We have been so ending this summer in Sweden, renting a house and going camping with an enormous tent among other things. Every morning has started with slow breakfasts with tea. Sometimes at home, sometimes in borrowed kitchens and sometimes outdoors. This setup was on a sunny campsite by lake Vänern just below the plateau mountain of Kinnekulle. Old Trangia coffee pot, rings on the handle are for extending it with a stick in a campfire. The tea was supplemented by oatmeal porridge, making us ready to hunt for fossils in this case. The abandoned quarry of Hällekis has plenty of othocerida and other remains in the limestone from 400 million years ago.
This nice morning routine is now changed to regular quick breakfasts and an urban way of life. Not normal as the corona pandemic is continuing but still lacks the serenity of green grass and a more natural pace.
Old Trangia coffee pot filled with tea on top of the Svea 123r. all placed on a saucepan to avoid scorching the grass and setting the tent on fire.
This winter is really mild and hiking is simple but still chilly in the nearby forest. It is never bad to take a coffee break in the outdoors to get warm. Cooking water on a Svea petrol stove (the brass cylinder in the back) for coffee and somewhat too spicy instant noodles feels so much better than eating them at home. The stainless steel cup that fits a canteen was shiny and brand new and could in spite of its kidney-shape balance on top of the Svea 123R. The stove works really well in cold conditions with few moving parts. A bit fiddly to start sometimes. I never get a smooth solution for getting the key to the right place when putting the windscreen back on in the midst of preheating. Maybee I have to improve my fine motor skills… Note that the bread is not on top of a chopping board. It is a seat made of wool, making it a bit more pleasurable to sit on a boulder when it is freezing. After this break in the peri-urban forest it feels better to return to the urban world again.
The Common agricultural policy (CAP) and environmental work in the European Union is not always easy to understand. Farmers have to endure changes every time the system changes. Changes that affect income, mode of production or even ownership properties. The latest thing that has vexed the Swedish farmers, at least some, is that the EU has decided that the number of trees in a grazing area has to be a certain number. It has to be less than 50 trees per hectare. How the wise people in the central European bureaucracy has come to this conclusion I do not know. It could be that pastures in southern Europe have less vegetation, whereas the traditional pasture in Scandinavia has been forested to some extent. This change in regulations will lead to that many traditional pasture areas will be reclassified as forest thus depriving the land-owner of the income these lands have generated as areas of high biodiversity. If the farmer wants to keep the subsidies ha will have to cut down the trees so the land follows the EU-norm. That could be hundred-year old oaks and other trees that have stood there for centuries. There has been attempts to change persuade the minster of agriculture to do something about this and now not only famers’ associations have become involved but also environmental groups such as WWF. Media and also the scientific community has been mobilized. Everyone saying more or less: don’t let the EU decide the number of trees in Swedish pastures. The Minister of Agriculture Eskil Erlandsson writes on his webpage that he has increased the number of trees to 60 in the national regulations and that this has taken 1500 manhours for him and his staff in negotiations with the buerocrats. The pastures could also be funded by transfering money från the agricultural subsidies to environmental funds. As a farmer himself from Southern Sweden he also thinks that the regulations from Brussels are propostrous! (Swedish: befängt). He finishes his text and hopes that this will change in 2013, when everthin is to be changed again. That is way beond the next Swedish election.
From time to time I am asked by students and others what a map is. It is an interesting question and it becomes increasingly difficult to answer. On the web site Maphist, that is by the way a good resource for discussions on old maps you can find over 300 definitions of what a map is defined as during the last 300 years. See also John Krygier’s blog on the topic
I usually include the definition made by ICA (International Cartographic Association) in 1995, but according to the Maphist site it is originally from an earlier source. The ICA celebrates by the way its 50th anniversary this year. Here is the definition:
“A symbolised image of geographic reality, representing selected features or characteristics, resulting from the creative efforts of cartographers, and designed for use when spatial relationships are of special relevance (quoted in Michael Wood, ‘Whither maps and map design’, Bulletin of the Society of Cartographers, xxvii (1993), p. 8).”
I like the fact that creative efforts are included. It means that uncreative cartographers are not making bad maps, they are not making maps at all!! Cartographers should be creative of course. But as a geographer, I’m also sympathetic to the text in the Dictionary of Human Geography (also from the above mentioned Maphist site).
“The map image is a structured cartographic representation of selected spatial information. The image becomes a map when represented physically (e.g. classical topographic map, or braille), virtually (e.g. on a computer screen) or linguistically (e.g. verbal or written spatial instructions) (R.J.Johnston, Derek Gregory and David M.Smith, The dictionary of human geography (3rd edition, Oxford, 1994)).”
The key is selected, and that a map can be virtual and linguistic. Not everybody would agree. I had that discussion recently. Some still prefer to think of maps as something exclusively printed on paper. That is to make it too easy in my opinion because it excludes cartographers when it comes to discussing the look of virtual maps. This is something that cannot be left to the software engineers alone, we see the results everyday on the web.
During the better part of the first 50 years of the ICA the definition of a map was probably not to problematic, but during the coming 50 years spatial information will be used in many ways and the concept of the map will be stretched. Let’s stretch it and do not abandon the many ideas achieved in cartography over the centuries. OK, I realise that we cannot use 18th century ideas with new techniques. No one thought of 3D-visualisation when maps were engraved on copper-plates.
The map symbolizes the nation. It describes the territory that the government, king etc controls. The flag does more or less the same thing – the banner of the state. It is surprising that so few flags combine these two. The best known banner is the flag of the United Nations. It was created in 1947.
From time to time you find variants of the map for instance this one below that has the American continents in the centre instead of Africa. This could be a mistake made by someone trying to create a genuine map, but I have not been able to find the origin of it, but it can be found on some places on a couple of blogs on the Internet. They show up if you search for images in google as well.
Another obvious example is Cyprus. And this is where it gets interesting. These two flags have two similarities apart from presenting a map. The first one is that there are olive branches symbolizing peace. The second is that they actually do not present the area the organisation cover. Not every country of the world is a member of the UN and Cyprus was divided into two separate parts. So maybe when an area is under question you include the map in your flag. This must have been clear to the new republic of Kosovo, a former part of Yugoslavia (Serbia), where we can see the map undersix white, five-pointed stars – each representing one of the major ethnic groups of Kosovo.
Unclear boundaries = lets put the map on the flag!
Ahhhrg. I just understood that my fancy Excel in Office 2007 does not support dBase-files. This was probably going to happen at one time or another, fewer and fewer program were using dbf, but ESRI has inArcGIS been using it a lot so I have a bunch of files that now cannot easily be read in Excel 2007 and furthermore I cannot export to dbf for use in ArcGIS. I have an older version of ArcGIS installed on my laptop – 9.1. If I upgrade to for instance 9.3 there is a way of importing xls-files from Office 2007. Thank you very much ESRI… Reading excel-files was easy in MapInfo years ago. It even works with strange looking characters. (OK I know other formats can be read as well txt, csv etc, but it all takes time, time I do not have). Many have figured out this problem a year ago (I am slow…) There are also some small programs out there to transform from dbf to xls/xlsx and vice vers of course and a very nice litle script. But honestly Microsoft why abandon dbf? Was it really that expensive to keep it as a possible file?
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