As aventuras dos primeiros turistas
Eduardo Brito-Henriques entrevistado pela revista Sábado . Associação Portuguesa de Geógrafos.
Mensagens
Food for thought :)
From the wonderful CDA blog . If there’s one thing the British coastline is famous for, it’s fish and chips. You’d be hard pushed to find a seaside town that doesn’t have at least one chip shop. Fish and chips have become such a British staple in fact, that during World War II, Winston Churchill exempt the dish from rationing. But it might be surprising to hear that fish and chips aren’t British at all, but Portuguese. It’s said that the Shepardic Jews of Portugal bought a centuries old Andalusian dish called peshkado frito to the UK in the 1400s when fleeing religious persecution. White fish would be fried in a thin coat of flour ready for the Sabbath and when the potato became popular in the 1800’s, they made the perfect accompaniment… Now you know where “fish and chip Friday” comes from! It’s starting to feel like Portugal doesn’t quite get the credit it deserves when it comes to “native” food…While many foods have been taken from India and ad...
The Most Iconic Books Set in 150 Countries
Click to access Global English Editing's blog and full explanation on books selected by country.
European Occupational Surnames - alas, not my own
I made it with Cartopy , Shapely , and Natural Earth data . The surnames are taken mainly from the appropriate Wikipedia page . Redditors provided data for Sweden , Norway , Lithuania , Latvia , Bulgaria , Macedonia , Serbia , Montenegro , Bosnia and Herzegovina , Turkey , and Catalonia (Ferrer = Smith), as well as corrected my mistakes in Ukraine and Austria . I sincerely appreciate their help. Click on the links to see relevant comments. This is a quick hack, not serious research. The map takes into account countries rather than ethnic or cultural areas (update as of October 1, 2015: now the maps of Spain and Serbia include the most frequent Catalan and Kosovar occupational surnames, respectively). The methodology is simplistic: I always picked the most frequent occupational surname even though Wikipedia aptly notices that in the Netherlands the set of {Smit, Smits, Smid, de Smit, Smet, Smith} outnumbers both {Visser, Visscher, Vissers, de Visser} and {Bakker, Bekke...
The Machine Stops
New York City is the greatest public works project in the USA . It is a city of tubes, grids, circuits and networks. We are organised by numbered floors and numbered streets and numbered apartments, fed and watered through great pipes and tunnels and bridges, shuttled to and fro in shifts along lines. On Monday night the magnificent machines were revealed to us, as they failed one by one. American newscasters hyperventilate about everything, and foam at the mouth when the subject is weather systems over the Northeastern United States, so there seemed no special reason to pay them any urgent attention in the days leading up to Sandy. The storm only became real when the governor announced the closure of the subway system on Sunday morning. The process takes eight hours. Employees moved train cars, removed tracks that might be damaged by salt water, primed pumps, cleaned drains, evacuated stations and cleared rail yards prone to flooding. That night, the Metr...
Update on the Art of Yanko Tsvetkov - the Mapping Stereotypes Project
A little more than a year ago I posted here about this master cartographer, or rather, social analyst: The Geography of Prejudice indeed! Here's an update from Yanko's website. Click and go! And I want a t-shirt :-Þ Now, Yanko did not do this one, nor do I know who created it, but here it goes, Europe according to the Portuguese: Let's honor here those I find priceless :) Madonnaland for Malawi?
The Geography of Prejudice indeed! by Yanko Tsvetkov
Bulgaria, because Yanko was born there :) London, where Yanko now resides: Germany (we're Oceania? Was bedeutet das?) Italy: France, runner-up for most prejudiced of them all: UK, another runner-up for most prejudiced of them all: The US of A, winner!
The terrible persistence of Volcanoes
Simon Winchester for Lapham's Quarterly The map is almost uncannily similar: a spray of black dots showing the recordings of a foul gray haze spreading all across Europe, from Helsinki to Naples, from Heligoland to Majorca, and reaching eventually to Aleppo and Damascus—and all caused by clouds of ash from an immense volcano erupting far across the sea in Iceland. This was a map drawn not this year, but created from data collected in 1783. The volcano, called Laki, erupted for eight dismal months without cease. It ruined crops, it lowered temperatures and drastically altered the weather. It killed 9,000 people, it drenched the European forests in acid rain, it caused skin lesions in children and the deaths of millions of cattle and, by one account, it was a contributing factor (due to hunger-inducing famines) to the outbreak six years later of the French Revolution. Volcanoes are generators of unintended planetary consequences to a far greater deg...
10 places that don’t exist (but should)
10. Hundred Acre Wood The home of Winnie the Pooh , Christopher Robin, Piglet, Eeyore, Tigger and friends, the lush and charming Hundred Acre Wood is the literary soul mate of Ashdown Forest in Sussex. The perfect place to get in touch with your inner child, the Wood is known for its honey, tree climbing and the endangered Heffalump species. 9. Narnia The kingdom of Narnia , brought to life by C.S Lewis, captured the heart of young readers desperate for their own wardrobe portal to a wondrous land where animals talk and magic abounds. Lewis was inspired by his native Northern Ireland when conjuring Narnia’s wildflowers, haunting castles and majestic mountains, but the creators of the recent film version decided that New Zealand did it for them. The latest film is scheduled to be shot at White Island in the breathtaking Bay of Plenty . 8. El Dorado The mythical city of gold has come to represent things opulent or unattainable. Inspired by stories of a ‘gilded’ man, ...