Musings on Maps | a deep dive into maps, from before print to data visualization

Time 2020-10-29 18:02:24

Web Name: Musings on Maps | a deep dive into maps, from before print to data visualization

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Air Quality The tracking of local air quality is a contemporaneous way to track the effects of the fire seige that initiated clusters of fires across the western seaboard to be ignited at the end of a long, dry summer from August 25. We were not really struck unawares by the dry lightning, but had left forests languishing, not beneath electricity lines as last year, around this time but under a hot sun, and high temperatures that we hardly registered as changing the ecosystem and forest floor. This year, the sun turning red like a traffic light in the middle of the afternoon, we were forced to assess the air quality as the blue sky was filled with black carbon plumes from nearby fires that at times left a grittiness in our eyes.Confronted with a red sun through pyrocumulus haze, we followed real-time surveys of air quality with renewed attentiveness as an orange pyrocumulus clouds blanketed usually blue skies of the Bay Area, obscuring the sun s light, suffusing the atmosphere with a weirdly apocalyptic muted light, that were hardly only incidental casualties of the raging fires that destroyed houses, property, and natural habitat for they revealed the lack of sustainability of our warming global environment.The soot and fog that permeated clean cities like Portland and San Francisco came as a sudden spike in relation to the black carbon loads that rose in plumes from the fires, as if the payload of the first bombs set by climate change. The shifting demand for information that evolved as we sought better bearings in the new maps of fires that had become a clearly undeniably part of our landscape was reflected in the skill with which the sites of incidence of dry lighting strikes that hit dried out brush and forest floors, the growing perimiters of fires and evacuation zones across the west coast, and the plumes of atmospheric smoke of black carbon that would leave a permanent trace upon the land, liked to the after-effects of holocausts created by atom bombs by Mike Davis. The measurement of wind carrying airborne smoke emerged as a layer of meaning we were beginning to grasp, a ghostly after-effects of the fields of flams that began from sites of lightning hitting the earth in a Mapbox wildfire map of fields of fire across the states, radiating resonant waves akin to earthquake aftershocks, a lamination on hex bins of the fires that seemed a new aspect indicating their presence in the anthropocene. The suitably charcoal grey base-map of the state integrates approximate origins of fires, fire spread and greatest intensity of hotspots from satellite imagery courtesy Descartes Labsand NOAA, and air pollution data integrates the fires spread across our picture of the state. While human reviewed and sourced, the satellite data embodies the ravages of fire across the state in ways echoed by its black charcoal base map, and reflects the need to develop new visual tools to process their devastation.While we began to measure air quality to meet new needs to track ground-level ozone, acid rain, air toxins, and ozone depletion at an atmospheric level, the increased tracking of more common air pollutantssince 1990 included airborne particulate matter (PM10 and PM2.5), carbon monoxide (CO), and ozone (O3), we track the effects of wildfire smoke by hourly levels of each at local points, parlaying sensors into newsfeeds as wildfires rage. If stocked with labels of each chromatic layer, are these real-time updates lacking not only legends but the temporal graph that would clarify the shifting data feeds that lead us to give them the illusion of purchase on the lay of the land we are trying to acknowledge this fire season?Watching slightly more long-term shifts in quality of air that we breath in the Bay Area, we can see striking spikes of a maximum just after the lighting siege began on August 19, 2020 across much of the state, as air quality decisively entered into a hazardous zone, tracking PPM2.5 concentrations, but entering the worst fifteen air days since registration four times since 1999, when Bay Area Air Quality Management District began reporting the levels of fire smoke in inhabited areas.We measure fires by acreage, but the sudden spikes of air quality, while not exceeding the smoke that funneled into the Bay Area during the North Bay Fires in 2017, when the Tubbs and Atlas Fires devastated much of the Wine Country, created a run of high-smoke days, were followed by a set of sudden spikes of the atmospheric presence of particulate matter that we tried to track by isochomes, based on real-time sensor reading, but that emerge in better clarity only in retrospect. It is true that while the AQI maps that offer snapshots of crisp clarity of unhealthy air might serve as an alarm to close windows, remain indoors, and call off school as particulate matter spread across the region s atmosphere. We are used to weather maps and microclimates in the Bay Area, but the real-time map of particulate matter, we immediately feared, did not only describe a condition that would quickly change but marked the start of a fire season. Not only in recent days did the sustained levels of bad air suggest an apocalyptic layer that blanketed out the sun and sky, that made one feel like one was indeed living on another planet where the sun was masked a sense heightened by the red suns, piercing through grey smoke-cover that had seamlessly combined with fog. Although the new landscapes of these AQI maps generate immediate existential panic, we should be more panicked that while we call these fires wild, they release unprecedented levels of toxins once imagined to be detected as industrial pollutants. The seemingly sudden ways that black carbon soot blanketed the Bay Area, resting on our car hoods, porches, windowsills and garbage bins were not only an instant record of climate emergency, but the recoil of overly dry woods, parched forests and lands as overdue payback for a far drier than normal winter, months and a contracted rainy season that had long ago pushed the entire state into record territory. The lack of soil moisture has brought a huge increase of wildfire risk, not easily following the maps of previous fire history, and persistence of“abnormally dry” conditions across a third of California, focussed in the Sierra and Central Valley the areas whose forests fuel loads arrive carbonized in particulate form.Local monitors of air quality suggest the uneven nature of these actual isochromes as maps they are reconstructions of what can only be sensed locally, and does not exist in any tangible way we can perceive but presented what we needed to see in a tiler that made differences popped, highlighting what mattered, in ways that left cities fall into the bottom of the new colors that blanketed the state, in which local sensors somehow revealed what really mattered on August 20: if the map is only a snapshot of one moment, it showed the state awash in ozone and PPM.We were in a sort of existential unfolding in relation to these maps, even if we could also read them as reminders of what might be called deep history : deep history was introduced by Annalistes to trace climatic shifts, the deep undersea shifts of time, on which events lie as flotsam, moved by their deep currents that ripple across the economy in agrarian societies, suggesting changes from which modern society is in some sense free. Deep History has to some extent been reborn via neurosciences, as a history of the evolution of the mind, and of cognition, in a sort of master-narrative of the changes of human cognition and perception that makes much else seem epiphenomenal. If the below real-time map was time-stamped, it suggested a deep history of climate of a more specific variety: it was a map of one moment, but was perched atop a year of parched forests, lack of groundwater, and increased surface temperatures across the west: Sacramento had not received rain since February in an extremely dry winter; its inter was 46% drier than normal, and the winder in Fresno was 45% dryer in February. They are, in other words, both real-time and deep maps, and demand that we toggle between these maps as the true layers of ecological map on which we might gain purchase.The levels of dessication of course didn t follow clear boundaries we trace on maps. But at some existential level, these flows of particulate matter were not only snapshots but presented the culmination and confirmation of deep trends. We have to grasp these trends, to position ourselves in an adequate relation to their content. For the deep picture was grim: most of California had enjoyed barely half of usual precipitation levels after a very dry winter: Sacramento has had barely half of usual rainfall as of August 20 (51%); the Bay Area. 51%; parts of the Sierra, just 24%. And wen we measure smoke, we see the consequences of persistent aridity.These are the layers, however, that the maps should make visible, And while these shifts of particulate matter that arrived in the Bay Area were invisible to most, they were not imperceivable; however, the waves of smoke that arrived with a local visibility that almost blanketed out the sun. Perhaps there was greater tolerance earlier, tantamount to an ecclipse. Perhaps that seemed almost a breaking point. For almost a month after the first fires broke, following a sequence of bad air days and spare-the-air alerts marked our collective entrance to a new era of climate and fire seasons, fine soot blanketed the state at hazardous levels, leaving the sense there was nowhere left to go to escape.We had of course entered the Very Unhealthy zone. If real-time maps condense an immense amount of information, the snapshot like fashion in which they synthesized local readings are somewhat hard to process, unless one reads them with something like a circumscribed objective historical perspective that the levels of PPM5 provides. In maps that are data maps, and not land maps, we need a new legend, as it were, an explanation of the data that is being tracked, lest it be overwhelmed in colors, and muddy the issues, and also a table that will put information on the table, lest the map layers be reduced to eye candy of shock value, and we are left to struggle with the inability to process the new scale of fires, so unprecedented and so different from the past, as we try to gain bearings on our relation to them.militates against that, with feeds dominating over context, and fire maps resembling increasingly weather maps, as if to suggest we all have the skills to read them and they present the most pressing reality of the moment. But while weather maps suggest a record of the present, these are not only of the current moment that they register. Looking at them with regularity, one feels the loss of a lack of incorporating the data trends they depict, and that are really the basis of the point-based maps that we are processed for us to meet the demand for information at the moment, we are stunned at the images commanding power of attention to make us look at their fluid bounds, but leave us at sea in regards to our relation to what is traced by the contour lines of those isochrones. We can, in the Bay Area, finally breathe. But the larger point re: data visualizations is, perhaps, a symptom of our inflow of newsfeeds, and lies in those very tracking maps and apps that focus on foregrounding trends, and does so to the exclusion of deeper trends that underly them, and that despite all our knowledge otherwise threatens to take our eyes off of them. When the FOX newscaster Tucker Carlson cunningly elided the spread of wild fires ties to macro-process of climate change, calling them liberal talking points, separate from climate change, resonating with recent calls for social justice movements to end systematic racism in the country: although you can t see it, but rest assured, its everywhere, it s deadly. . . . and it s your fault, in which climate change morphed to but a partisan talking point as akin to systematic racism in the sky. While the deep nature of the underlying mechanics by which climate change has prepared for a drier and more combustable terrain in California is hard to map onto to the spread of fires on satellite maps, When climate denialism is twinned with calls for reparations of social injustice or gun control as self-serving narratives to pursue agendas of greater governmental controls to circumscribe liberties, befitting a rant of nationalist rage: the explanations on our lifestyles and increased carbon emissions, only pretenses to restrict choices we are entitled to make, Carlson was right about the depths at which both climate change and systematic racism offer liberal lies especially if we squint at tracking maps at a remove from deep histories, and cast them as concealing sinister political interests and agendas, the truly dark forces of the sinister aims of governmental over-reach in local affairs. Structural racism is indeed akin to the deep structure of climate change if the cunning analogy Tucker Carlson powerfully crafted for viewers did not capture the extent of their similarities. For if both manifest deep casualties created by our society, both depart from normalcy and both stand to hurt the very whites who see them as most offensive. The extent of inequalities of systematic racism as present in our day-to-day life as is the drying out landscape. And the scope of climate change is able to be most clearly registered by the evident in trends of diminished precipitation, groundwater reserves or temperature change that create environmental inequalities, too often obscured by the events of local air quality or maps of social protests that respond to deep lying trends. To be sure, the tracking of environmental pollutants underlay the national Pollution Prevention Act of 1990, and led to a number of executive orders that were aimed to set standards for environmental justice among minority communities who long bore the brunt of industrial pollutants, from lead paint to polluted waters to hazardous waste incinerators. And, as we are surrounded by racial inequalities that are visible in systematic inequalities before the law, and have lowered life expectancies of non-whites in America by 3.5 years, increasing rates of hypertension, cancer, and systematic disenfranchisement of blacks these extensive inequalities hurt whites, and hurt society. As Ibrahim X. Kendi perceptively noted, White Supremacists affirm the very policies that benefit racist policies even when they undercut interests of White people; they claim to be pro-White but refuse to acknowledge that climate change is having a disastrous impact on the earth White people inhabit. Is there a degree of self-hatred that among Carlson s viewers that informs Carlson s frontal attack on climate change and structural racism as myths, more content to blame non-Whites for structural inequalities.But these inequalities are evident in the differences in air quality that climate change creates. For if the AQI maps tell us anything, it is the absence of any preparedness for the interconnections of fire, smoke, and large dry stretches of a long story of low precipitation that have created abnormally dry conditions indeed, drought across the state.The intensity of severe drought across the conifer-dense range Sierras raises pressing questions of federal management of lands: the moderate to severe drought of forested lands intersect with the USDA Forest Service manage and the over 15 million acres of public lands managed by the federal government manages or serves as a steward. that crosses many of the dried out wildland and rangeland forested with conifers and dense brush, a majority of which are managed by federal agencies 19 million acres, or 57% but with climate change are increasingly drier and drier, which only 9 million are privately owned. Yet the reduction of Wildland Fire management by 43.98% from FY2020 to FY2021 in President Trump s budget continued the systematic erosion of funding for the United States Forest Services. As California weathered longer and longer fire seasons under Donald Trump s watch, Trump made budget cuts $948 million to the Forest Service for fiscal year 2020, after defunding of US Forest Services by reducing mitigating fire risk by $300 million from FY 2017 to FY2019, cutting $20.7 minion from wildlife habitat management, and $18 million from vegetation management a rampage beginning with cutting USFS research funding by 10% and Wildland Fire Management by 12% in FY 2018! While blaming states for not clearing brush in forests, sustained hampering of managing federal lands rendered the West far less prepared for climate change. As the costs of containing wildfires rise, the reduction of the Forest Service budget has provoked panic by zeroing out funding for Land and Water conservation alleged goals of the Trump Presidency and cuts grants to state wildfire plans by a sixth as fire suppression looms ever larger. By defunding of forest management, rangeland research, and habitat management, such budgetary measures pose pressing questions of our preparedness for the growing fire seasons of future years; stars that denote public land management might be targets for future dry lightning. To Levitate anElephant The red elephant unveiled as an emblem of the Republican Party during the 2020 Republican Convention marked a new sense the party was now Trump as if Trump embodied the party. For the representation of red states that enshrined an image of Republican identity demanded a redesign of its logo identified with the interests of red states with grandeur. And in an era in which we have a President able to channel his inner P.T. Barnum more openly than his predecessors, Trump mined a rich iconographic mine in speaking before a redesigned symbol of the party. The leaping elephant was no doubt shopped around in committee and reviewed by experts for a Convention whose design loosely planned as a live event, before the shift to television that led the President to reach out to a former producer of Celebrity Apprentice, his old Reality TV show, who at Trump s personal insistance to oversaw the Convention s video production as he realized that the stakes were greater than he imagined.What of the leaping elephant that reached to the heavens, bedecked by stars, behind his podium? Thomas Nast famously branded a pachyderm with the letters GOP in 1874 at a time when newsprint was the prime vehicle of public opinion. In a political world dominated by Democrats, many of whom were suspected corrupt, Nast intended an emblem of significant dignity; but the exultant elephant unveiled before Charlotte s crown seemed close to tap an outdated symbol of royalty and to address an audience by a middle-brow entertainment more than assume public gravitas: the newly nominated candidate speaking before the new RNC emblem partisan animal emblazoned with five stars in a W as if a premature declaration of victory insisted the best is yet to come, as he accepted the nomination, proud of the incredible progress we have made over the last four years, brimming with confidence about the bright future we will built for America over the next four years in the face of the expansion of national cases of COVID-19, animated by the brisk step of the elephant behind him that suggested the party s lively progress. When the newly animated pachyderm was unveiled as the symbol of the Charlotte-based convention, whose length was only cut short short by COVID-19, the new icon of the convention was proudly unveiled in anticipation of its reinvigorating function by an ebullient Ronna McDaniel and Marcia Lee Kelley, dressed in red, emblazoned with five curious stars.What better way than the redesign of a red logo to make the point that the commitment of the party to red-state values, replaced the capaciousness of the party and the place of values and dignity that Thomas Nast, an ardent Republican and the father of American cartooning, saw the beast incarnating values able to transcend intra-party dispute, than for a former television star to tweak the Republican logo for a convention that replaced a platform with the scripting of a television event by the directors of Donald Trump s Reality TV show, that placed him as central to the party s identity, rather than values, and asserted red state values of a party as proof of ideological purity? Unlike the Democratic donkey, a braying jackass poking fun of its vocal cries and low status, its dissonance less dignified than the eagle and pure pretension: while the animal logo was hardly adopted by the party, and the pictorial warfare seemed stacked in favor of the dignified pachyderm, the reborn elephant makes us recall how much epidermal pigmentation was central to the elephant adopted by 1877 in the Presidential election, and overdetermined as an image of partisan strength. By enlisting a startlingly monochrome elephant of entirely red skin, all but leaping off the ground, the beast raising its sleek trunk in celebration or benediction mirrored the role Trump adopted in sanctioning the party s collective identity by the illusion of advancing forward in space with dignity as the champion of red states : a rearing elephant served as a surrogate for replicating the electoral alliance of 2016, now rearing above Trump s head, and the the eagle on the podium with a Presidential seal: For it seemed, during the convention, that other interests were not in need of being representation than the cities of the Deep South, the fans of football player Hershel Walker, who as a surrogate to denounce Black Lives Matter ran defense for a President accused of being racist, attacking it as in fact organized by trained Marxists, and a subversive to the nation. The former running back ran defense as spokesperson in South Carolina and Georgia to testify to his character, mocking social justice protests as a slur on Trump s character, using pro football metaphors and slogans of patriotism, he echoed how the pachyderm emblem erased racial divisions of the nation in many of the endorsements featured at the 2020 Convention in Charlotte, North Carolina. While the convention lacked any platform the nominal reason for meeting to nominate a President from the turn of the century, exemplified in the New Deal in 1932 or inclusion of civil rights in the Democratic Party s platform from 1948, and the War on Poverty of 1965 the absence of a platform concealed the trust in a red map, as the Democrat Joe Biden threatened to stretch the map by curtailing the continuity of red states in the Presidential election as Pennsylvania seemed desired to become the lynchpin of the Presidency.In the hot summer of ostensible racial unrest and social justice protest and a reclaiming of public space, after police killings of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and Ahmaud Arbery convulsed the nation by evidence of persistent racial disparities of race before law enforcement, the Republican Convention was determined to defer divisions by race, assembling beneath the advancing red elephant, star-studded and before a crown, a months in a sign of purity and fealty that was echoed attempts to weed out anti-Trump Republicans by grooming the convention as a weeklong infomercial featuring attestations to Donald Trump s absence of racism oddly before a red elephant, echoing the circus animals brought on ships from Africa to perform in circuses from the eighteenth century, and later by P.T. Barnum. It was ironic the the red elephant before which he had thundered about American greatness was as embedded in the determining role race played in the emergence of the elephant as an emblem of the party, long before it was cast as pure red. For Nast first employed an elephant as able to outlast the divisions of the party in Reconstruction, in ways that tacitly addressed the popular fascination with the stability of skin-color as a key to racial identity, and a way of questioning the continuity of black-white dichotomies as an indicator of race. The purity of the Sacred Elephant of white skin color that P.T. Barnum displayed in 1884 led the image of the pachyderm, already used in Nast s prolific cartooning on occasions but with limited public embrace by a party or currency, with the purity of white elephants ostensibly more docile and civilized that circuses juxtaposed to African ones for audiences to feed fascination with race. The white skinned elephants not from Africa, but Burma, stood in the popular press as a dignified an icon of partisan purity distanced from political corruption, able to sustain the new electoral maps of 1880 in an image of concensus.But the circus elephant popular in the popular press was a bid to tweak party dignity against partisan corruption during the turbulence of post-Reconstruction politics. Although later purged of the racial connotations with which the beast was freighted by the postwar period, the pure red elephant whose uniform color defined a new form of belonging, much as the President had himself may have unconsciously recuperated the connotations of the purity of the white elephant as a the bedrock of dignified values on which Nast in 1884 insisted the party was based, when he included himself in a popular cartoon to indicate the sacred values that he believed would carry the candidate who mounted its regal chair to the White House using the newly exhibited beast as a model incarnating the values the nominee might adopt, with the calm and upright demeanor of the newly poplar image of a white elephant. Nast, a promoter of the new image who showed himself as if Barnum, advertising the virtues of the party that was bound by a commitment to Civil Service and Probity, used the whiteness of the circus animal as a testament to the party s commitment to honesty that it would do well to follow to win the coming election.The signification of the skin color was muted in the Harpers cartoon, but reflected the fascination of a new elephant, unlike the African elephants shipped the United States by circus men from Africa, whose new demeanor suggested nothing less than a new race of animal understood and so appreciated by eager circus-goers as a new animal, extending the categories of racial difference into the animal kingdom that provided odd if welcome confirmation for the purity of races as distinct species, with different patterns of sociability, different habitats, and distinct customs The purity of the White Elephant was by 1884, at the end of Reconstruction, an image of continuity and virtue as racial barriers of segregation rose, a reminder of the traditions of the Party and its values that tacitly addressed race as central to party. The iconic elephant endured as an icon of the party, linked to a promised prosperity of the extension of westward empire in America, enduring to the twentieth century in the public imagination, scarcely removed from the circus animal.The preservation of values was recalled by tacit prominence of race for the pure-red pachyderm of 2020. Although the red skin color of the pachyderm was not natural, it may as well have masked attention to race long submerged in the party logo if many political positions seemed to be exhumed in the new red beast of burden, whose hue reflected the championing of President Trump as the most pro-life President ever, and defender of White America. The heightened redness of the elephant reflected an increasing national polarization of hot button issues across this Presidential race, which has introduced the distinction between Republican and Democrat judges, in ways that suggest an openly partisan divide of the nation and its courts. nd when the Susan B. Anthony List championed the pure-red loyalty Trump gained in the office of President, apart from his personal failings, red values served to galvanize support and demonize Democrats, cast as the Party of Death as if their platform was a disruption of values and law: t he pure-red President, in other words, gained the pure-red logo he demanded, in a new episode of the complex genealogy of political iconography.If the unity of the Republican Party was emphasized by the purity of red, race remained close to the surface, threatening to disrupt order, if not the tacit subtext the stage-managed 2020 Convention, that seemed to subsume the very memory of racial discord among the many flags across its stage as Trump spoke and accepted the nomination, as if convinced he would ride this red elephant back to White House once more.For Trump boasted his personal reconfiguration of the Republican Party after the social justice protests that occurred across the country in the summer of 2020, which were cast as a disruptive event that ran against his calls for law and order that was promoted at the Convention by the invitation both of dark warnings about the ominous future of the nation overseen by Joe Biden, and featuring Mark and Patricia McCloskey,the St. Louis couple charged with feloniesfor drawing their guns in a threatening manner against non-violent Black Lives Matters protestors who marked past their home in New Orleans. A month before the Convention, Trump championed a Garden of Heroes and prosecution of those who vandalized public statues: the Garden that placed nineteenth century abolitionists beside Republican Presidents, army generals, and astronauts and pioneers glorified a homogenized image of the past. But a month later, Trump foregrounded his commitment to history as a battle for the nation s conscience, in a racially divisive event that exploited the National Archives to stage a White House Conference of American History to enshrine a vision of the most exceptional nation in the history of the world refusing to engage in the deeply racist past that he called an assault on the nobility of America s character, as if only African Americans bore what Langston Hughes called slavery s scar even thought the often omitted third stanza of the national anthem, the Star-Spangled Banner, celebrated how No refuge could be save the hireling or slave/From the terror of flight or the gloom of the grave for the former slaves fighting with the British in 1812, beneath the star-spangled banner waving o er the land of the free and home of the brave. Trump described race as a distorting lens to view American s freedom, calling critical race theory an ideological poison that threatened the very civic bonds that unite us together failing to promote America s exceptionalism, lest students confront the the role of enslavement in the shaping the nation. If Trump famously watched the recent musical about P.T. Barnum, The Greatest Showman, in a rare White House screening, the role of Barnum s exhibition of elephants in the emergence of the emblem of Republicans offers a perfect instance of the broad discursive role of race and racial identity in America, after Reconstruction. Did a selective amnesia not underpin the unveiling of this streamline red elephant, now died in the wool red, removed from any ideological or racial divide, and the remove of the elephant from its African origins? If Trump has quite condescendingly addressed black Americans in his 2016 campaign, asking them What have you got to lose? by giving him their support, the platitudes of black entertainers and athletes who endorsed Trump at the Convention or Mar a Lago who never held a political position may indeed suggest the remove at which saw race from the nation.The unveiling of a new icon of party may have been, consciously or unconsciously, a revision of the history of the Party that erased its own fetishizing of the elephant, alternatively cast as a formidable memory or a respectable party. In replacing an elephant logo that was inclusively red-white-and-blue, the 2020 Convention offered a new icon of partisan unity for 2020 nominee, unlike the red, white and blue tricolor elephant of the GOP of years past, strikingly monochrome of a pure red hue, the new icon seemed semantically indeterminate, if not quite hackneyed and stiffly generic and stripped of all sense of its history, but seemed a purified red elephant, unlike the earlier icon of once-stolid conservative values, that double as a patriotic icon of party and capacious container for states rights as well as a custodian of tradition. For a pure-red elephant seemed to be demanded by candidate who identified himself with red states alone, rewriting the patriotic coloration of the once-stolid conservatism the quadruped had embodied less tolerant or capacious but exulting in the identity of its pure red skin. If purged of any racial connotations with which it was historically freighted, this elephant promised a sense of belonging to the party responded to departure of many from a party recast as Party of Trump and increasingly even branded as such to make the point, leading to the broad reinvention of the party s symbol and its iconography with the odd choice of five white stars that seemed an astrological sign of victory.The departure of some older Republicans, less content with this redirection, may have bode badly for the election.But the rearing quadruped unveiled at the Republican 2020 Convention reanimated as an icon of national unity, even as the nation struggled against the weight of COVID-19 that was sinking the nation, and increased social inequalities made evident in economic insecurity and compromised health care. In the midst of a convention that became a political circus of all things Trump, filled with affidavits and testimonials of the President s magnanimity more than an actual platform, it seemed important to remember that the iconography of the elephant of the Republican Party derived from the first arrival of captured African elephants that arrived in American circuses, and the theatrical amusements that they offered at a time America struggled with racial divides, and the elephant became a curiosity for a nation that was beginning to solidify segregation as a dividing line of race, in a precursor to modern racial divides. When Trump was channeling his inner Barnum in promoting his party at the Convention, he may have not known that the adoption of an elephant as a partisan symbol was consolidated by the cartoonist Thomas Nast, soon after the heralded arrival of the first Burmese elephant, Toung Taloung, bought from a dealer by P.T. Barnum was paraded through the streets of New York in a white costume at the institution of widespread segregation, by a circus promoter who sought to attract audiences by extending a color line into the animal kingdom, among different breeds of elephants: the curiosity of the Burmese elephant P.T. Barnum successfully promoted as a white elephant was intended to be exhibited beside the African elephants already in Barnum s circus, long captured from the wild to be exhibited to crowds for popular entertainment in a global trade only banned in 2019, if the Ringling Bros., Barnum Bailey circus only ended a hundred and forty-five family tradition of the ferrying elephants to be exhibited across the country in 2016, when the transport of the quadrupeds ceased. The memory of the exhibition of elephants, long tokens that demonstrated the Greatest Show on Earth indeed warranted its name, often exhibiting elephants as sights of terror or fascination, if developing handling methods that were more humane, their public exhibition, older than baseball or Coca Cola, as a popular entertainment rooted firmly in an American grain.And if the 2020 Convention was an opportunity to map Trump s party as a unity of red states, and to embody it around nationalist values, the oddly undressed elephant in the chambers of the convention went unaddressed, in ways that seemed to echo how racial divides were suppressed in the original selection of the elephant as party emblem. Did the new emblem seek to demonstrate the American nature of the new Grand Old Party, as unrecognizable as it had become as the Party of Trump, striving to offer evidence of its continued American-ness, even as its ties to white supremacy and racial divides were increasingly painfully evident? Earth, Wind, andFire We think of earth, wind and fire as elements. Or we used to. For the possibility of separating them is called into question in the Bay Area, as wind sweeps the smoke of five to seven fires, or fire complexes, across the skies, we are increasingly likely to see them as layers, which interact in a puzzle we have trouble figuring out. Indeed, the weirdly haunting map of air quality to map the atmospheric presence of particulate matter by isochrones brought late summer blues to the Bay Area. Blue skies of the Bay Area were colored grey, burnt orange, and grey again as cartoon plumes of soot flooded the skies in a new sort of pyrocumulus clouds that turned the sun red, offering a disembodied traffic sign telling us to stop. Fire season began by remapping the town in terrifying red that registered unhealthful, but almost verging on the hazardous level of brown, based on local sensors monitoring of ozone, but is also registering a deeper history defined by an absence of rain, the lack of groundwater, the hotter temperatures of the region and the dry air. The map is both existential, and ephemeral, but also the substrate of deep climate trends.Is fire an element we had never before tracked so attentively in maps? We did not think it could travel, or had feet. But wildfire smoke had blanketed the region, in ways that were not nearly as visible as it would be, but that the real-time map registers at the sort of pace we have become accustomed in real-time fire maps that we consult with regularity to track the containment and perimeters of fires that are now spreading faster and faster than they ever have in previous years. And soon after we worried increasingly about risks of airborne transmission of COVID-19, this fire season the intensity of particulate pollutants in the atmosphere contributed intense panic to the tangibility of mapping the pyrocumulus plumes that made their way over the Bay Area in late August. As the danger of droplets four micrometers in diameter remaining airborne seemed a factor of large-scale clusters, the waves of black carbon mapped in the Bay Area became a second sort of airborne pathogen made acutely material in layers of real-time Air Quality charts.The boundaries of fire risk charts and indeed fire perimeters seemed suddenly far more fluid than we had been accustomed. When we make our fire maps with clear edges, however, it is striking that almost we stop registering the built environment, or inhabited world. As if by the magic of cartographical selectivity, we bracket the city the sprawling agglomeration of the Bay Area from the maps tracking the destructiveness and progress we call advancing wildfires, and from the isochronal variations of air quality that we can watch reflecting wind patterns and air movements in accelerated animated maps, showing the bad air that migrates and pool over the area I life. The even more ephemeral nature of these maps they record but one instant, but are outdated as they are produced, in ways that fit the ecoystem of the Internet if also the extremes of the new ecosystem of global warming the isochrones seem somewhat fatalistic, as they are both removed from human agency as we found out in the weeks after the Lightning Siege of 2020 if they are the result of the extra urban expansion that has pushed houses to the borders of forests we haven t ever faced the problem of maintaining and clearing in weather this dry: as a result, we are now burning underbrush that has lain like kindling, on the boundaries of the raging fire complexes, hoping to create fire lines and new perimeters able to forestall the advance of major fires, even as the smoke escapes from them and travels across the nation, far beyond the Bay Area. While watching the movement of fires that them in inhabited areas like shifting jigsaw pieces that destroy the landscape across which they move. These marked the start of megafires, that spread across state boundaries and counties, but tried to be parsed by state authorities and jurisdictions, even if, as Jay Inslee noted, this is a multi-state crisis of climate change that has rendered the forests as fuel by 2017 for combined drought and higher temperatures set bombs, waiting to go off in our forests, in ways unable to be measured by fire risk that continues to be assessed in pointillist terms by fuel load and past history of fires known as the fire rotation frequency. When these bombs go off, it is hard to say what state boundary lines mean.If San Francisco famously lies close to natural beauty, the Bay Area, where I live, lies amidst of a high risk zone, where daily updates on fire risk is displayed prominent and with regularity in all regional parks. These maps made over a decade ago setfire standardsfor building construction in a time of massive extra-urban expansion. But risk has recently been something we struggled to calculate as we followed the real-time updates of the spread of fires, smoke, and ash on tenterhooks and with readiness and high sense of contingency, anxiety already elevated by rates of coronaviurs that depended on good numbers: fire risk was seen as an objective calculation fifteen years ago, but was now not easy to determine or two rank so crisply by three different shades.When thunderstorms from mid-August brought the meteorological curiosity of nearly 12,000 dry lightening dry strikes from mid to late August 2020, they hit desiccated forests with a shock. The strikes became as siege as they set over three hundred and fifty-seven fires across the state, that rapidly were communicated into expansive complexes of brush fires. We map these fires by state jurisdictions, and have cast them as such in policy, by borders or the perimeters we hope to contain barely grasp the consequences of how three quarters of a million acres burned up suddenly, and smoke from the cluster of fires rose in columns that spread across state boundary lines as far as Nebraska, and how fire complexes that spread across three million acres that would soon create a layer of soot across the west, eerily materialized in layers of GIS ESRI maps of environmental pollutants, while toxic particulate mater released in plumes of black carbon by the fires cover the state, rendering the sun opaque where I live, in the Bay Area, now Pompeii by the Bay as smoke at toxic levels blanketed much of the state. They even more serious map, to be sure, was of fire spread: but the maps of air quality set the entire western seaboard apart from the nation, as if threatening to have it fall into the ocean and split off from the United States, even if the burning of its open lands was more of a portent of things to come, they were a historical anomaly, lying outside the record of fire burns or air quality, if the poor air quality traced the origin of black carbon columns of smoke that would rise into the nation s atmosphere. President of Some? Donald Trump has presented a new notion of the Presidency to the United States: the open claim to be President of only some of the nation, and to have that model of Presidential rule become the standard for political decisions. This policy was not Trump s own decision: the retreat from any interest in bipartisan governance that had been the basis for American politics for two hundred years began in the pitched nature of pointed acrimony in the U.S. Senate that erased the decorum and respect among different interests in a model of collective action for over two centuries. Already by 2011, the nation divided into spectral schema suggesting slight chance of local bipartisan governance, disguising often narrow margins of political victory, despite eighteen states where Republicans controlled both the legislature and governor’s mansion in 2011, some eighteen were split.While the pitched fervor of some of our national divisions bears the imprint of faith-based movements, they are replicated in the pointillistic logic of the electoral plans of REDMAP a concerted attempt of regional redistricting. For the reconfiguration of electoral districts has staked out a problem of governance as a strategy of victory that would erode the project of governance, by privileging states as an amassing of electoral votes, rather than positing the coherence of the interests of the nation as a whole. The concept of governance seems fragmented, bolstered by regionalism, states rights discourse, and the cruel new isolationism of go-it-aloneism. In ways recast in the 2020 election as a choice between darkness and light of truly terrifyingly Manichean proportions, evoking near-apocalyptic scenarios to recast public debate as issues of identitarian self-interest. The divide of states on the 2000 electoral map, which didn t change much over eight years, enshrined a blue versus red state logic, dovetailing with a deeper plan of retaining electoral control. This was the map was parsed in the seventh season of The West Wing, in 2006, at a time when the television newscasters needed to remind their audience states shaded blue sent electors to vote for Democrat Matt Santos (modeled in 2004 on then-Illinois State Senator Barack Obama, who just delivered the nominating speech at another convention), red ones for his Republic opponent, Arnie Vinick as Campaign Director colored a dry erase board red and blue as results were announced.Obama provided a model for Santos as a candidate not defined by race, pivoting from race to underlying unity among red and blue states, but the restate-blue state divide was militarized. And when Barack Obama was re-elected in 2012, the Republican state legislators in Virginia, Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, and Ohio adopted the idea of ensuring Republican victories by rigging the Electoral College according to the congressional districts that they had redesigned, rather than in bulk, in the hopes to skew the distribution of electors by the congressional districts they had guaranteed would be firmly red, having designed districts that even in what were considered blue states had red legislatures. m so that districts would be assured that they would not be outvoted by urban metro areas would dictate a future.This gave rise to the logic that asserted the rural non-metro regions should reclaim a place at the table by recrafting representational politics to give new meaning to those who increasingly feared or felt that their vote just didn t count but felt that their futures on the line. By redrawing districts, legislatures magnify rural interests outside large metro areas, offering a logic magnifying their political representation through congressional districts as power bases and political divides: not by blue and red states, but by a red republic, in need of its voice. The plan to separate electoral votes from the popular vote can only work by recasting electoral districts on party-skewed lines, independent of any geographic shape save benefitting one party, at the expense of another, at violence to the republic. It was echoed in a tactic of political obstructionism that provided the logic for red areas to be increasingly opposed to current governmental policy in the Obama administration.The reduction of debate between parties may have begun on a local level, but metastasized nationally in legislative maps. The rationale of legislative bodies has shifted on local levels from a representational logic of governance to a pitched battle as only one party wields legislative power in all but one state in the union.The disorienting nature of an overdetermined power play means that there is not much discussion or debate in the local states, or legislative bodies, but a sectarian consolidation of demographic identity as destiny. The division of parties cast red and blue as forms of governance that essentialize the color-choices made in news maps as almost existential terms. Indeed, the increased casting of the 2020 Presidential election as a battle between light and dark was gained distinctly pocalyptic undertones fit for the age of the Coronavirus, mapping the current elections as a referendum of the future of American democracy or, for President Trump, a bright future and dark future whose oppositional terms echo a religious eschatology. Was it any coincidence that the separatist blood-stained banner of the Confederacy reappeared at Trump campaign rallies in 2016, jumping the logic of a chromatic divide into opposing visions that could be understood as a nation divided in war?Brandon Partin, of Deland, Fla., at 2016 Trump rally in Kissimmee, Fla. (AP Photo/Evan Vucci)As candidates proclaim themselves to constituents as an ally of light, not darkness, the choice of the election has turned on the complexion of the nation s political future in ways that concretize the removal of maps of support of political parties as an existential struggle for the nation s soul, removed from questions of political representation. The eery blocks of political division were apparent in the long led-up to the election, as the fracture lines in the nation were only less apparent because of increasing tension as to which way the highly colored states in play would slide, and how the electoral prism would mediate the popular vote. The notion that a specter of socialism haunts America, to be promoted by the Democratic Party, is the conclusion to a logic of deeply sectarian politics of belonging. Sneak Attacks? The anniversary of the bombing of Hiroshima gives one pause as it marks the emergence of a world of remote military strikes conducted by GPS, or on a UTM grid that cast agency at a distance from ethics or ethical choice. One thinks not only of the global cartoons of global expanse that seemed to unroll geopolitical spaces for their American readers, but of the new ethics of point-based precision. For the point-based maps created vertiginously elevated the subjectivity of their readers across the 40,000 maps produced between 1941-45 by the U.S. Army Map Service so as to remove them from a shared ethical framework of humanity. The framing of military invasion as a game of geospatial dominance discounted the massive incalculable loss of human life in campaigns of prolonged fire-bombing and atomic holocaust. Indeed, the narrative this cartoon bears traces of how this new spherical global space suggested suggested a territorial dominance across the new spaces of air travel: the cartoon that appeared after the atom bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki on August 6, 1945 are particularly striking as it appears to remove any sense of the agency of atomic holocaust; it cast the explosive logic of the atom bomb as a delayed quid pro quo response to the Jap Sneak Attack of 1941; it asked readers to consider not the effects or impact of the atom bomb, but, rather evasively, who really was the Fellow who Lighted the Fuse, as if he were to blame: before any images of the destruction of both cities was described, the Chicago Tribune included testimony of Enola Gay crew members, hailing from Chicago, as an exclusive, with a discussion of the physics of atomic bombs and a reminder that a number of B-29 bombers were posed for further destructive missions. The front-page color cartoon of the Tribune, in Hearst style, was the sole visual documentation of the bomb s effects, masking the devastation of its impact by the geopolitical logic that led to dropping an atom bomb. Who, indeed, was making the sneak attack? If the yellow and orange hued pyrocumulous clouds caused by atomic blasts suggested the fireball of a nuclear or atomic explosion, the cartoon clearly referenced not only the explosion that left 200,000 estimated dead in its immediate aftermath, but the fireball of the atomic explosion as a sunset of the Japanese Empire. The first dropping of an atomic bomb on civilian population by the United States was sunset of the Japanese empire, seen from the empyrean perspective of the navigation of aeronautical space that allowed its delivery at precise global coordinates.The atomic fireball left massive fatalities and injuries in its immediate radius, far beyond the devastation at the site of impact where buildings were flattened, leaving third degree radiation burns far beyond it. The cartoon provided a rationalization of the explosion in maps that provide a continued basis for reflection on the scope of aerial bombardment, departing from the maps of worldly retreat of Japanese Empire on which American newspapers had focussed and were created by late August 1945 by the U.S. Army Information Branch, as if to justify the impact of one devastating attack.Many cartoons of the atomic bomb dropped by the U.S. Army were explicitly racist or misguidedly celebratory. This famous front-pager made open reference, perhaps fitting Chicago, where Rand McNally was based, as the spherical projection enabled dominance of aerial space and mastery of the virtual space of air strikes: the globe was now not inhabited by people, but a spherical surface over which one flew. And while the sign planted on the unidentified island of Oahu is suggested to be the site of the spent match that started it all, omitting that the 1941 aerial attack was staged on a military base Pearl Harbor rather than on a civilian population. The colors of the apocalyptic conflagration are muted, as we see only harm coming to the scattered limbs and bloodied knife of a caricature of the Japanese soldier scattered in a stratosphere. The images of airplanes clustered like so many gnats over the empire of Japan provided an increasingly common typos in maps that affirmed the status of Japanese cities as targets. Boosterish jingoist maps had presented Japan as the target of aerial bombing, but delivery of the Enla Gay s payload confirmed the targeting of the island empire by announcing the ultimate superiority of airspace dominance, in targeting two cities:We are perhaps still measuring our relation to the decision and effects of the atomic bombs dropped on the civilian populations of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. If the interconnectedness of any two points on the globe was asserted by a spherical projection, the cartoon gestures to lines of longitude and latitude to link the unprecedented conflagrations of the destruction of Japanese cities to the rash act of aerial bombardment on a December morning, as if to suggest that the decision to suddenly drop two atomic bombs was a matter of just deserts in the new age of airborne explosives: the logic of air dominance had entered the cartooning landscape by 1943. Of course, the real sneak attack one might have expected to see reported was not from the point of view of the pilots who had guided the two bombs dropped over Japan oddly outside the field of terrestrial expanse that the staff cartoonist of the Chicago Tribune presented to readers the morning of August 6, 1945. But the space of flight commanders that cartoonist Carey Orr was invited to design celebrated the introduction of a new atomic age for its readers, that seemed to mark the global supremacy of the Americans in the destruction of Hiroshima that Harry Truman had commanded in Washington, DC, and that the US Army s upper echelons had signed off on.Readers of the newspaper acknowledged the impact of the blast the rocked large aircraft lying nearby, promising unprecedented damage as a result of a blast that obliterated a huge sector of the inhabited city causing as yet unmeasured human casualties, spreading radiation illness among civilians-by a cartoon that clearly rendered the unprecedented degree of devastation as a consequence of the incursion of American airspace four years earlier, as the U.S. Navy threatened to let loose more and more destruction on vital coastal installations, with little regard for human life. The cartoon must have provided a critical way that this act of destruction could be mapped.The pastoral scene rendered by cartooning was a sharp counterpoint to the way that the Manchester Guardian, for example, reported on the destruction that spread out from the hypocenter of the bomb in Hiroshima, carbonizing trees and reducing to rubble all but a skeletal framework of a building that survived the atomic blast that killed tens of thousands of civilians. While President Truman proclaimed to the nation with almost unhinged excitement (or glee) that we are now prepared to obliterate more rapidly and completely every productive enterprise the Japanese have above the ground, as he went on to threaten a rain of ruin from the airtime like of which has never been seen on this earth, the cartoon oriented readers to a view above the ground, justifying the scale of the explosion in wildly disproportionate terms as the result of restoring balance in a geopolitical theater, not a nation, and omitted the scale of its devastating destructiveness by orienting viewers not to the scale of human destruction by which some 60% of the city was obliterated, but the smooth surface of a spherical globe. that enabled the heinous act to be performed, as if to echoed how the Enolas Gay target it with precision.The different ethics of understanding the atomic explosion two thousand times more powerful than the largest bombs the RAF dropped on Germany was stunning in its scale, but muted in its horror by being rendered in a lessons learned jingoism Hearst newspaper style, but taking advantage of the regular comic strips that supplemented its news coverage from 1940-43, to describe the most consequential global news that day by a color cartoon, as if by detracting attention from the four sq miles the bomb had flattened by the bomb by imagining the aerial view from outer space as a set of pastels through which fly, as if comically, a disembodied head, limbs, and a hand, in an all too unsubtle warning of where playing with fire will get you, placing the unnamed fellow in place of the men who ordered the bombs of devastating tonnage dropped on two civilian centers: the editorial penned by veteran cartoonist Carey Orr whose explicitly racist cartooning in his regular strip in The Tiny Tribune was a model for Walt Disney oddly replaced the horror of the bomb with a sequence of pastels of pinks, oranges, and reds as the glorious sunset of an Eastern military theater, almost allowing readers to ignore that 60% of a city had been wiped out.The cartoon that fails even to map Hiroshima displaced all responsibility for dropping of an atomic bomb pointing the finger, circularly, at the very folks whose populations it incinerated and introduced radioactive illnesses. If one followed the long fuse that curved around the surface of the globe, those who understood the new doctrine of hemispheric dominance might trace the origins of the massive explosions that rocked the earth to the spent match that lay notionally on the islands of Oahu in Hawaii, where the evidence of who was the culprit in the recent air raid might be found and located with geographic precision on exact global coordinates. The explosion was itself evidence of the interconnectedness of global war, and a decisive rebuff of images mapping a pan-Pacific Japanese Empire that radiated from the islands of Hawai i that were a target of Pearl Harbor, that asserted the expansion of a Pacific empire in saturated reds in 1940 that took the Hawaiian islands as their center and focal point, to underscore the Empire s active encroachment on American sovereignty.The tables were reversed in the double-duty that the atomic afterglow provided as a sunset of Japanese empire, and the precision strikes that pinpoint mastery of aerial targeting revealed. The cartoon underscored the power of bombing with such precision that the virtual landscape maps of the Army Service created; but the spherical projection erased any agency in the dropping of the bomb in ways that almost removed their users from humanity, replacing a landscape of national integrity with the world of geopolitics on grids, where the surgical strike of point-based intervention became more tempting than wars between nations, rewriting the harmony implicit in a leftist One World underscoring the shared humanity of global interconnections now allowed by high-speed air travel in a maleficent style. Politicians like Wendel Wilkie optimistically assured audiences in 1940 that there are no distant points in the world any longer, by using the magic of a Universal Transverse Mercator, Richard Edes Harrison exploited available global mathematical projections to teach Americans, as the editors of Fortune magazine or Harrison himself put it, there was now One World, One War, as a single map was entitled in the the atlas that Harrison helped produce to allow readers to Look at the World with new eyes, eyes of global strategy, in a view of the world fitting the air age and global war.The FORTUNE Atlas for World Strategy sought to provide the magazine s subscribers to Time might expect by offering the very needed principles used in the U.S. Military to map global expanse in wartime and indeed, as William Rankin noted, enabling the synchronization of air, water, and land troops in unprecedented ways, by the very spherical UTM projection that the U.S. Army helped to develop, as if to allow them inside on the new power of strategic mapping that the U.S. military sought to promote.The resuscitation of such recondite Renaissance global projections as the azimuthal equidistant, that Gerardus Mercator used to map the pole, to foreground the notion of a global theater of military dominance by air was later adopted, in something of a recuperation of the logic of a one world argument, as Rankin noted perceptively, in the wreath-bound emblem intended was a of global harmony in the United Nations, as if the war or cartographic logic of aerial bombardment had not occurred; what had provided a strategic sense of reducing global expanse in a world of air travel and the global reach of airborne bombs was repurposed by 1945 that for all practical purposes affirmed the centrality of American in a global discourse that dislodged the UTM projection from military theaters of war, as if to try to recreate a map of less militaristic intent, that ensured the global map would be continued to be framed by olive branches.Harrison s maps are the pictorial precursors of our ubiquitous satellite maps of today, yet hand drawn with great cartographic skill for specific arguments, detailed in text, statistics, and diagrams that erased the problems of military strikes across borders in a terms of a logic of efficiency and geometry and of theaters of dominance. They expanded emblems of transcontinental air travel to a global optic as Edes Harrison reinvented cartography as a skill of global dominance for American Strategy, far beyond the form of transcontinental travel of the recent past from New York City, unveiled in January 1942, as America entered into the global war effort, and sought to sell the war to domestic audiences through the logic of military maps by revealing geostrategic aims of airspace, as much as technologies of transcontinental air travel.Global dominance in air travel was soon to arrive, opening up American dominance for a time in this global airspace, but the war became a critical time to promote this world view at the same time far beyond American frontiers: as war was increasingly fought in the air across Europe and the world by 1942, when the United States was joining, Life magazine assured readers that the United States frontier of Alaska was only wait[ing] for war in January 1942, months after Pearl Harbor, as the United States was readying itself for a showdown with the ancient and imperial power of Japan, the air map not only displaced the national map, but guaranteed a global purchase by high-speed air travel that could be readily imported to a military theater, now that the United States Air Force was stationed outside Anchorage in the Elmendorf Air Base, ensuring a Pacific Theater of War. Harrison in 1943 gave us the simple ease of seeing Japan rom Alaska from our own territory, as if, prefiguring Sarah Palin, on the horizon from her own window in Achorage presents the globe absolutely free from cloud cover, in all its topographic elegance, the Sea of Japan and the island s extensive mountain ranges from the Sakhalin islands all present with a tactile quality of a molded plastic relief map, with a level of naturalistic local detail and topographic accuracy that the surface of a Rand McNally globe could only aspire and which was, the reader knew, a virtual space as much as one that a person could ever apprehend, even from the air, but was the promise that airspace dominance provided to Americans in 1943-4. The detailed topographic aerial views that Edes Harrison so expertly designed of four approaches or possible incursions into Japanese airspace seemed designed to familiarize readers to the prospect of high-speed air travel in ways that worked hand-in-glove with the U.S. Army Map Corps into whose horizon line the reader could gaze, as if with wonder, seeing the island empire revealed on the horizon as lying essentially in its purview. The territorial proximity of the Empire of Japan seemed so near the Aleutian plans, that the text promising to reveal various approaches to Japan that could span, in the rapid travel across airspace, the huge continental mass that Japan is trying to subdue by confirming the close geographic relationship that can be put to work in Allied offensive action in the air while conceding difficulties of supply of such offensive actions.The shaded hemispheric relief maps of Richard Edes Harrison s landscape maps of course offered evidence of a new purchase on global military theaters to civilian audiences in such elegant full-color inserts included in National Geographic and other publications. His global perspectives orient readers to global dominance that intersected with the ability of the Army Map Corps, as they naturalized the adoption of UTM coordinates by the U.S. Army to coordinate military forces in global war. The critical nature of maps for global war were indeed apparent after Pearl Harbor was attacked, and the United States realized that few maps existed of this theater of war, William Rankin has noted: as if to conceal the absence, Newsweek assured readers that Washington DC had become in short order a veritable city of maps months after the attack on Pearl Harbor, as if to assure them of American mapmakers readiness to meet military needs in global war: it is now considered afaux pasto be caught without your Pacific arena, editors assured readers lest they still entertain some inner isolationism. Newsweek openly linked Harrison s pictorial map to dominance over theaters of combat: the increased accuracy of such bifold pictorial maps served to process a spherical earth beyond national bounds, as President Roosevelt geared up to move troops, navy fleets, and air squads around the globe. There were, Harrison assured readers of news maps made for the U.S. Army Service Forces, or Army Maps Corps, at least four approaches to Japan on the table by 1944, despite the considerable distance across the Pacific which really, he implicitly argued, should not seem so far in an age of airspace and high speed flight and the simplicity of these approaches to Japan from Alaska, from Manuchuria, from China-Burma, and from the SW Pacific presented a defined Pacific Theater sought to orient readers to the nature of global geopolitics on grids. Relations of global geostrategy seemed complicated, in the specific, but Edes Harrison simply simplified the legibility of a global landscape no one had seen.The pictorial landscapes that cast military theaters as verdant topographies were absent from war, but the picture was, readers would have known, quite different on the ground: the view might have been able to be naturalized as a continuous spherical map to suggest the close ties of air travel, but the same islands of the Alaskan peninsula were themselves theaters of war as well as stepping stones, where American army bases and U.S. Army and Navy airfields existed, providing the infrastructure for the global airspace that Edes Harrison s bifold landscape maps promoted through their elegantly expansive pictorial form. These islands that rest on the seam of the Pacific and American geological plates offered a powerful strategic bridge and theater of combat that is all but erased in Harrison s hemispheric maps, which use the continuity of a UTM grid to define continuity, as if the illusion of perspectival unity habituates viewers in the know to the contraction of terrestrial relation that air power allows, without needing an infrastructure of air bases and refueling stations, or indeed human lives.The unique global perspective that Edes Harrison offered Americans of the approach to Japan from Alaska was almost a creation of the U.S. Army Map Service geodeists, who plotted the continuity of air flights from these bases, as if to plot alternate flights from the Aleutians or Marianas the eventual actual fligthtpath Big Boy and Little Boy took as if they were options on the table of future geopolitical strategies. The set of landscape images superceded any notion of national airspace, suggesting the freedom of the skies if not a global theater of geopolitics over which the United States presided from the air.the approach over and into Japanese airspace here reduced to a thin strip of land lying upper center on the global space Edes Harrison showed, must have normalized the possibility of an airborne invasion or bombing campaign as a game of sliding across a newly mapped global space. And when the Chicago Tribune asserted a false equality of wartime bombing, even in the case of the unicum of the unprecedented power of an atom bomb, as a tit for tat, that suggested in a color scheme straight out of Tiepolo complete with cottony puffs of billowy clouds that dramatically suffuses the cartoon panel with light, that cuts against the dismemberment of Japanese bodies, and, amidst the violence of airborne limbs that fly across the globe like so much detritus, assured readers, that the explosion was to be ethically accepted as a response to the sneak attack. American readers of the Tribune should feel no qualms at the dehumanized victims of the atomic strike or feel ethical qualms of deep, deep unease at the prospect of a world whose inhabitants bathed in radiation more than celestial light.The tragedy of showing the dropping of atomic explosives by a cartoon map on the front page of the world s greatest newspaper some seventy-five years ago recast the act of dropping an atom bomb as only the due delayed response for the Japanese Imperial Air Force s aerial attack: the magnified register of this response was perhaps hinted at, or acknowledged, in the color scheme that recalled the bizarrely majestic illusionistic perspective in the Wurzburg staircase of in the truly global Apollonian perspective it offered over the continents, for visitors to the Wurzburg Residenz a fresco that seemed to suffuse the stairwell and pick up the light that streamed through large bay windows below it, as one proceeded to the Imperial Hall on the first floor, on the way to the baroque Kaisersaal dominated by images of the genius imperil: was there a gesture to the frescoes of a sun god bathed in light in the cartoon of the explosive force of Genius imperil? The cartoon may not have been a reference to the Tiepolo ceiling fresco that dominates the gallery through which one ascends the imperial staircase in Wurzburg, in a monumental passageway of Vitruvian ideals. The ceiling of the vescoval residence that echoes was the culmination of several vaulted ceilings Tiepolo designed and executed of planets orbiting round a sun god, bathed in radiating light, this one placing images of the continents in each cornice and caricatures of the world s races on the ceiling fresco s sides; the celestial court to which the visitor ascending the staircase ascends presents emblems of three continents America, bearing a griffon, Africa, and Asia, but is dominated by the remove of the Apollo ringed by a golden glow. The cartoonist seems to have replaced Apollo by the Enola Gay, bathed in celestial rays that is the modern seat of cosmographic globalism. Whereas Tiepolo rendered the continents paying service to the Sun God as if a courtly society, what was an allegory of triumph is rendered as a triumphant tha tconceals the purely destructive intnent ofAmerica; if Tieopolo s characterization of the continents was tinged by racism, and racial prejudice, the celestial celebration is now rooted in military triumph over the Japanese floe, the dawning of an atomic age whose radiance is rooted in new rays, hardly so removed from the terrestrial sphere and now hardly an allegory at all but perhaps only able to be imagined on August 6, 1945 as the dawn of a new age marked by the release of cataclysmic energy of divine transcendence.There was, of course, little actual transcendence or any sense of transcendent sublime down on the ground, where actual humans lived. The dropping of the Little Boy atomic bomb that targeted Hiroshima was hardly an allegorical event, but was probably easier to see that way by the folks who dropped it, and wanted to see in it the conclusion of the war and the beginning of a new age. The explanation the cartoonist offered of the logic of dropping the first atomic bomb ever was preposterous indeed. The Japanese planes had attacked a territorial outpost over one third of whose inhabitants had recently been Japanese, before the United States government placed them under martial law including its courts! from December 7, 1941 through 1945, interning the small minority of Kibei who claimed loyalty to Japan, until the U.S. Supreme Court voided as illegal the military takeover of the civil government of Hawaii, and the internment of those Japanese-Americans in relocation centers on the islands where they had, under considerable duress, come to renounce American citizenship. The Tribune, as if making due on their marquee promise to be the Best Newspaper in the World, offered a local perspective on the obliteration of two Japanese cities for readers. For it promised, for what it was worth, exclusive coverage of the Atom Bomb Crew s Story, that Americans were more likely to read about: as if obliterating the inconvenient fact that island of japan was inhabited, or that four square miles of Hiroshima had been just purposefully reduced to an obliterated zone, the sort of thing we should never try to create, and presented the awesome scene from the plane for all Americans to share especially Americans already habituated to the removed view of a global landscape and hemispheric logic: the presence of the Aleutian peninsula that was so critical in the war, and the proximity of Alaska to the Pacific theater as Harrison had described it, both described the inside story of the Chicagoan in one of the planes that dropped the bomb was dropped on August 6, 1945, and provoked cries of My god! from those battle-hardened American airmen ten miles away on the Marianas, as more bombers waited to run raids on other enemy targets without noting or considering their human costs of such brutality; the dominant tone of the exclamatory headline is celebration and festive.The cartoon is above all a celebration of the cartographic logic of wartime globalism that show the world as interrelated, and linked discreet points in the spatial continuum of airspace. This was the space Edes Harrison and the U.S. government had promoted served to advance priorities of strategic hemispheric dominance, to be sure in an extension of the freedom of the air of civil aviation, but in a logic and illusion of global mastery that was to militate against global peace for the second half of the twentieth century. Bats over UrbanSkylines Thomas Nagel queried the possibility humans had to know what it is like for a bat to be a bat in a 1974 paper that posed pressing epistemological challenges beyond the philosophical community. Nagel was asking us to consider what was the context in which bats move, and to consider the foreign nature of propositions about the distribution of a network of flying bats to humans embodied experience: the winged mammals that may have inhabited the eaves of Nagel s house in Connecticut or Vermont I am guessing where he rises from his desk to spend the early evening watching bats reel out at dusk as they fly in wide arcs, searching en masse to seek out meals of bugs and gnats at dusk. Asking what it is like for a bat to be a bat suggests a new model for collective action, not bumping into one another by using spatial registers in ways we don t really know how to map or to even think we can. Maybe he was in Florida, near Gainsville, or Tampa Bay, where homes for bat colonies have been constructed that offer them temporary housing watching a bat colony search for bugs and flies at a time when the flying mammals are losing safe natural habitat, displaced by construction and environmental saturation of electric lighting. The instant of inter-species realization that launched an epistemic earthquake might have been launched when, returning home, evening drink in hand, Nagel retired to his desk after dinner to write an article arguing we lack not language but adequate mental tools to think like a bat, or imagine the context of bat-like proposition about space, our own individually embodied experience so removed from a distributed network to imagine moving let alone accurately navigating like a bat, in clouds of a distributed intelligence. Are bats able to synthesize, share, and collectively process a sense of the images of the outlines of trees, skyscrapers, and blocked routes, by abilities to synthesize individual datapoints in something like a collective map map? The philosopher performed a powerful thought experiment about human consciousness about the subjectively rooted nature of human experiences, by inviting us to consider wha the took as the vast intellectual remove of the experience of those nocturnal navigatorWe might be able to adopt the bat s point of view, Nagel argued, but being like a bat escaped the conceptual tools humans have at their collective disposal. While Nagel did not necessary mean the swarm thinking that enables bats behavior, it is striking that the logic of the swarm of bats nocturnal flight paths that employ vision, but don t rely on it may be providing a basis for the new training sets that push new horizons for AI intelligence, beyond the training sets used to develop computer vision that has helped train how computer vision might see and recognize facial characteristics. As echolocation helps bats track insects, not crash into each other as they fly in large groups, and navigate caves, moving by sounds, as much as visual cues, the abilities it allows for densely flying animals to somehow not jam each others sounds, but fly side-by-side in large groups without touching, evading one another without audio interference, and distinguishing the recognizable pitch of one another s individual calls they may offer a way of being within a distributed network, sustained at over sixty miles per hour and within underground caves from which up to half a million bats nightly emerge. This would be a form of distributed intelligence and a form of intelligence, Nagel s work reminds us, removed from human ken.Bats powerful bioacoustic abilities to distinguish individual echolocators without interference in crowded caves may offer a powerful model for using sonar signals to create a similar capacities of sonic recognition among the range of sensor data that self-driving cars use by emitting distinctive levels of sonar so specific not only across different makes, but individual drivers, allowing swarms of commuters to calibrate their spatial relations to other commuters by an analogous sort of distributed intelligence: might autonomous vehicles, in other words, be made to think like bats? The thought is tempting, as it would push a new basis for drone thought and warm thinking and movement, if it remains a bit of a pipe dream quite different from the current base-maps for self-driving cars, based on mapping roadways, directionality, and the driving cues of highway signs, turn routes, and the sort of tacit signs of how we move cars within lanes, along painted reflective dashes, to prevent or reduce automobile collisions.But what are the maps of bats? Could the flight paths of bats ask us to reimagine maps? The level of auditory discrimination is at basis, perhaps, a question not only of technologies of extremely accurate localization but bioacoustics. Much as LIDAR might create a point-cloud for areas that are lacking in many topological maps of routes to estimate the areas of roads on which autonomous vehicles might travel, is there a chance that bats move mentally among multiple scales and registers of mapping, moreover, both to navigate among one another s flight paths while traveling in the night skies at speeds that are often up to 60 mph, and to take paths that allow them to return to the security of caves or other diurnal dwellings? The problem was how the sort of state-of-the-art maps for autonomous vehicles that were dependent on existing maps would make sense in the dramatically changing extra-urban and rural environments on large scales, and how such rapid development of built landscapes could limit the potential positives of autonomous vehicle technologies: often, these areas were the same in which many commuters lived, and where the benefits of driverless cars would be felt, so the benefits of unmooring cars from existing maps was more than a purely academic challenge.The bioacoustics tools bats use to negotiate in swarms and on individual rest on developed abilities of acoustic recognition that might be especially important to autonomous vehicles for which the motion between large scale maps and the mapping of fast-moving vehicles beside them remain something of a missing piece, if not a potential cartographical blind spot for modeling distributed spatial intelligence by sonic blasts. Bats may hone these auditory skills of discrimination of sonic frequencies by skills honed by preparing from departure deep underground in caverns, developing echolocation systems that allow them to capture insects while flying that are less than a centimeter in size, though the presence of a still human can confuse bats sonic maps for judging moving prey, while navigating swarms of over 1.5 million 15 million live in Natural Bridges underground caverns, and caves in Carlsbad NM once housed up to eight million.The ability to map individually and in a swarm make their ultrasonic pulses a powerful tool of acoustic discrimination of routes, but the images bats preserve in their mental maps are not nearly so existential in nature. Indeed, the colony of a million and a half Mexican free-tailed bats that live in downtown Austin, under Congress Bridge, beleived to be the largest urban bat colony in the world, is so prized by the city s human residents that the emergency of maturing bat pups in the Central Texas night sky is advertised as a cheap thrill during fall sundown of vertiginous biophilia, the dedicated “bat hotline” (512) 327-9721 provides visitors eager to witness the swarm with confirmation when bats are seen emerging downtown a biophilic spectacle that highly demonstrates the intricate networks of distributed knowledge as young pups learn to fly, that is a prominent part of the Central Texas city s ecology. Perhaps a splinter group from the nearby Bracken Cave colony one of the densest sites of mammals on earth, just a half hour northwest, is the largest known bat colony in the world.Inspired by the broad arcs of nightly emergence of bats from New Mexico s Carlsbad Caverns National park as Pearl Harbor was attacked, a dentist first promoted the idea of using bats for fire bombing of Tokyo s wooden homes. The plans for outfitting thousands of bats with explosives affixed to their little chests treating the bats as dive bombers to create spontaneous conflagrations in Japanese cities developed as the letter sent to President Roosevelt led to plans for a nocturnal release of thousands of bats, bearing explosives on their chests, who would roost in the structures of Japanese buildings by treating Mexican free tail bats as a squadron of blind dive bombers who, transported across the Pacific to the eaves of wooden houses in Tokyo, might provoke an incendiary attack by distributing packets of napalm the basis of incendiary bombs by the far greater geographic area of bats on whom chests were affixed napalm adhesive vests. Sequestering a thousand free tails hibernating in isolated chambers for trans-Pacific travel never bore fruit; optimistic simulations revealed explosive packets regularly impaired flight and “uncertain behavior of bats” glossed the failure to cooperate in destructive fantasies of using winged mammals to distribute urban conflagrations by 1944, if disastrous experiments in California created some massive explosions. Despite the failure to orchestrate a swarm of bomb-bearing bats, plans to parachute a swarm were brushed aside by OSS director William J. Wild Bill Donovan punctured as the Die Fledermaus Farce, dismissing the fantasy of costuming bats for an air raid by an Strauss operetta promoted into the operatic repertory to ridicule the strategic value of an airborne zoo putting the cruelty of immolating flying mammals aside. The basic truth was that the bats flight could not be planned. The remove of such a bomb as a way of creating winged kamikazes removed nature of hopes for the strategic deployment of bats in a global strategy from what it is like for a bat to be a bat, or how bats think. But could it be possible to approach the mental outlook that enables bats to navigate nocturnal skies at high speeds in search of fast-moving food? Perhaps Nagel s project influenced how, since 2011, Israeli researcher Yossi Novel attempt to cross this bridge of consciousness by a colony of bats nearly 20,000 winged mammals that he raised from birth to maturity, and tracked their progress as they navigate Tel Aviv s skyline, using the city lights to navigate their paths home. By fitting the small bats with the smallest GPS [then] in existence of about ten grams, scientists charted paths to uncover secrets of the mammals neural abilities of nocturnal navigation around man-made waypoints in Tel Aviv s and the most visible nocturnal monuments to detect their cognitive abilities. While perhaps not as elegant as aerial V-formations of geese, pelicans, or storks, timing their wing beats to catch eddies of air that seem to save birds some 20%-30% in energy, minimizing downdraft to an aerodynamic advantage, and flapping in phase to maximize energy by an anti-phase synchronizing of wingbeats in V-formation: bats far smaller wingbeats evolved fewer aerodynamic problems, and responded to fewer challenges of long-distance migration, but offer evidence of assembling spatial maps over time over a surprisingly expansive distance range. Far from a costume party of human orchestration, in a staged ball based on costuming bats, the bats flight was nightly tracked. Indeed, the almost nightly expeditions of bats some 15 million from caves north of San Antonio TX, in summer months that show up on radar as explosions of bioscatter, as they emerge from caves in search of food, is so striking at large-scale that the small-scale tools of navigation by which the bats move from sundown need to be mapped in relation not only to seasonal meteorology, artificial light, and human disturbances of the environment, although it might be better to begin from more basic still insufficiently understood questions of how bats, all too often mischaracterized as blind, regularly map space. The National Weather Service mapped nocturnal emergence of bats from caves in Central Texas on its radar that appear to be explosions of meteorological imbalance, but in fact only track the nightly emergence of millions of bats, an efflorescence of cave-dwelling mammals bursting into flight from underground sites what weather forecasters dismiss them bioscatter which raises immediate questions about the bats mapping tools, and the distributed networks of navigation that allow bats to fly across the state in search of food, without ever crashing into one another s paths of flight.if all maps are surface readings and of necessity exclude often crucial sensory noise, do those green explosions miss the miracle of bioacoustics that allow sophisticated level of auditory discrimination for bats to move with a sense of where they are going or what to avoid and what to eat! while registering or encoding a map to allow them to return to the caves? What are we missing in mapping those bats as mere biostatic, of no meteorological significance, we are now asking what sorts of sounds bats are making to one another as swarms disperse from what seem fixed points? Are the bats best mapped as swarms, or do they have individual flight paths, and, if so, what is their form of air traffic control?Without explicitly trying to revisit Nagel s thesis, the data gained about the bat s spatial sense of navigation and its brain capacities provided a sense of navigation as they flew above Tel Aviv s skyscrapers in relation to the tallest towers of the built manmade environment by a GPS of their own devise, that revealed how bats possessed uncanny navigational skills to fly in straight lines at considerable elevations of over a hundred meters, using as points of reference trees up to twenty-five meters away. Outfitted with GPS chips, they mapped the progress made from bat pups first exploratory flights, theorizing their abilities to encode learned flight paths to identify the best routes to locate food sources in the city at distances far beyond what sonar allowed them to navigate, to accumulate a mental map of the city that they accrue over years around visual landmarks, taking shortcuts to move across dozens of kilometers. Israeli researchers explained without much surprise how their bats navigated elevated points on the skyline of Tel Aviv as akin to the same GPS tools that they used to navigate their commutes around the skyscrapers that provided waypoints that were, somewhat quaintly, the very same waypoints of the researcher s own daily commute: it seemed eerily natural that bats had substituted for other landmarks that bats employ to orient themselves to a skyscape to seek their food or find their diurnal dwellings, as a basis for aerial navigation that provide orientation to the built environment. It might make sense to ask who was enabled by technology, or how technologies allowed us to think like bats: scientists interpreted their data by consulting with pilots, in order to determine what sorts of landmarks the bats released near Bersheba to guide their fairly secure paths, or what types of spatial learning bats developed over time, and how they build maps that allow them to navigate areas as expansive as 100 sq km.The studies of bats neural navigation nets began in 2011 in Israel, in a sense as a casualty of war: the military engagements in Israel created huge pressures on displaced and endangered animals, peace also provided new nesting opportunities for bats, as Haaretz reported Eran Levin of Tel Aviv University’s Department of Zoology discovered species-rich bat populations nesting in long-vacated army bunkers in the Jordan Valley, abandoned since the 1994, but now repurposed by displaced bats as perfect niches that mimic caves, repurposing the bunkers abandoned by Israel Defense Forces, vacant since peace accords with Jordan, but serving as a new habitat for large colonies of Egyptian fruit bats. The fruit bat populations provide a new sample group for zoological studies, providing a unique site to study bat populations, as help from Bat Conservation International and the Ford Foundation transformed the bunkers to homes for displaced bat colonies, including plastic nets and ropes to refashion their ceilings for bats that could restart new colonies holding up to twelve different species in twenty old unused bunkers, that have welcomed bats from the Palestinian Territories, Jordan, and Israel to temporary or perhaps permanent shelters.If bat studies progressed in the West Bank, the space of urban bats have been studied to show their ability yto navigate from the desert locations as Bersheva to urban habitats. taking them to new areas in the desert over forty kilometers from their usual habitat, finding fruit trees where they feed in the desert, 44 kilometers south of their normal range, and releasing them at dusk who had no problems finding their ways back to their favorite fruit trees, and those who were released at dawn went back to their caves. The bats seemed to use landmarks to guide their paths of flight to do so, and the bats that were released in a crater, over eighty km south of their caves, gaining the purchase to start to fly north: as they took time to exit the crater and to get oriented and needed to leave the crater to place themselves against distant landmarks to return home waypoints, as it were, to mark their own travels that we imagined computationally checked out, grasping their internal wayfinding abilities by analogy to our own use of GPS in multiple contexts; in what risks a circular argument, bats were argued to have internalized a GPS system. Did the GPS trackers enable researchers to map a bat navigating system, or to think that they had? The surprising lack of difficulty that the bats had in moving collectively is striking. The success with which bats learned short cuts, and indeed re-oriented themselves to space against spatially removed landmarks, seemed to suggest that they had been caught in the act of building a sophisticated mental map on which they could draw, even if it did not derive in sight, as they could indeed see it in their minds, that raised questions of how to describe the mental processes by which they were able to navigate after having been moved almost fifty kilometers south of their usual feeding grounds, and easily able to find their familiar sites of rest by the following day: the description of the bats as moving against buildings by their own GPS applied the grids we use to navigate traffic, airspace, or bike rides to the cognitive tricks of the mental operations of bats, without missing a beat.Tel Avivi researchers recently started monitoring a colony of 20,000 bats from birth could unlock secrets of sociability that allow colonies of thousands of bats to survive over forty years, and perhaps communicate, and indeed to all use their own abilities of sonar to fly together collectively within subjective tools, by a neural map that the abilities of echolocation bats use for closer range encounters. Such studies suggest intriguing orientational abilities of mouse-eared bats to orient themselves by magnetic fields as if by analogy to a compass at sunset, when they emerge, the suggest possession of considerable orientational tools. but the study of how bats can cannily navigate Tel Aviv skylines suggested an uncanny ability to internalize built landscapes, and to study their behavior that would not cause duress to any single bat. The image of the peaceful nocturnal navigation of the Holy Land seems a collective experiment for which funding must exist in Israel, the questions of echo-recognition were hoped to find a solution to how bats map human-built space, and perhaps the surprise came when they were recently explained to built a map akin to GPS as the means that experienced bats move with such surety across what seems a known space, taking short-cuts around buildings to find new paths to food, in ways that indicate they have built a map of the city in their bat-minds or to cast the bats minds not as a different embodied experience, but akin to GPS machines. The mapping tools strapped on their backs seem to have provided terms to allow us to imagine how bats navigate as a swarm by a version of GPS? as if the point-based mapping system that we adopt to move through space provides a basis for understanding how to be like a bat, or how a bat navigates space the GPS monitors seem to adopt a sort of invisible agency in the experiment, indeed, that allow us to think we can indeed, pace Nagel, enter a bat s mind. But the astounding adoption and growth of GPS as a universal translation device seems to have been extended across species in the experiment that ties GPS monitors as tools without their own spatial logic.Whether such monitors afford a sense of what it is like for a bat to be like a bat may be less evident than the possible expansions of imagining a neural net or distributed network by which automated cars case use GPS. There is a sort of romancing of the GPS devices as an agent, in other words, that links the bats to one another, and allow serve as universal translating machines, a version of the instantaneous translation of TARDIS, in Dr. Who, that relies on matters of telepathic fields, or the babel fish that excretes translations into the auditory canal in which it is implanted like an active hearing aid in an auditory channel, as a sort of prosthetic that provides instant empathy in Hitchhiker s Guide, or the prosthetic Microsofts that plugged into wetware sockets behind the ear like a chips to offer exoskeletal enhancements enabling fluency in other languages: the conceit of simultaneous translation the was tweaked by Douglas Adams and William Gibson was imagined as needed to resolve an atomic stalemate that emerged during space travel, in Murray Leinster s First Contact, as atomic detente after the encounter of a ship of humanoid bipeds are caught in a deadlock near the Crab Nebula and leads to a memorable conclusion as humans learn to recognize the truly universal sounds of laughter after both ships find they have proposed the same solution. The fiction of simultaneous translation in the 1945 story would be the basis for resolving the actual fears of atomic war at the foundation of the United Nations, which from its start promised to instantaneously translate all communications under its auspices into each of six official languages Arabic; Chinese; English; French; Russian; Spanish from the 1945 San Francisco Conference that led to its formal founding; instantaneous interpretation for speeches anywhere from as long as thirty-five minutes to a full hour became a basis for world peace, if one that Preter Pyotr Avaliani compared to driving a car that has a steering wheel but no breaks and no reverse as it allows no time for corrections characterized as premised on remembering enough short-term but forgetting the words one just said. The analogy takes us back to unidirectional routes of travel, waypoints, and the creation of a mental map without what we recognize as vision, based on the supersensitive visual perceptions of far greater distances than we ve imagined, if a vision not dependent on color sensitivity or differentiation.The GPS device attached to the backs of the bats provided the very tools used to track their motion would allow us to think like a bat, at least in offering a basis to interpret the how the bats navigated airspace, and make us realize that just as we enhance our navigational abilities by placing trust in Waze and live GPS navigation to avoid traffic jams and plot our daily commutes or used to they, too, allow us to think like bats. But the elevation of way finding tools in GPS might make us imagine we ve found way to think like bats, as opposed to equip them with translation devices that provide a better analogy to think about how they travel.Echolocation and geolocation are different spatial logics. But we may be in danger of assimilating bats to a system of something like a GPS-inflected AI. If the earlier model of navigation by magnetic fields at sunset posed the problem of the internal compass by which bats move after sunset by magnetic fields, the mental dominance of GPS as a grid we have internalized around waypoints, destinations, and points of primary reference provides a new model to think about how bats do think. 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