Sportello - Door/Window/Doc/Pynchon

[David Morris]

http://www.flickr.com/photos/michaelpaukner/4018585149/

The Dymaxion map or Fuller map is a projection of a World map onto the
surface of a polyhedron, which can then be unfolded to a net in many
different ways and flattened to form a two-dimensional map which
retains most of the relative proportional integrity of the globe map.
It was created by Buckminster Fuller, who claimed that his map had
several advantages over other projections for world maps. It has less
distortion of relative size of areas, most notably when compared to
the Mercator projection; and less distortion of shapes of areas,
notably when compared to the Gall-Peters projection. Other compromise
projections attempt a similar trade-off.

More unusually, the Dymaxion map does not have any "right way up".
Fuller argued frequently that in the universe there is no "up" and
"down", or "north" and "south": only "in" and "out". Gravitational
forces of the stars and planets created "in", meaning 'towards the
gravitational center', and "out", meaning "away from the gravitational
center". He attributed the north-up-superior/south-down-inferior
presentation of most other world maps to cultural bias.

There isn't any one "correct" view of the Dymaxion map. Peeling the
triangular faces of the icosahedron apart in one way results in an
icosahedral net that shows an almost contiguous land mass comprising
all of earth's continents - not groups of continents divided by
oceans. Peeling the solid apart in a different way presents a view of
the world dominated by connected oceans surrounded by land (as shown
in my picture).


On Mon, Nov 16, 2009 at 4:09 PM, John Carvill <johncarvill at gmail.com> wrote:
>>> There are many grids in GR.  The most famous one probably being Slothrop's map.
>>
>> Indeed. And I think there was probably quite a lot of relevant stuff in Against the Day - the Venetian sequences, for instance.
>
> Such as:
>
> "The problem lies with the projection. The author of the Itinerary imagined the Earth not only as a three-dimensional sphere but, beyond that, as an *imaginary surface*, the optical arrangements for whose eventual projection onto the two-dimensional page proved to be very queer indeed."
>
>  - Against the Day, p249
>