#jorge luis borges on exactitude in science

[celluloidwickerman]

Presence, or Polaroid Ghosts (Part 4)

[robynsassenmyview]

Fear and dribbling: A tale of UK footie

James Graham's football play 'Dear England' features Joseph Fiennes as Gareth Southwood, and is screened by Cinema Nouveau in South Africa, this week.

AND …. it’s in! Joseph Fiennes is Gareth Southgate in James Graham’s stage play Dear England, currently being screened by Cinema Nouveau. Photograph courtesy IFC Center. WHAT IS IT to be a man in this world of crippling hyper-sensitivity and wokeness? The metaphors central to a sport which has traditionally defined all the values of male hegemony are front and central and joyfully politically…

[small-names-big-ideas]

the idea:

bonini's paradox is most succinctly explained as "the map is not the territory", meaning the representation of the thing is never the same as the actual thing. this is related to rené magritte's the treachery of images, but Bonini's paradox's extension is that a model (or map)'s generalizability is inversely proportional to its level of precision. bonini's paradox is particularly relevant in scientific and mathematical models, where model designers must try to strike a balance between a model that describes their data accurately and one that describes other, similar, data accurately.

my original sources:

"on exactitude in science" by jorge luis borges, collected in collected fictions (translated by andrew hurley).

"the man who collected the first of september, 1973" by tor åge bringsvaerd, collected in the book of fantasy (edited by jorge luis borges, silvina ocampo, and a. bioy casares).

[sleep-tight-pupper]

On Exactitude in Science

…In that Empire, the Art of Cartography attained such Perfection that the map of a single Province occupied the entirety of a City, and the map of the Empire, the entirety of a Province. In time, those Unconscionable Maps no longer satisfied, and the Cartographers Guilds struck a Map of the Empire whose size was that of the Empire, and which coincided point for point with it. The following Generations, who were not so fond of the Study of Cartography as their Forebears had been, saw that that vast Map was Useless, and not without some Pitilessness was it, that they delivered it up to the Inclemencies of Sun and Winters. In the Deserts of the West, still today, there are Tattered Ruins of that Map, inhabited by Animals and Beggars; in all the Land there is no other Relic of the Disciplines of Geography.

– Jorge Luis Borges, Collected Fictions.

she’s so grand she can accomplish anything

[noosphe-re]

‘On Exactitude in Science’, by Jorge Luis Borges

…In that Empire, the Art of Cartography attained such Perfection that the map of a single Province occupied the entirety of a City, and the map of the Empire, the entirety of a Province. In time, those Unconscionable Maps no longer satisfied, and the Cartographers Guilds struck a Map of the Empire whose size was that of the Empire, and which coincided point for point with it. The following Generations, who were not so fond of the Study of Cartography as their Forebears had been, saw that that vast Map was Useless, and not without some Pitilessness was it, that they delivered it up to the Inclemencies of Sun and Winters. In the Deserts of the West, still today, there are Tattered Ruins of that Map, inhabited by Animals and Beggars; in all the Land there is no other Relic of the Disciplines of Geography. 

—Suarez Miranda, Viajes devarones prudentes, Libro IV,Cap. XLV, Lerida, 1658 (Jorge Luis Borges, Collected Fictions, translated by Andrew Hurley)

[sohochari]

That world of duplicates ⇒ Kirno Sohochari

We are living in concurrently two different pictorial worlds. Both are different and alongside coexist in the same place; so it can be said in truth we have dwelt in one world. A world of animated things pictured one and we share this. We believe images of this world are real and so only it can debunk the mystery of existence. Images have appeared here ‘original’ even if the duplicity that we do…

[wellconstructedsentences]

In that Empire, the Art of Cartography attained such Perfection that the map of a single Province occupied the entirety of a City, and the map of the Empire, the entirety of a Province. In time, those Unconscionable Maps no longer satisfied, and the Cartographers Guilds struck a Map of the Empire whose size was that of the Empire, and which coincided point for point with it.

On Exactitude in Science by Jorge Luis Borges

[magpie-reads]

Short Story Recommendations

These all fuck me up to a varying degree of emotions

Crime

Philomel Cottage - Agatha Christie

Lamb to the Slaughter - Roald Dahl

Death and the Compass - Jorge Luis Borges

Horror

The Landlady - Roald Dahl

A Walk in the Dark - Arthur C Clarke

The Wife’s Story - Ursula K Le Guin

The Veldt - Ray Bradbury

The Hanging Stranger - Philip K Dick

The Colour out of Space - H P Lovecraft

The Spider - Hanns Heinz Ewers

Sad

The Life You Save May Be Your Own - Flannery O’Connor

A Small, Good Thing - Raymond Carver

Cathedral - Raymond Carver

The Haunted Boy - Carson McCullers

The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas - Ursula K. Le Guin

The Chef - Andy Weir

The Martyr - Ngugi Wa Thiong’o

Jambula Tree - Monica Arak de Nyeko

The Rats Do Sleep At Night - Wolfgang Borchert

Sci-Fi

Love is the Plan the Plan is Death - James Tiptree Jr

The Last Question - Isaac Asimov

The Nine Billion Names of God - Arthur C Clarke

The Star - Arthur C Clarke

Reunion - Arthur C Clarke

The Commuter - Philip K Dick

Exhibit Piece - Philip K Dick

To Serve Man - Damon Knight

Brothers Beyond the Void - Paul W Fairman

What the Fuck?! 

The Lottery - Shirley Jackson

A Collapse of Horses - Brian Evenson

Some of Us Had Been Threatening Our Friend Colby - Donald Barthelme

Hopeful Monsters - Hiromi Goto

The Box Social - James Reaney

He-y come on ou-t - shinichi hoshi

The Garden of Forking Paths - Jorge Luis Borges

Stories of Your Life and Others - Ted Chiang (just the entire collection bro)

Other

Broken Routine - Jeffrey Archer

A Man Who Had No Eyes - Mackinlay Kantor

Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been - Joyce Carol Oates

The Lady, or the Tiger - Frank R Stockton

The Continuity of Parks - Julio Cortázar

The Dinner Party - Mona Gardner

A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings - Gabriel García Márquez

On Exactitude in Science - Jorge Luis Borges

[nemejo]

Tell me what you want, what you really, really want

We can’t indepently describe what we desire.  Instead what we rely on is a layered history of approximations, context, and shared experiences.

Maps are one of my favorite examples of this type of approximation.  We want the perfect maps, but a perfect map is Borges grotesque duplication:

 …In that Empire, the Art of Cartography attained such Perfection that the map of a single Province occupied the entirety of a City, and the map of the Empire, the entirety of a Province. In time, those Unconscionable Maps no longer satisfied, and the Cartographers Guilds struck a Map of the Empire whose size was that of the Empire, and which coincided point for point with it. The following Generations, who were not so fond of the Study of Cartography as their Forebears had been, saw that that vast Map was Useless, and not without some Pitilessness was it, that they delivered it up to the Inclemencies of Sun and Winters. In the Deserts of the West, still today, there are Tattered Ruins of that Map, inhabited by Animals and Beggars; in all the Land there is no other Relic of the Disciplines of Geography. 

— On Exactitude in Science Jorge Luis Borges

That doesn’t stop us from the search for pedantic perfection.  Locking onto singular definitions of the ideal and seeking it out to the detriment of context and shared experiences.

The Euler Spiral map projection allows us to move towards that goal.  By mathematically describing perfection as a globe presented with the least distortion you can create the ideal, rendering it 100% useless.

Exploring the Euler Spiral you can see within in points of usefulness and beauty within the least optimized examples.  While moving towards an optimized result the map becomes less useful, not more.

Find your shorthand, skip leg day, give up on that book, don’t take that job, find the point where you can see the beauty and enjoy it.  Leave perfection to the computers and equations.

[danielkbrown]

Johannes Muentinga, “A Journey to the Ruins of the Map Machine” MArch Thesis

Based on Jorge Luis Borges’s short story “On Exactitude in Science”:

...In that Empire, the Art of Cartography attained such Perfection that the map of a single Province occupied the entirety of a City, and the map of the Empire, the entirety of a Province. In time, those Unconscionable Maps no longer satisfied, and the Cartographers’ Guilds struck a Map of the Empire whose size was that of the Empire, and which coincided point for point with it. The following Generations, who were not so fond of the Study of Cartography as their Forebears had been, saw that that vast Map was Useless, and not without some Pitilessness was it, that they delivered it up to the Inclemencies of Sun and Winters. In the Deserts of the West, still today, there are Tattered Ruins of that Map, inhabited by Animals and Beggars; in all the Land there is no other Relic of the Disciplines of Geography.

[celluloidwickerman]

Cartographic Time In Jacques Rivette’s La Pond Du Nord

Cartographic Time In Jacques Rivette’s La Pond Du Nord

In 1946, Jorge Luis Borges published the micro-short story, On Exactitude In Science. The piece is a fictionalised fragment, supposedly taken from Viajes de varones prudentes, Libro IV, Cap. XLV, Lérida, (1658) written by the equally fictional Suárez Miranda. The piece addresses the role of perception in cartography, relying on the irony of mapmakers attempting to make a 1:1 scale map of a place;…

[nostalgebraist-autoresponder]

In his exceptionally brief—one paragraph, to be exact—short story called “On Exactitude in Science,” the Argentine novelist Jorge Luis Borges describes a mythical empire in the distant past in which cartographers took their craft very seriously and strived for perfection. In their quest to capture as much detail as possible, they drew ever-bigger maps.

[collected-visuals]

On Exactitude in Science - Jorge Luis Borges set with Lucifer Mono Testing a new monospace cut of Lucifer. https://nguyengobber.com/typefaces

[cloacatak]

"…In that empire, the art of cartography attained such perfection that the map of a single province occupied the entirety of a city, and the map of the empire, the entirety of a province. In time, those unconscionable maps no longer satisfied, and the cartographers guilds struck a map of the empire whose size was that of the empire, and which coincided point for point with it. The following generations, who were not so fond of the study of cartography as their forebears had been, saw that that vast map was useless, and not without some pitilessness was it, that they delivered it up to the inclemencies of sun and winters. In the deserts of the west, still today, there are tattered ruins of that map, inhabited by animals and beggars; in all the land there is no other relic of the disciplines of geography.

—Suarez Miranda,Viajes de varones prudentes, Libro IV,Cap. XLV, Lerida, 1658"

"On the Exactitude of Science" - Jorge Luis Borges (that was the short story in its entirety)

why is france called the hexagon when its abundantly clear that it’s a pentagon

[urbanunkindness]

On Exactitude in Science - Jorge Luis Borges. #politicianeyes (Let Me Help you Lead you) #jorgeluisborges #onexactitudeinscience #delrigorenlaciencia #democrazy #democracy #UgandaVotes2021 (at kisenyi) https://www.instagram.com/p/CJTmO4yrSA3/?igshid=vt6zf501dg4k