Lewis Carroll, AKA Charles Dodgson, was a philosopher's dream author. Indeed, it is almost formally impossible to complete a philosophy degree and not quote him on some subject or another. Now Strange Maps publishes the Bellman's Map from Hunting of the Snark, which accompanies the following stanzas:
He had bought a large map representing the sea,
Without the least vestige of land:
And the crew were much pleased when they found it to be
A map they could all understand."What's the good of Mercator's North Poles and Equators,
Tropics, Zones, and Meridian Lines?"
So the Bellman would cry: and the crew would reply
"They are merely conventional signs!"Other maps are such shapes, with their islands and capes!
But we've got our brave Captain to thank:
(So the crew would protest) "that he's bought us the best—
A perfect and absolute blank!"
What tickles my fancy is that this pretty much sums up the view that we can classify the world any way we like.
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My favorite Carroll bit is from his A Tangled Tale, a serialized collection of mathematical puzzles in story form, which was published in The Monthly Packet in 1880. One geographical paradox brought up in Knot 10 was admitted, in the published answer section, to have no solution the author could see! A modern reader can see instantly that Carroll has produced a proof of the necessity of inventing the International Date Line; something which in all honestly, I'd never quite understood the point of until I read this puzzle.
Way ahead of his time, that man was ...
Ooh, how terribly post-modern of you, John.
Bob
Wasn't the need for the IDL discovered by Magellen. When he got back home after sailing around the world, his logs were all off by a day.
I've always liked that map. Does anyone sell a reproduction of it?
It also reminds me of a comment I recently ran across, in a discusson of digital rights management in Vista: "This is high-definition silence, the purest silence known to man. And it must be protected with DRM!"
But when was the International Date Line first invented? surely one existed before 1874?