Category: globalism

The House of the Camel, Venice

Palazzo Mastelli, in the sestiere of Canareggio, is a peculiar and characteristically Venetian mélange of Roman fragments, Byzantine elements, and a lot of sixteenth-century construction, all topped with a Gothic balcony. On its walls is a depiction of a camel. Why?

Shakespeare’s Globe

The aged are inclined to live in the past. In 1576, when Thomas Platter was seventy-seven, he published a charming autobiography. It would be admired centuries later by…

On the making of maps

After a long interval in which nothing happened, suddenly I’m back working on my little book about Persian ceramics (the trim size, 9.5 x 10 in., is small…

Google dangers and opportunities

A few months ago, scholars from the University of Graz in Austria released a 187-page pdf document, entitled Report on dangers and opportunities posed by large search engines,…

Digital divide

I was talking with someone the other day about website statistics packages. The image above comes from Google Analytics. As you can see, Right Reading has yet to…

Flag Colors

The pies represent the colors of various flags, the sizes of the slices determined by percentage of flag area devoted to each color. At the original site you…

A Short Guide to Iraq

In 1943 the U.S. War Department produced a book offering guidelines for our soldiers fighting in Iraq. It contained advice such as this: The tall man in the…

Bertelsmann continues to expand

Bertelsmann is continuing its quest to be the print version of Google and control all the world’s paper-based information (all of it that’s profitable, that is) by expanding…

Syria or Afghanistan?

What country is this? CNN votes “Afghanistan.” Hint: Try the Middle East and North Africa Map Game.

GDP Map

I’ve mentioned the website Strange Maps before. Here it is back again, with a map showing U.S. states renamed for countries with approximately equivalent gross domestic products. My…

NewsMap

NewsMap lets you get the news from any country by clicking its location on a map. It’s basically a mashup of Google Maps and Yahoo News. Kind of…

Bad Health Care, Deficient Welfare Keep Americans Short

That’s the headline I’m reading here. Seems Europeans have been gaining on us, to the point where Americans are now shorter than the average Dutchman. From the article:…

Comparing the U.S. and France

With France mired in malaise, French voters have turned away from the center-right government of Jacques Chirac in favor of the center-right government of Nicolas Sarkozy. The Guardian…