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geography
Word(s) of the day
Cartocacoethes
is, apparently, the uncontrollable urge to see maps everywhere, in everything. It’s a flavour of apophenia, which is the experience of seeing patterns in meaningless or random data (e.g., canals on Mars). A well-known version of apophenia is pareidolia, which is when people see significant things in random patterns (e.g., apparitions of the Virgin Mary).
I call this one urine-nation.
Word(s) of the day
Friction of distance
The concept that as distances increase the amount of resources necessary to overcome the distances increase. Therefore most interactions will take place at a relatively local scale and interactions will generally decrease with distance.
Have communications advances voided this hypothesis or have even more of our interactions become localized?