5 March 2023
.book-toc { max-width: 8rem; } Europe and Mankind—English translation Translator’s notes Europe and Mankind is an interesting essay written by Nikolai Sergeyevich Trubetzkoy (1890–1938), who happens to be a first cousin thrice removed. He was primarily a linguist, but occasionally wrote on historical and sociological topics.
I merely stumbled upon this essay and found it extremely relevant to today’s world. However, there doesn’t appear to be an English translation available.
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10 March 2019
10 March 2019 Buy high-res file -- (copied from Twitter)
After reading about Blantyre, Malawi I got curious about other places that were renamed. Areas with significant English or Afrikaans presence avoided renaming.
Shoutout to newly christened Eswatini. Also sorry for not including Madagascar, I got lazy.
6 May 2018
6 May 2018
Four possible outcomes in Korea The Panmunjom Declaration is an exciting step towards peace on the Korean peninsula—a goal many have worked hard towards across many decades. We have forecasted four scenarios of potential developments as a result of future summits, closed-door deliberations, and agreements. A realistic view of current developments would mean that the future most likely lies somewhere between Scenarios 1 and 2.
The summit is an easy political win.
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23 April 2018
Reconstructing Kenmore, 1890 23 April 2018
I wrote this short essay for a class called “History of Cartography”. Prof. Danzer thought I did a good job, so I decided to share it here.
The area of modern-day Boston between Massachusetts Avenue and Kenmore Square has no common name, despite being one of the city’s most important transport nodes. Beacon Street, Commonwealth Avenue, Massachusetts Avenue, the Mass Turnpike and MBTA all converge here, in addition to the Bowker Overpass—these 50 acres handle virtually all Boston’s long-distance east-west traffic.
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27 February 2018
27 February 2018
What if China falls apart? I am not an expert on China or its government. I am just a casual observer with some knowledge of what happened in the USSR, and I saw some parallels that I wanted to explore, just as a thought experiment. Design shamelessly based on a great Nat Geo map hanging in my room.
China is an absolute behemoth—it’s the last traditional empire that is still more or less intact (Mongolia and Taiwan have slipped away, though).
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7 December 2017
List of Western countries 7 December 2017
There is no single definition of what the West is, so the list of countries changes depending on context. The different contexts are outlined in this Wikipedia article. Since people are now visiting this page more frequently, I will present three definitions, which people can use depending on context:
The Latin West (cultural definition) – A broad definition of the West is all countries that were shaped historically by Western Christianity – today’s Catholic and Protestant churches.
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2 May 2016
Long Island according to Urban Dictionary 31 January 2016
(click to enlarge) This one’s pretty straightforward. Like the Washington State map, this was made at a friend’s request. This time I decided to make it a little more empirically sound by sourcing the stereotypes from Urban Dictionary, rather than vaguely coming up with them in my head.
The result is pretty edgy but also kind of hilarious. All I did was type in the name of a neighborhood and put the key words that were in the UD entry.
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2 May 2015
Correlations in Ukraine 2 May 2015
The electoral division in Ukraine is very well-publicized, with countless maps all over Western media cropping up, showing the diagonal line that splits the country roughly north-south.
As someone with a relatively close connection to Ukraine, I had always been deeply aware of this divide. But I never really thought about the root causes, beyond the idea of the Polish, Russian and Ottoman imperial boundaries.
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3 November 2014
Proposed Australian states 3 November 2014
There have been many proposals for states and territories to be added to Australia, many of which were brought up during the era of Australian imperialism. The late 1800s saw many Australian politicians, particularly those from Queensland and Victoria, petition London to annex neighboring Pacific islands without much success. While the territories were worthless to London, many Australians saw them as tokens that confirmed a new Australian Empire.
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