The Geographies of the Twin Planets Anarres and Urras of the Tau Ceti Star System: a Comprehensive Guide for the Ekumen Traveller

Four years. That’s how long I’ve been working on these maps. My first “commit” to the git-repository that set me on this journey, a tool for calculating and performing projections from one projection to another, was on December 31st 2012 [0], but I remember that I started working on the code in October or November. Any way — Four years! A lot can happen in four years. I’ve changed jobs twice, and am now working with maps as part of my work as a software developer. This is not something that I would have expected, but it is welcome, and I really do feel that what I’ve learned by mapping Tau Ceti has helped me with my work. Thinking about the balance of aesthetics and information content, the merits and drawbacks of different projections — these are important considerations for what I do today. I’m still an amateur in the field, but an amateur with some confidence built from experience, and who knows something of what questions to ask, even if I don’t have the answers. Four years is also the time that Dr Grijndvar has been away on an extended expedition across the Atlantic, but he returned safe and sound yesterday — welcome home, dear friend!

So what have I learnt, and what have I done all this time? Before getting to that, I would like to start with my usual advice to the reader, that this text is very long and mostly written for my own sake: should you wish to skip directly to the maps, then please do so – no hard feelings! I have also compiled a list of the tools I have used at the end of this article, which may be of interest to some – all are free (as in free speech) and open source, and available for anyone to download and use.

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The Parable of Christmasland

American election made simple:

Imagine that there’s a competition in Christmasland for “most popular Christmas character” where everyone gets to vote. The winner gets to sit at the top of the Christmas Tree for four years, and gets all the tinsel they can stuff into their pockets. Two main groups of people are arranging this election.

One group suggests Santa, because he’s popular, he promises a lot of gifts to everyone, and so on. Others in the same group suggest Baby Jesus, or Rudolph, or the Archangel Gabriel, or a gingerbread man or whoever.

But this same group has a whole bunch of Grinch-supporters, and they decide that the Grinch is a much better candidate for “most popular Christmas character” than Santa is for reasons that are unclear to everyone else. So they do everything they can to sabotage all the other candidates, and in the end, this group runs with the Grinch as their candidate.

The other, quite distinct, group has misunderstood what the whole competition is about, for some reason decide that their candidate is going to be the Abominable Snowman, because he has the best snow, and while his hands are small, his feet are ENORMOUS, and that has to count for something, doesn’t it?

So suddenly, the people of Christmasland find that instead of any of the popular, well-known Christmas characters like Jesus and Santa, they only get to chose between the Grinch and the Abominable Snowman.

The Abominable Snowman then does his best to put his oversized feet in his mouth on a regular basis throughout the election season. The Grinch-supporters watch him in bewilderment, and smile gleefully to themselves. This election is theirs! The partridge is practically *in* the pear tree already! They don’t need to prepare anything or try to make the Grinch more likeable or even try to butter up to the people who had rather voted for Jesus or Santa.

No, the Grinch-supporters instead go for the winning strategy of putting all their eggs in one basket. The Abominable Snowman is a monster! Don’t vote for a monster! Sure, the Grinch may have stolen Christmas once, but at least the Grinch is a Christmas character and not just a random snow-related thing in a crazy wig. Also: a vote for Santa is magically and mysteriously a vote for the Abominable Snowman, even though no one understands how.

The Grinch-supporters then sit back and wait for election day.

Now, the founding fathers of Christmasland were morons, and had no idea how a democracy should work. But for some reason that no one understands, these same idiots are so revered by the people of Christmasland that their idiotic system can never be changed. So instead of just doing the reasonable and simple thing and just count all the votes that the people of Christmasland has handed in, they have a combination of twelve drumming drummers, eleven piping pipers, ten leaping lords, and nine dancing ladies, who look at the piles of votes and then decide among themselves who should win the election. So even if most people in Christmasland vote for one of the candidates, the other one may win because of how the system works.

So when election day comes around, the people of Christmasland have a difficult choice: they don’t really like either of the two candidates, but because of corruption, this is the choice they are left with. Some try to vote for Santa anyway, and these are the people who will be bedeviled by the Grinch-supporters when they inevitably lose.

Because, you see, even if the Abominable Snowman isn’t really a Christmas character at all, and even though he’s said that he’ll get rid of all the gingerbread people and has made a series of lewd remarks about the eight milking milkmaids throughout the campaign season — well, the Grinch *did* steal Christmas, after all… And instead of trying to give the people of Cristmasland a reason to vote *for* the Grinch, the Grinch-supporters have relied on a strategy of smugness and bullying and just assumed that of course no one will vote for the Abominable Snowman, because by Jove he’s got the word “abominable” in his name. It’s *right there*. Just use your eyes, sheeple!

Meanwhile, the Abominable Snowman has gone around Christmasland showing off his five golden rings and promising people that he’s the only person who *really* understand how to get that damn partridge into the pear tree, despite the fact that partridges are by nature ground-living birds and that having one in a pear tree makes no damn sense at all. He’s relied mainly on the fact that *his* fur is white, and snow is white, and white is sort of a good colour for Christmasland, and that’s what it all comes down to in the end, isn’t it? The house where the Christmas Tree is placed is called the *White* House for a reason, you know…

Slowly the votes start coming in, and gradually it dawns on the Grinch-supporters that their tactic of doing *fuck all* to get the Grinch to become popular in Christmasland is remarkably having no effect whatsoever. It seems that the Grinch-supporters have misunderstood the people of Christmasland entirely: arrogance and pomposity is *not* what makes you endearing! What a revelation!

And so, in the end, the Abominable Snowman wins the election, and gets to sit at the top of the Christmas Tree for four years, during which he’ll be doing unspeakable things not just to the gingerbread people and the milkmaids, but probably to the a-laying geese and all the other weird stuff they put into carols.

The Grinch lost the election, as had been predicted by the people who supported Santa and Jesus from day 1, yet mysteriously it is the people who supported Santa and Jesus that will somehow get the blame, because the Grinch cannot see beyond the tip of her own nose. And we all know what a small nose that is.

Hope this made it easier to understand!

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Please Stop Donald

The melody of this song is “Waiting for Margret to Go” by Chumbawamba, which can be found here: Link

 

The sun rises up o’er a country once great

Where blue, white, and red stands for greed, faith and hate

A second-rate state with designs to be best

And one man has dreams that are worse than the rest

 

The breadth of his knowledge is mainly a gap

Can’t find his arse on a high-detail map

Armed with his prejudice charging the field

To people like Donald his ignorance’s a shield

 

Not very different from people you know

Waiting for Donald to go

With God on your side you must give ‘em a show

Waiting for Donald to go

Oh, waiting for Donald to go

 

Launched a ridiculous birther attack

Can’t stand the fact that the president’s black

Hates the Hispanics because of their race

Thinks people of colour should stay in their place

 

Look with suspicion on those you should love

Waiting for Donald to go

Gladly obeying dictates from above

Waiting for Donald to go

Oh, waiting for Donald to go

 

Happily pouring more oil on the fire

His “War on the Other” will never expire

For empathy’s nothing to those who are strong

Showing that even the rich can be wrong

 

Snitch on the muslims when Islam’s a crime

Waiting for Donald to go

The new Middle Ages – a horrible time

Waiting for Donald to go

Oh, waiting for Donald to go

 

The sun slowly sets on a country once great

The dream still is dreamt, but the hour is late

Eight years of fascism with Donald on top

“Loving thy neighbor” has come to a stop

 

If he wins, back to the 40s we go

Please stop Donald from having a go

If he wins, back to the 40s we go

Please stop Donald from having a go

Please stop Donald from having a go

 

 

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Så oskyldigt

Another political song, once again — surprise, surprise! — directed mainly against the People’s Party in Sweden (surprise, surprise! ^^ /skymandr). The leader of this party is currently in charge of educating our kids, and he hardly had time to put on his minister hat after the recent election before he started his campaign to make primary school education more similar to what it was when his ideology was really in vogue — the 19th century.

The melody is perhaps not as well known as the one in the previous songs. It is “Balladen om dagen efter” by Bengt Sändh, which I cannot find on YouTube, but there are CDs with this melody (I have one), so it is available.

Unlike the other songs, however, this is written together with S. I wrote one verse, and challenged him to write the next, and so on.

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No Nobel prize winners this year (either)

Public Service Announcement:
It is that that time of the year again — the exciting start of the annual celebration of scientific achievements known as the Nobel prize. As usual, there is a confusion regarding the nomenclature, so I thought I would set the record straight: One does not win the Nobel Prize, one is awarded it. To quote from the FAQ of the NobelPrize.org homepage:

Why do you use the word Nobel Laureate and not Nobel Prize Winner?

Answer:
The awarding of the Nobel Prizes is not a competition or lottery, and therefore there are no winners or losers. Nobel Laureates receive the Nobel Prize in recognition of their achievements in physics, chemistry, physiology or medicine, literature, or peace.

Therefore there are no winners this year, nor have there been any in previous years. There are, however, some well-deserving laureates who deserve recognition for their work.

Three cheers for Science!

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Poetry response to Skyman

Having read Skyman’s brilliant piece on borders, and seeing that most of the stuff published recently was his, I felt compelled to do something about that. Thus, this poem, which was written in a few hours this afternoon, and then not edited, so there are parts that I don’t really like, and I may go back and change these later. Anyway, here is a poem about borders:

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Ursula K. Le Guin’s Tau Ceti, a planetary survey

Warning: Wall of Text!
This was supposed to be a post about some maps I’ve drawn, but it turned into a minor essay (featuring fifteen footnotes and two poems). This regularly happens when I set about describing my work (this paragraph is no exception). I am terrible at leaving unimportant details out of the picture. Since the readership of this blog is very limited, however, I have decided that it is all right this way. I wrote it mostly for myself anyway. If you don’t want to read about my love for maps and my love for the works of Ursula K. Le Guin, feel free to jump to the maps, or got to Get Stuff where you will find more versions. (I also made some animations of the planets revolving which can be found in a follow-up post.) If, on the other hand, you are interested in the background to and process involved in the making of the maps, you are more than welcome to continue reading.

Breaking News! New and improved versions of the maps available here!

Fan-cartography

I’ve always loved maps.

I remember, that when I first discovered fantasy (through The Hobbit, as it were), for many years I held the opinion, that a map was a sure sign of a good novel. If there were ample appendices or a word-list for a made up foreign tongue, all the better! I have since realised that a map is not a sure sign that a book is worth my time, and that not all the appendices in the world could save a bad book from being bad read — I remember one fantasy heptology in particular, whose appendices were beyond most in ambition, but whose story soon dwindled from acceptable to dull, and in the end turned offensively stupid. But I still hold, that a mediocre book can be saved by an inspired map, and that a good map always makes a good book more memorable.

After The Hobbit, I read Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings (great appendices), Eddings (mediocre, but good maps) and the Earthsea trilogy by Le Guin (excellent and with excellent maps [0]). At some point I discovered Science Fiction, and started to prefer it to Fantasy, even though science fiction novels seem to be utterly devoid of maps. Until I discovered The Dispossessed. Science fiction, by an author I knew I liked, from having read The Word for World is Forest and the Earthsea books — with a map!

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Bernadotten

I have been told, repeatedly, by Skyman that I write too few political songs these days. Well, to appease him, I wrote this today.

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Royalists are morons #3

By the way, in case I ever get accused of simply making up the claim that royalists say that the only feasible alternative to the current dictatorship is another dictatorship, take a look at this article about how the puss-faced dungeon parasite wants to have even MORE money.

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Royalists are morons — Follow-up #2

I just had to add a small thing, and then I hope I will manage to leave this hos sordid topic.

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