytelling - and each other” through audio pieces, maps and a GPS app that leads listeners on an audio journey of local people and places. There are two maps; a city (above) and regional map. They can be downloaded here. Indigenous Abenaki names are given equal weight on the map. Examples include the town name, Wantastegok and the river Kwenitekw. Here is a picture zoomed into downtown to appreciate the handmade details. The regional map features portraits featuring notable people with local ties such as Rudyard Kipling, Saul Bellow and Daisy Turner. Here is the Brattleboro area. The process of creating these murals and maps is very interesting. It started with 10 clay landscape mural tiles, about 12 lbs each, 16"x16". They were hand carved by Natalie Blake Studios lead designer Cynthia Parker-Houghton. She was nice enough to share some details of the creation process: “I took the information for the rivers off a Google Map, which I then re-oriented and then distorted distorted to give a birds eye view. So it was as if seen from the top of Mount Wantasticuit on the NewHampshire side of the Connecticut River gazing out West over Brattleboro and the surrounding region. "I had this map printed out large at a print shop and then used it as a template to lay out the clay forms to represent the topography of the mountains. After this I draped square slabs of clay over the forms. These slabs then dried for a few days and then could be lifted to remove the clay mountain forms and also the paper templates. I believe I had a second set of paper templates printed which were slightly smaller to adjust for the clay shrinkage. I used this second paper template to mark out the rivers. I did this by drawing over the river lines with a pen which pressed through the paper to leave marks on the clay. "Once the marks were made I removed the paper template and carved the details of the map. I carved away the iron oxide slip that had been painted over the entire surface. Wherever I carved it revealed the white clay. After we bisque fired the tiles, we used an industrial sprayer to apply the transparent glaze colors over the black and white image. We then fired it for a second time to a high temperature.” Here are the tiles seen hanging at the Brattleboro Museum & Art Center. The map was created from photographs of the mural with text added digitally. Here is a video if you want to dig more into the details of the creation process. Brattleboro Words is a project of the National Endowment for the Humanities. They will be revamping the map for 2026 when the whole Trail will be featured on the new Amtrak station outside track facing side of building. The project also has a podcast - https://brattleboro-words-trail-podcast.simplecast.com/episodes/ (available free all formats Apple, Spotify etc...) https://brattleborowords.org
While there isn’t a direct way to symbolize a line feature in ArcGIS Pro to have a gradient that travels along its length (rather than across its width), there are a handful of workarounds to get you there. If your line is wiggly, you might have to try a more robust method, like split the …
Submitted by Matthew, who says: Madison, WI just opened the first phase of our new BRT system, with new stations, new electric buses, and a new diagrams. I’d love to know what you think about the design, especially how the city handled differentiating the two types of station platform set ups. (I haven’t seen many […]
