236 Matching Annotations
  1. Jul 2016
  2. Jun 2016
  3. May 2016
  4. Mar 2016
    1. 9 Degrees 22 Minutes North

      The 9th parallel north intersects both Colombia and Venezuela, from which we can estimate that Crusoe's island is somewhere off the northern coast of South America. [Insert map here.]

    2. beyond the River Amozones, toward that of the River Oronoque, commonly call’d the Great River

      The Amazon River extends from Peru through Brazil, and the Orinoco River from Venezuela to Colombia. [Insert map here.] These details help the reader to estimate whereabouts Crusoe's island is.

    3. so that he found he was gotten upon the Coast of Guinea

      This clause can be rather misleading: Defoe means here not Guinea, the African country for which Crusoe was bound, but the Guianas, a region in South America to the north of Brazil. [Insert map here.]

    4. the River Gambia or Sennegall, that is to say, any where about the Cape de Verd

      The area south of Morocco, near modern Senegal, was an epicenter for British trade in salt and slaves. [Insert map of west coast of Africa here.]

    5. the Islands of the Canaries, and the Cape de Verd Islands also, lay not far off from the Coast

      There is a geographical inconsistency here. Crusoe and Xury are somewhere along the southwest Moroccan coast if the Canary Islands are close by. Therefore, they are to the southwest of their starting point at Sale, which is in northwest Morocco. However, Crusoe claims to have sailed south and east of Sale - this is, in fact, impossible, since traveling southeast of Sale would entail "sailing" inland. [Insert map of Morocco and Canary Islands here]

  5. Feb 2016
  6. Dec 2015
    1. There are many other questions. Of course existing systems on the earth may be very much influenced by the geographical reality of a two-dimensional surface. Historical groups have been nested geographically. So though there may be aspects in which community size is scale-free, that maybe a completely different optimisation problem from the one we have when on the Internet anyone can connect to anyone. If you could devise an algorithm for connecting people into groups, and so that they each participated in communities of different sizes in a scale-free way, then how much more effective (at solving problems, etc) can you make a web-based society which ignores geographical borders? To what extent does humanity as currently connected by the web in fact deviate from geographical nesting anyway?
  7. Oct 2015
    1. that the clear distinction which once existed between the urban and the rural is gradually fading into a set of porous spaces of uneven geographical development, under the hegemonic command of capital and the state.

      Is this result what society had in mind during the planning or not so planning and action driven part of the process of this development?

  8. May 2015