Living in Baja, I’m at least thankful for not having mormon craziness right next door.

Imagine northern Baja during Prohibition in the United States, jam-packed with bars catering to gringos looking to get plastered. That’s how Tijuana grew from a sleepy town to city virtually overnight back then. Many people still see Tijuana as a drinking-spree place, in reputation. Now imagine it was still that way, at that 1920s level of intensity.

Imagine polygamy as part of daily religion and politics in the area. With so much territory equaling political agency, Deseret might have openly maintained their backwater, backwards attitudes towards women to this day. It would have seeped into Mexico. It would be part of the conversation.

As it stands, we are buffered from those crazy mormon bastards by a series of layers with other types of crazy, and currently Baja could not have had better luck than with a neighbor like blue, progressive California.
Thank god we don’t have Texas or Arizona next door. Sorry about that, Sonora, Chihuahua, Coahuila, Tamaulipas. We got lucky there in Baja.

Believe you me, you are not alone.

Then there’s what some guy wrote and the quote became famous, I paraphrase - “The Holy Roman Empire is none of the above”, or maybe it was “The Holy Roman Empire is neither Holy, Roman, nor an Empire”.

you can get rid of them by changing your coordinate system - a very common operation

Would that be the Lorenz Transformations?

What makes you think I smoked anything?
Why couldn’t it be… edibles? :-P
And don’t get me started on the topologies and symmetries of fields in quantum mechanics!

But seriously, I enjoy letting the mind take me for a nice long ride, using an artifact to trace connections to other things throughout history, and in this case it’s the math of maps, their topologies.
Random topics on Lemmy sometimes lighting up my mind like a Christmas tree.

Also trying a little to get into the mindset of the era when some of these things were being cooked up and explored, shift perspective as best I can, from where and when I am. It’s incomplete, but it’s still fun. I probably got this type of “pinball narrative” from James Burke and his old history shows Connections and The Day The Earth Changed.

The way I understand it, when you plot out the topologies of spacetime via Relativity, the same kind of thing can happen, the maths gets all weird and funky on you, can blow up into infinities at certain points, and we call them singularities.

It still kinda blows my mind that these things popped up in the math first (by Karl Schwarzschild in the trenches of WWI, 1915) and it wasn’t until exactly half a century later their existence was physically detected for the first time (Cygnus X-1, in 1965).

Then you use a different mathematical tool to plot out spacetime, and you get white holes, Einstein-Rosen bridges and parallel universes.
Different maths for 3D (or 4D) topological maps of spacetime show us different phenomena, and that relevant XKCD serves as a perfect analogy of how many ways there can be of approaching the same topologies.

Or why the hell not try mapping things out in ten dimensions! Come up with M-theory for a multiverse!

Also, people figured out the Earth was round long ago exactly because of these sorts of discrepancies.

Sure, they had an understanding of how the thing warped, they could see with their own eyes that their flat math was kinda rubbery with curved surfaces, but they hadn’t separated the two realms of geometry, hadn’t figured out that you could have a triangle where the angles didn’t add up to 180°.

It must have been very strange and disturbing to see math as imperfect, incomplete or mischievous in some way. Wasn’t this the language of God? Therefore, shouldn’t his language be perfect?

While this might be going on in your mapmaking mind, the king or emperor, the generals and admirals, and the religious authorities are looking closely at these maps, and here you are making something that has a hazy sense of sacrilege.

I guess I mean the type of map that we grew up seeing in our schoolbooks and encyclopedias, the type that distorts the further you get from your starting point, but instead of putting Europe at the center of things, this map here starts from Asia, outwards.

EDIT: as such, it represents the Indian Ocean and South China Sea, Sea Of Japan coastlines more accurately (as would be seen from space), while the Mercator does it for the Mediterranean and middle Atlantic.

It’s fascinating to see a Mercator-style projection that does not produce a huge Greenland.

Maps like these must all have been frustrating to plot out before the advent of non-Euclidean geometry explained a bit better what was going on with the numbers, certain forks in the mathematical road taking you where things didn’t quite make sense, and there was nothing you could do about it, except start over from a different point and or geometrical approach.

WE WANT THE OPERA IN IQUITOS!

This map still reflects the crazy daring of both:
“Fitzcarraldo” as the main character in the film.
“Fitzcarraldo” as the Werner Herzog on-location film production.

Theirs are the mountains, leaving the jungles to the jungle inhabitants.

Should be called Artography.

Look at The Atlantick getting all fancy on us, a CK at the end is like wearing tails and top hat, maybe even a monocle. Perhaps even a step further back, all the way to powdered wig.