Remapping the present

Question 1

What was the journey to mapping japan

Answer 1

In 1801, Ino Tadataka presented his progress to Shogunal Leaders, who were impressed with his work. They sent him to northern Honshu, to map out the Pacific Coastline of the island. This put him over 100 km mapped mark, and achieved his initial goal of mapping 1 degree latitude, which calculated to 110.75 km.

Over the next 2 years, Ino mapped out all of Eastern Coast of Japan, and started to move inwards. He showed his findings to shogun Tokugawa Ienari, who shocked by the insane progress, hired Ino as a worker.

Ino was sent to map out all of Western Japan Coastline, fully funded by the central Japanese government. While initially, this was predicted to take 5 years, due to rugged terrain and intricate shorelines, the project took over a decade to complete.

Over a total of 17 years, tens of thousands of kilometers, Ino Tadataka and his team managed to create the first fairly accurate map of Japan, and possibly the world.

Question 2

Who was Ino Tadataka

Answer 2

Ino Tadataka was an eccentric wealthy Japanese who, upon retiring, aimed to map out Japan. He began this insane journey in 1800s, and while initially working with a small team, began growing his operation.

Question 3

Oldest maps - Strabo’s Map

Answer 3

Year Created: Unknown – believed to be no earlier than 20 BCE

Country of Origin: Anatolia during the transitional period of the Roman Republic into the Roman Empire (modern-day Turkey)

Creator: Greek geographer, historian, and philosopher Strabo

Materials Used: Ink and parchment

Area Depicted: The known world at the time to the ancient Greeks and Romans

Question 4

Oldest maps - Eratosthenes’ Map

Answer 4

Year Created: c.276 – c.195/194 BCE

Country of Origin: Ancient Greece

Creator: Greek mathematician, geographer, poet, astronomer, and music theorist Eratosthenes

Materials Used: Ink and parchment

Area Depicted: An improved map of the known world at the time to the ancient Greeks

Question 5

Oldest Maps - Hecataeus’ Map

Answer 5

Year Created: c.550 – 476 BCE

Country of Origin: Ancient Greek city of Miletus (area in modern-day Turkey)

Creator: Greek historian and geographer Hecataeus

Materials Used: Unknown

Area Depicted: The known world at the time to ancient Greeks

Question 6

Oldest Maps - Anaximander’s Map

Answer 6

Year Created: c.610 – 546 BCE

Country of Origin: Ancient Greek city of Miletus (area in modern-day Turkey)

Creator: Pre-Socratic Greek philosopher Anaximander

Materials Used: Unknown for sure but possibly an etched rounded metal surface.

Area Depicted: The known world at the time to ancient Greeks

Question 7

Oldest Maps - Babylonion’s Map of the World

Answer 7

Year Created: c.6th century BCE

Country of Origin: Babylon, Iraq

Creator: Unknown

Materials Used: Engraved clay tablet

Area Depicted: The known world at the time to Ancient Babylonians

Question 8

Oldest maps - Turin Papyrus Map

Answer 8

Year Created: c.1160 BCE

Country of Origin: Egypt

Creator: Egyptian scribe Amennakhte

Materials Used: Drawings on papyrus

Area Depicted: Topographical map of Wadi Hammamat

Question 9

Oldest Maps - Abauntuz Lamizulo Rock Map

Answer 9

Year Created: c.14,000 BCE

Country of Origin: Navarre, Spain

Creator: Unknown – possibly Magdalenian hunter-gatherers

Materials Used: Engraved rock

Area Depicted: Area around Abauntz Lamizulo cave and animals such as red deer and ibex

Question 10

Oldest maps - Lascaux Cave Star Map

Answer 10

Year Created: c.17,000 BCE

Country of Origin: near Montignac, France

Creator: Unknown

Area Depicted: Area around Abauntz Lamizulo cave and animals such as red deer and ibex

Question 11

Oldest maps - Mammoth Tusk Map

Answer 11

Year Created: c.25,000 BCE

Country of Origin: Pavlov, Czech Republic

Creator: Unknown

Materials Used: Engraved mammoth tusk

Area Depicted: Mountains, rivers, valleys, and routes around ancient Pavlov

Question 12

Google maps business loss

Answer 12

The business of google maps is getting eaten up by social media apps like tiktok and instagram. Instead of young people going to the well curated and research databases of Google, they flock to the visually appealing world of social media, where large influencers hold the most control over which restaurants are popular and which get no attention.

Question 13

Benifits of using a globe over regular surface maps

Answer 13

Using a globe over a map can have numerous benefits, such as accurate representation, better visualization of Earth’s geometry, improved perspective, etc. Despite these advantages, globes have some limitations, such as being impractical for large-scale mapping, difficult to measure, challenging to see the entire world at once, and less portable compared to folding maps.

Question 14

Area-preserving projection

Answer 14

Also called equal area or equivalent projection, these projections maintain the relative size of different regions on the map.

Question 15

Shape-preserving projection

Answer 15

Often referred to as conformal or orthomorphic, these projections maintain accurate shapes of regions and local angles.

Question 16

Direction-preserving projection

Answer 16

This category includes conformal, orthomorphic, and azimuthal projections, which preserve directions, but only from the central point for azimuthal projections.

Question 17

Distance-preserving projection

Answer 17

Known as equidistant projections, they display the true distance between one or two points and all other points on the map.

Question 18

Cylindrical Projections:

Answer 18

These projections involve wrapping a cylinder around the Earth and projecting its features onto the cylindrical surface. Examples are the Mercator, Transverse Mercator, and Miller Cylindrical projections.

Question 19

Conic Projections

Answer 19

For these projections, a cone is placed over the Earth, and its features are projected onto the conical surface. Common examples are the Lambert Conformal Conic and Albers Equal-Area Conic projections.

Question 20

Azimuthal Projections:

Answer 20

Also referred to as planar or zenithal projections, these use a flat plane that touches the Earth at a single point, projecting the Earth’s features onto the plane. Azimuthal Equidistant, Stereographic, and Orthographic projections are examples.

Question 21

Pseudocylindrical Projections

Answer 21

These projections resemble cylindrical projections but employ curved lines instead of straight lines for meridians and parallels. The Sinusoidal, Mollweide, and Goode Homolosine projections are popular examples.

Question 22

Blue Marble Earth photos

Answer 22

December 7, 1972 was the first time a photo encompassing all of Earth was taken. This photo was named the Blue Marble. It was taken from the Apollo 17 mission, on the way to the Moon. This image showed Earth as a vulnerable planet, with no borders or divisions. Taken by a Hasselblad camera, it was extremely high quality and accurate.
This image served as a representation of many environmental movements, pushing humans to work to protect this planet, rather than fight for it. This was during the time of the cold war, and by showing our one planet, humbled people into working together.

Question 23

Pale Blue Dot Earth photo

Answer 23

February 14, 1990. A photo of Earth, as a pale blue dot was taken. The photo was taken 6 billion kilometers away from us, and showed Earth as what it was, a tiny spec of mass floating in infinite space.
This photo was taken from Voyager 1, an unmanned mission traveling as far away from Earth as possible. Voyager 1 was launched in 1977, and traveled over 13 years before taking the famous pale blue dot photo.
This photo was another humbling experience for humanity. Everyone we know, everything we have, every human being is on that tiny, microscopic dot. All of our lives are lived on that dot, every good, bad, happy, sad moment was on that dot.

Question 24

Importance of photos of earth from afar

Answer 24

Photos like this do not show things that humans consider to be very important- such as national boundaries. However, they can highlight which regions are less economically developed than the others. This can be done by seeing which parts of the world go dark at night. These images do this by repeatedly scanning the same scene a lot of times and identifying pixels by different light levels using technology known as VIIRS . It is shown that continents- South America and Africa are the least lit up continents, which can reflect their economic status as well.

The above photo was taken by a NASA satellite, NOAA.

Question 25

What was the “Night Time Light”

Answer 25

In 2012, NASA presented the view of Earth Illuminations at Night. This showed how much light was coming from countries at night time throughout the world, and it showed some shocking discoveries.
The image shows Europe as the most illuminated at night, followed by North America, Asia, and the Middle East. Australia, Africa, and South America were all mostly dark, depicting the economical development of continents.
These images helped us understand the level of development in continents, with even though Africa being the second largest continent by size, being the least illuminated and economically developed.

Question 26

Daylight Saving Time

Answer 26

Daylight Saving Time, thought of by Benjamin Franklin, proves to save millions of USD just by using daylight more effectively. This idea was thought of by Benjamin on his visit to France, where he found that the sun rose at 6 in the morning. This was absolutely mind boggling for him at the time, since back in the USA the first sunlight was at 12.
Upon doing some calculations, Benjamin figured out that if everybody woke up at 6 in the morning, at sunrise, and slept at 10 in the night, at sunset, on average, all of Paris would save millions of dollars spent on candle wax.
He found that if the USA did the same thing, they would have to make some changes, and easily save millions. Firstly, all clocks would have to be shifted back 6 hours, so at sunrise, it would be 6 am. Then, everybody would have to be forced to wake up, either by ringing bells, or firing cannons. Second, a tax would be put on every window putting shaders to block out the sun. Third, guards would stop every person walking on the streets after sunset, unless absolutely necessary. Fourth, guards at every candle shop would restrict families from buying more than 1 pound of candles every week. For the first few days, it would cause much discomfort, but people would start to get used to the new cycle.

Question 27

Permanent Daylight savings

Answer 27

Many people would argue whether or not daylight saving should be made permanent, or completely removed, and here are a couple of issues with both.
Americans can’t decide on anything. Multiple polls in the past have shown that approximately 30% of people want to keep the switching of daylight saving time, 30% want to keep standard time permanent, and 30% want to keep daylight savings time permanent.
There are already states where it is permanently standard time. Most of Arizona and all of Hawaii are great places if you hate the switching of daylight saving time.
Being on daylight saving time permanently has been tried before, during World War II, and the energy crisis of 1970. However, there were many problems with this, since the sun didn’t come up until 9 am, and so parents complained about kids having to wait for buses in the dark.

Question 28

China’s Solution to daylight saving problems

Answer 28

Before the 1940s, China was split into 5 different time zones, it was constantly at civil war, and there was a lot of political unrest. Once the communist government PRC came in, all the time zones had been streamlined into one singular time zone, called the BST, or Beijing Standard Time.
After this streamlining, between 1986 to 1991, the country tried to use daylight saving time, but after not working out, it was dropped.
Having one time zone for this huge of a country posed many practical issues. Firstly, the western provinces like Tibet and Xinjian faced many difficulties in day to day life. The sun rose at 10 am in many of these places, and so it put off many daily activities and lifestyles.
Many of such provinces started using their own separate time zones, like Hong Kong’s HKT, or Macau’s MST. Less politically powerful provinces started using their own unofficial time zone as well, in an attempt to normalize shop owners and daily lifestyles.

Question 29

Crimes that technology can reduce : Metro fare evasion

Answer 29

In recent years, evading fares on metros has been all too common. According to data by MTA, they lost 500 million USD in 2021, and 690 million in 2022, and the number keeps growing.
Innovative solutions to these types of crimes have been popping up everywhere, with pilot stations, a new wider fare method has been tried. It shows a 20% increase in paying passengers, but also runs the risk of piggybacking. The pilot program costed 700k USD to implement, and is showing promising results.
Piggybacking is when multiple people pack closely together and pass the gate in a single paying fare. This can cost MTA millions every year, and solutions need to be found.
Although already made programs are being used, they are not nearly as effective as can be. New technology on the market uses human tracking to send an alarm every time piggybacking is used, which could possibly remove fare evasion and piggybacking permanently.

Question 30

Crimes that technology can reduce: Speed Limiters

Answer 30

Laws to implement speed limiters in all newly manufactured cars in the UK are in the process of being passed. These speed limiters would use different methods and functions to limit the speed at which a person can drive the car. This would be tracked using gps software to locate the area at which a person is driving, and finding the speed limit of said area.
There would be 4 ways to implement these speed limiters that are being looked into today.

Gentle pushback on the accelerator pedal.

Automatic power reduction (overridable).

Escalating warnings with visual and then
audio alerts.

Vibrating accelerator pedal with visual alerts (times out

Early data tests have shown that speed limiters in every vehicle in the UK could result in a 30% decrease in accidents due to acceleration, saving possibly 140,000 serious road injuries by 2038.- slightly decrease the text lenght while keeping the main information in this structure only

Question 31

how is the
Melbourne Public Transportation

Answer 31

The Melbourne Public Transport System is one of the most connected systems in the world. It involves the use of buses, trams, trains, and Myki cards to connect almost every inch of the city publicly. Whether you want to visit the outer suburbs for a few hours, or want to explore the whole city over the span of a day, it is made to the utmost convenience of users to travel across the city easily.

Question 32

Luxembourg Free Transportation

Answer 32

Luxembourg City, the tiny wealthy city inside Luxembourg, has attempted to make a change by making all public transportation (not including first class) completely free. This drastic step has been taken by the Luxembourg government due to the extremely dense vehicular traffic Luxembourg faces on a daily basis. According to some data, there are 696 cars for every 1000 people in the country, making it the most vehicle-dense country in all of Europe.

In an attempt to drive people away from private transport and towards eco-friendly public transport Luxembourg City has made all public transportation free. This has cost the government over 43.4 million USD every year since, and while it is not the first place to try so, it is definitely the most promising.

Although this change was widely happily accepted through citizens, it seems to have made little progress towards shifting people towards public transport. Compared to May 2019, May 2022 has had equivalent if not more vehicular traffic than before.

Question 33

Tallinn Free Transportation

Answer 33

Tallinn is the longest lasting city with free public transportation yet, with over 10 years of free transportation for all its citizens. Tallinn’s approach to free transportation was slightly different from Luxembourg. While Luxembourg made all transportation completely free, Tallinn made it free for registered citizens, who pay 1000 euros of taxes every year, and a one time fee of 2 euros.

Since this established system, over 25,000 more people have registered for the city upon the already 416,000 people. This, according to government statistics, has in fact resulted in a profit for the government of 20 million euros every year, instead of the predicted loss.

This has shown places all over the world how being eco friendly and helping citizens can be profitable as well, and inspired other places like Luxembourg to try the same.

Question 34

Relevance of windows and how they were made

Answer 34

Windows began as simple openings for ventilation, covered with animal skins for control.

Around 3500 BC, volcanic ash gave way to man-made glass, a revolutionary see-through barrier made from sand and heat. This technique continues today for specialty glass.
Stained glass, crafted from colored glass pieces, became popular in Europe for both its beauty and practicality in filtering light.

The 17th century saw the rise of glass factories in Europe, making glass more affordable with techniques like Crown Glass (1674). These factories continued to innovate, leading to advancements like Cylinder Sheet Glass (1834) for larger windows.

The 20th century brought Float Glass (1959), a revolutionary method for creating flat, distortion-free glass that dominates modern windows.
Today’s windows are a culmination of these innovations, with Laminated Glass often added for safety. They provide light, ventilation control, and a clear view of the world, all thanks to this rich history.

Question 35

Open-Plan Classrooms

Answer 35

Open Plan Classrooms have been constructed in Finland, Melbourne, and New South Wales. These brand new models for schools have initially shown promising results, especially in Finland.
Finland’s Open Plan Classrooms boast a higher overall score in Maths, Science, and Reading, than UK and US even though official schools start at age 7, no tests are done before 18 years, and less school time and homework is given.
This could partly be because students are involved in mixed learning, which is learning multiple subjects at the same, like Biology and History. This helps students develop a creative and cognitive mind, instead of memorizing topics and information.

Question 36

American Open Classrooms

Answer 36

America started creating Open Classrooms in the 1960s, which were classrooms without tests, curriculums, or lessons. They were free for students to learn in their own way. If a 1st grader was doing 2nd grader work, he could go next to the 2nd graders and study with them. If a 5th grader wasn’t understanding topics, he could move down to the 4th grade class and learn from there. It was completely free for kids to do what they wanted, but it didn’t work out.
By the late 1970s, the majority of these Open Classrooms Schools had been shut down or reverted to classic classrooms, with just a few surviving in all of America today.
One of these was Benjamin Orr Elementary School, started in 1974, still running today. There are many issues with running one of these Open Classrooms Schools on this date, one of them being the noise. Noise levels on a daily basis are through the roof, literally, since there are no walls to control the noise, it just spreads and echoes throughout the halls. It was problems like these which caused most schools to shut down permanently, and so alternative similar solutions were thought of.

Question 37

Harkness Layout

Answer 37

The Harkness Layout of learning involves setting up an oval or circular table, and having every student sit around it. This would allow every student to see and understand each other, while helping the teacher communicate with all the students at once. This solved many of the issues traditional classrooms were facing, while not bringing up problems for Open Classrooms.