Radical Cartography

News and frivolity, found on a map.

[radical-cartography]

Get Your Monks In a Row: Makha Bucha at Wat Dhammakaya Temple

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[View on The Atlantic]

[View on The Atlantic]

Wednesday marked the 2,558th anniversary of Buddha's sermon to the first 1,250 Buddhist monks, and thousands gathered at Thailand's Wat Dhammakaya Temple north of Bangkok to observe the occasion.

The architecture of the temple and the choreography of the ceremonies combine to create stunning visual compositions: images of the thousands of small golden Buddha statues that make up the central dome, the 100,000 lanterns lit up at night, and the thousands of monks and other Buddhist devotees gathered in circles and rows to meditate.

[via: The Atlantic]

[radical-cartography]

States of Decay: Visiting the World's Largest Body Farm [Graphic Content]

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In a field northwest of San Marcos, Texas, fifty human bodies lie exposed to the elements, each in a different stage of decomposition.

Some are fully mummified, their flesh dried out by the harsh Texas sun. Others have been picked over so voraciously by vultures that their bones are frayed. The most lurid are the fresh ones: week-old bodies that have ballooned to twice their normal size and crawl with thousands of maggots.

This is Freeman Ranch, part of the Forensic Anthropology Center at Texas State University—otherwise known as the world's largest body farm. By observing bodily decay under varying conditions, researchers hope to help law enforcement better estimate time of death in criminal investigations.

[via: Vox]

[radical-cartography]

In The News: State of Emergency in Galápagos

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Naufragio Bay, wreck site [View on Google Maps]

[Image: Ecuador Times]

Ecuador has declared a state of emergency in the Galápagos Islands after a freighter delivering food and supplies ran aground on Jan. 28. While no fuel has yet been spilled, "officials said that as long as the ship remains aground there is a danger it will break up and spill its remaining cargo, which includes some polluting liquids."

The Galápagos Islands' biodiversity is recognized as a UNESCO World Heritage Site.

[via: The Wall Street Journal]

[radical-cartography]

Eye Candy Friday: Yellowstone's Grand Prismatic Spring

The Grand Prismatic Spring in Yellowstone National Park is the world's third largest hot spring. Its colors are the result of pigmented bacteria in mineral-rich water.

[radical-cartography]

It's Complicated: Preserving Nuremberg's Nazi Party Rally Grounds

The preservation of historic architecture is a given in most European cities, but how best to preserve a building that represents unspeakable tragedy? Nuremberg, Germany is debating the fate of the crumbling Nazi Party Rally Grounds, the site of enormous rallies led by Hitler, which were captured on film in Leni Riefenstahl's chilling Triumph of the Will (1935).

Officials face a tough choice: restoring the building would glorify the Nazi Regime, but allowing further decay poses safety risks for visitors. Officials seem set to pursue a third way: a bare-bones renovation that, according to mayor Ulrich Maly, "is not about beautification. We will not be looking for original-style sandstone”.

[via: Gizmodo]

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Eye Candy Friday: The Snowscapes of Antarctica

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White Lines: the Asbestos Mine of Asbest, Russia

A legacy of Soviet industrial planning, the city of Asbest in the Ural region of Russia stands at the edge of a massive open pit mine of asbestos—a carcinogen long-banned in the United States.

Asbest means asbestos in Russian, and it is everywhere here. Residents describe layers of it collecting on living room floors. Before they take in the laundry from backyard lines, they first shake out the asbestos. “When I work in the garden, I notice asbestos dust on my raspberries,” said Tamara A. Biserova, a retiree. So much dust blows against her windows, she said, that “before I leave in the morning, I have to sweep it out.”

[via: The New York Times]

[radical-cartography]

Eye Candy Friday: The 'Ideal' City

Three 'Ideal' Cities [top to bottom]: Bourtange, Netherlands; Palmanova, Italy; Nahalal, Israel.

[radical-cartography]

In The News: Louisiana's Angola Prison

Curators at the National African American Museum for History and Culture—under construction on the National Mall in Washington, D.C.—have negotiated for their collection a guard tower and prison cell to be relocated from the Louisiana State Penitentiary. Also known as Angola, the prison is a notorious symbol of the "dehumanizing incarceration of blacks in the 20th century and that practice’s link to slavery".

Originally a slave plantation on the banks of the Mississippi River, Angola grew into a brutal, privately owned prison that leased out convicts as forced laborers after the Civil War. The state took over the operation in 1901, not with an eye to reform, but to reaping big profits, said Burk Foster, a former professor of criminal justice who has written a history of Angola.

Cruel and squalid, Angola often inflicted worse suffering than was endured by slaves, historians say. In the 1960s, because of its violence, it was widely known as the bloodiest prison in the South.

[via: The New York Times]

[radical-cartography]

After the Gold Rush: The Olympic City Project

As catalyst of urban regeneration, the legacy of the Olympic Games is mixed. While some cities, like Barcelona (1992), were able to leverage investment into generally well-integrated urban districts, many others were left with abandoned facilities—and in some cases, decades of debt—when the games moved on.

Jon Pack and Gary Hustwit found a photography project in these haunting sites—each suggestive of recent but faded glory. Their book, The Olympic City, is available now.

[top three: Montréal Olympic Stadium (1976); bottom three: Moscow Olympic Village (1980)]

[via: Curbed]

[radical-cartography]

In The News: The Geography of the NSA Surveillance Program

In an eerily prescient essay from May of this year, Hendrik Hertzberg of The New Yorker describes the geography of the NSA's surveillance program, and seems to predict Edward Snowden's intelligence leak:

When the Washington Post surveyed that empire, in 2010, it counted more than three thousand government organizations and associated private companies working on counterterrorism, homeland security, and intelligence, in ten thousand locations across the United States. More than eight hundred and fifty thousand people held top-secret security clearances [emphasis added]. Three years later, the complex is still growing. This fall, the National Security Agency, the largest and most opaque component of the counterterrorism behemoth, will cut the ribbon on a billion-dollar facility called the Utah Data Center, near Bluffdale. The center, reportedly, will gobble up a galaxy of intercepted telecommunications. According to a rough estimate by Digital Fourth, an advocacy group based in Massachusetts, each of the Utah Data Center’s two hundred (at most) professionals will be responsible for reviewing five hundred billion terabytes of information each year, the equivalent of twenty-three million years’ worth of Blu-ray DVDs.

Edward Snowden remains at Moscow's Sheremetyevo Airport Transit Area, where he is thought to be seeking asylum in Ecuador.

[top: Utah Data Center: Bluffdale, Utah, United States]

[bottom: Sheremetyevo Airport, Moscow, Russia]

[via: The New Yorker]

[radical-cartography]

Happy Pride: Uprising at the Stonewall Inn

Happy Pride 2013 from New York City, site of the 1969 Stonewall riots.

When police raided the Stonewall Inn, a popular gay bar in the Greenwich Village section of New York City on June 28, 1969, the street erupted into violent protests that lasted for the next six days. The Stonewall riots, as they came to be known, marked a major turning point in the modern gay civil rights movement in the United States and around the world.

[via: PBS]

[radical-cartography]

Rooms with a View: Dubai's Burj Khalifa

Curious what life is like inside the world's tallest building? Google has added the 2,717-foot Burj Khalifa to its Street View collection, including views from a corporate suite on the 154th floor.

[via: Mashable]

[radical-cartography]

In The News: Protests in Brazil

The Atlantic has dramatic photos from Brazil, where enormous crowds have been protesting since late last week.

More than 200,000 took to the streets of Brazil's biggest cities yesterday, voicing frustration with the billions of dollars set aside for upcoming sports events like the World Cup and the 2014 Olympics, despite crushing levels of poverty in some places, and underfunded public education, health, security and transportation.

Above: Avenida Rio Branco in Rio de Janeiro.

[via: The Atlantic / AP]

[radical-cartography]

Eye Candy Friday: 'Crop Circles' in Texas

Center-pivot irrigation fields north of Amarillo, Texas.

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In The News: Hawaii's Mauna Loa Observatory

As President Obama debates approval of the Keystone XL pipeline, Elizabeth Kolbert of The New Yorker describes how the first investigations into climate change came about in the nineteen-fifties. It was then that Charles David Keeling "persuaded the U.S. Weather Bureau to install a set of monitoring devices at its Mauna Loa observatory, on the island of Hawaii". Mauna Loa's equipment has monitored carbon-dioxide levels ever since, and its findings are grim:

[Carbon-dioxide levels] have increased every year, and earlier this month they reached the milestone of four hundred parts per million. No one knows exactly when CO2 levels were last this high; the best guess is the mid-Pliocene, about three million years ago. At that point, summertime temperatures in the Arctic were fourteen degrees warmer than they are now and sea levels were some seventy-five feet higher.

[via: The New Yorker]

[radical-cartography]

Rust Belt Ruin: Detroit in 'Detropia'

The narrative of Detroit's meteoric rise and subsequent fall is well known, but seeing the city through the eyes of residents grants it unexpected poignancy. Heidi Ewing and Rachel Grady's excellent documentary Detropia chronicles the Motor City's ongoing challenges, and introduces a new generation of entrepreneurs creating opportunity amidst abandonment.

Detropia streams on PBS through June 17.

[via: PBS]