Chet Van Duzer’s Sea Monsters on Medieval and Renaissance Maps does what it says on the tin: you really will find out more than you ever wanted to about the sea monsters that appeared on medieval and renaissance maps. (Van Duzer defines them as anything that a contemporary reader would consider exotic, whether it was real or imaginary, so walruses appear along with krakens.) It’s a dizzying catalogue of them, all kinds of them, from medieval mappaemundi (actually, there’s a Roman map in there too) all the way to Ortelius and the late sixteenth century. By the seventeenth century sea monsters were giving way to sailing vessels, and to a loss of ornamentation and illustration in general.

But: sea monsters. What was up with them? For the most part this book gets lost in the weeds, focusing in detail on monster after monster, but Van Duzer does sketch out an argument in the introduction:

First, they may serve as graphic records of literature about sea monsters, indications of possible dangers to sailors — and datapoints in the geography of the marvellous. Second, they may function as decorative elements which enliven the image of the world, suggesting in a general way that the sea can be dangerous, but more emphatically indicating and drawing attention to the vitality of the oceans and the variety of creatures in the world, and to the cartographer’s artistic talents. Of course these two roles are compatible, and sea monsters can play both at the same time. (p. 11)

Van Duzer goes beyond the map in his discussion of sea monsters. For one thing, he points out the non-cartographic sources of sea monsters, such as works of natural history, and compares them to the monsters on the map. He also looks at the economics of sea monsters, which were embellishments that cost extra and may have required a specialist artist: “if the client commissioning the chart did not pay for sea monsters, he or she did not receive them” (p. 10).

For my part, it seems to me that sea monsters in renaissance maps are also holdovers of medieval iconography, sort of a cartographic appendix. Being a big-picture sort, I glazed over a bit at all the detail, but this sort of detail is exactly the sort of thing that illuminates the subject. Between this book and The Art of the Map (reviewed here), I’ve learned quite a bit about the margins and empty spaces of old maps lately.

Previously: Here Be Sea Monsters.

Number of astronauts announced yesterday in NASA’s candidate class of 2013: 8.

Number who are women: 4.

Smallest astronaut classes: Group 1 (1959) and Group 7 (1969), 7 astronauts each.

Largest astronaut class: Group 16 (1996), 44 astronauts.

First astronaut class with women: Group 8 (1978), 6 women.

Most women in an astronaut class: 9, in Group 16 (1996).

Average number of women per astronaut class, 1978-2013: 3.6.

Average percentage: 18.9%.

Number of men selected for NASA astronaut training, 1959-2013: 316.

Number of women: 51.

Nelson Minar has created a vector tile map of all the rivers in the United States. It’s an amazing map, one that is being compared with Ben Fry’s All Streets (previously) or this more recent map of U.S. roads. Only it’s rivers-only, not roads-only. Via io9 and Kottke.

That’s two of my questions answered about Sigma’s 18-35mm ƒ/1.8 zoom lens for APS-C cameras: it’ll be available in July, and it’ll cost around $800 (£800/€1000) — a lot less than expected (DP Review, Engadget, Nikon Rumors, Photography Blog). As for whether it’s any good, there are some samples out there: here and here. And here’s a review. My suspicion that this might be a good lens for candid shots at conventions (low light, close quarters) has not been dampened. I’ll probably have to get it. There’s really nothing else out there for APS-C cameras (Canon EF-S, Nikon DX) with that aperture at those focal lengths other than 30-35mm prime lenses.

Previously: Sigma’s New Fast Zoom Lens.

More cat health adventures. Earlier this week Scourge’s left eye clouded up, which obviously required attention. Anterior uveitis, said the vet, which could result from one of two things: head trauma or feline leukaemia virus. Now FeLV is obviously a Very Bad Thing, particularly in a multiple-cat household, so we were crossing our fingers for head trauma. After all, Scourge is (still!) a high-energy kitten, and tends to bounce off furniture, walls and other cats. With his head. A lot. A sharp bonkus to the conkus was a very plausible culprit.

Fortunately the FeLV test came back negative. Head trauma it is! And two sets of eye drops for the next ten days to heal up his eye. One set of those eye drops is atropine. It turns out that atropine causes much hilarity. For one thing it dilates the pupils, and since it’s just the one eye getting the drops, you get only one eye dilated. Which looks kind of freaky, as you can see here. For another, atropine causes hypersalivation: for a few minutes after the drops are administered, the kitten just froths at the mouth, rendering him briefly eligible for a cable news talk show.

Right now he’s attacking Doofus with his usual vim, so I’m not sure this has slowed him down much. At most he’s gone from prestissimo molto e con brio down to allegro assai. A little less of a blur. For now.

It’s a bit of a relief; this hasn’t been a good week for cats in our social circle.

Evidently I got a bit carried away. Yesterday I redesigned The Map Room’s front page to fix the broken and make it look nice, and once I was finished that I had a few more ideas, and before long — well, as you can see (unless you’re reading this via RSS), this site has a new design this morning. Hope you like it.

Web design trends have a pretty short shelf life, and what I came up with in February 2011, when this site first launched, now looks a bit dated. My goal was to freshen things up a bit and reduce clutter and cruft: the conventional wisdom is much more minimalist now. So: fewer menus and sidebar items, fewer CSS animations, less JavaScript, less greyscale, more colour and contrast.

A Mac version of Apple’s maps was among the new features announced for Mac OS X 10.9 Mavericks at Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) on Monday. Coverage: 9to5Mac, The Verge. I’m surprised to see that they’re doing it as a standalone application rather than on the Web, which is what I’d expected. One trick of the app is that you can send turn-by-turn directions to your iOS device. There’s an API, so developers will also be able to integrate the maps into their own apps. If they want. Cue old and tired jokes about Apple maps’ quality in three, two …

Stefan Ekman’s Here Be Dragons is a book-length examination of the use of maps and settings in fantasy literature. Maps and settings. Which is to say that maps are not the sole focus of this work: mark that. There are four main chapters, only one of which deals with maps; the remaining three deal with the issue of borders and territories, the relationship between nature and culture in fantasy cities, and the relationship between ruler and realm. Taken as a whole, this book discusses the role of place in fantasy.

But I won’t be discussing that whole here: I am no literary scholar, and can’t say much of value about the chapters that do not discuss maps — nothing that would rise above the level of a last-minute undergraduate paper, anyway. But maps are something I can say something about, especially fantasy maps, since I myself have been paying attention to them over the past decade, first during my time blogging at The Map Room (see the Imaginary Places category) and since then more sporadically, but with more focus, for my fantasy maps project.

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One of the things I’m interested in for my fantasy maps project is the origin of fantasy map design: where does that tell-tale fantasy map look come from?

Look at enough fantasy maps, and it’s hard not to notice certain commonalities in design. As Stefan Ekman demonstrates in Here Be Dragons (yes, I have a review coming — soon!), the maps that accompany fantasy novels tend to be characterized by a number of typical features. “Like much high fantasy,” he writes, “the secondary-world maps follow a pseudomedieval aesthetic according to which dashes of pre-Enlightenment mapping conventions are rather routinely added to a mostly modern creation.”¹ Fantasy maps look nothing like medieval maps, and can in many ways be seen as the hybrid descendent of 19th-century amateur mapmaking and early-20th-century children’s book illustrations.

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NASA has released an updated map of the bedrock beneath the Antarctic ice sheet; the map, called Bedmap2, adds considerable detail — a tighter grid and millions of data points — to its decade-old predecessor. The image above exaggerates vertical scale by a factor of 17 to increase visibility. See also this short video. Image credit: NASA-GSFC.