Starting tomorrow foreigners traveling to Europe will have their fingerprints scanned and picture taken when they arrive in 28 EU nations under new regulations. Those who don’t provide such biometric data will be denied entry.
The change comes as the European Union rolls out its new Entry/Exit System for not just Americans but all visitors from outside Europe’s Schengen Area, a group of countries that allows people in the zone to travel across borders freely without going through customs checks.
The new system will be introduced gradually over a roughly six-month period starting Oct. 12. It will eventually replace passport stamps, according to the EU.
A 17th-century, Safavid brass, Mecca-Centered World Map, from Persia.
The circular brass base plate with centrally-pivoted rotating brass diametrical rule fixed with removable pin, a glazed circular recess for compass to lower part, the base plate finely engraved and chased with an elliptical grid overlaid with inscriptions in thuluth naming the geographical locations on the grid, vertical and horizontal axis denoting longitude and latitude.
The elliptical grid surrounded by four cartouches filled with fine inscriptions in thuluth on stippled grounds with scrolling tendrils, the border with a series of further inscription-filled cartouches denoting the bearings, applied hinged sundial to upper edge, hinged latitude arc to left hand side, two applied splayed brass feet to upper side of reverse.
Most of us were educated to believe in a wildly inaccurate world map. Odds are that you have accepted the standard Mercator projection as the actual map of the world. But it’s completely misleading, making Africa look about the same size as Greenland. In reality, Africa is a 14 times bigger! You could fit the U.S., China, India, Japan, Mexico, and much of Europe inside it and still have room to spare.
Fortunately, there’s a better map available now: the Equal Earth projection. It gets the sizes right, accurately showing just how big Africa is and presenting continents in shapes that are closer to how they look on a globe.
The Correct the Map campaign challenges the distortion of Africa’s true size on world maps, aiming to empower global understanding and respect for the continent’s significance.
By now you all know that I love a clever map. And, there’s nothing better than a brilliant series of maps with a transit map theme. The map above is a terrific reimagining of North American rivers as a classic Tube style map. From the author:
This series of river maps is done up in a style inspired by urban transit maps such as those pioneered by Harry Beck in the 1930s for the London Underground. Straight lines, 45-degree angles, simple geometry. The result is more of an abstract network representation than you would find on most maps, and it’s not meant to be taken too seriously — I would not recommend actually transiting through these rivers, as many portions of them are not navigable. But they do, nonetheless, connect us.
If you’d like to know a bit more about how the maps were made, including the many many semi-arbitrary decisions that go in to them, click here.
The new Chronotrains – Europe Train Map allows you to select any city in Europe and view an animated isochrone layer show you how far you can travel by train over the course of 12 hours. As the timeline plays, the isochrone polygons steadily spread out from your chosen station, illustrating all the destinations you can reach within an ever-increasing travel window.
Of course, the main Chronotrains map is packed with even more useful features. In addition to showing how far you can travel within a chosen time period from any European station, it also lets you explore all the night train departures across Europe, view every direct destination available from a given station, and even access links to book train tickets.
“The Nine Billion Names of God” is a 1953 science fiction short story by British writer Arthur C. Clarke. The story was among the stories selected in 1970 by the Science Fiction Writers of America as one of the best science fiction short stories published before the creation of the Nebula Awards.
In a Tibetan lamasery, the monks seek to list all of the names of God. They believe the Universe was created for this purpose, and that once this naming is completed, God will bring the Universe to an end. Three centuries ago, the monks created an alphabet in which they calculated they could encode all the possible names of God, numbering about 9,000,000,000 (“nine billion”) and each having no more than nine characters. Writing the names out by hand, as they had been doing, even after eliminating various nonsense combinations, would take another 15,000 years; the monks wish to use modern technology to finish this task in 100 days.[
They rent a computer capable of printing all the possible permutations, and hire two Westerners to install and program the machine. The computer operators are skeptical but play along. After three months, as the job nears completion, they fear that the monks will blame the computer (and, by extension, its operators) when nothing happens. The Westerners leave slightly earlier than their scheduled departure without warning the monks, so that it will complete its final print run shortly after they leave. On their way to the airfield they pause on the mountain path. Under a clear night sky they estimate that it must be just about the time that the monks are pasting the final printed names into their holy books. Then they notice that “overhead, without any fuss, the stars were going out.”
The short film below by Dominique Filhol was adapted from the original story.
If the film fails to open in your browser, please click HERE.
Illustrator and designer Matt Stevens creates fanciful versions of pulp fiction book covers from films and TV shows that never originate as books. He imaginatively blends a variety of graphic styles and typography into book covers . Stevens began this project in 2023 and has now published the results in a collection dubbed Good Movies as Old Books—available in bookshops and online.
Here’s what Stevens had to say about the project in an interview with Print magazine :
My goal with the style was to try new things and create interesting combinations. Oftentimes, I was trying to do something that had not been done for a particular film. So many of these more known films have so much visual imagery already associated with them, I really focused on doing something that hadn’t been done before, or where the style created a really interesting combination of style and film. I would keep a list of films and a big Pinterest board of styles I liked or wanted to try. Often keeping those things both going at the same time, the combinations would just reveal themselves as I worked.
by Louise Glück
There was one summer
that returned many times over
there was one flower unfurling
taking many forms
Crimson of the monarda, pale gold of the late roses
There was one love
There was one love, there were many nights
Smell of the mock orange tree
Corridors of jasmine and lilies
Still the wind blew
There were many winters but I closed my eyes
The cold air white with dissolved wings
There was one garden when the snow melted
Azure and white; I couldn’t tell
my solitude from love —
There was one love; he had many voices
There was one dawn; sometimes
we watched it together
I was here
I was here
There was one summer returning over and over
there was one dawn
I grew old watching
Travel Between The Pages 