[sunday_serif]

On Exactitude in Science By Jorge Luis Borges

…In that Empire, the Art of Cartography attained such Perfection that the map of a single Province occupied the entirety of a City, and the map of the Empire, the entirety of a Province. In time, those Unconscionable Maps no longer satisfied, and the Cartographers Guilds struck a Map of the Empire whose size was that of the Empire, and which coincided point for point with it. The following Generations, who were not so fond of the Study of Cartography as their Forebears had been, saw that that vast Map was Useless, and not without some Pitilessness was it, that they delivered it up to the Inclemencies of Sun and Winters. In the Deserts of the West, still today, there are Tattered Ruins of that Map, inhabited by Animals and Beggars; in all the Land there is no other Relic of the Disciplines of Geography.

source: https://kwarc.info/teaching/TDM/Borges.pdf

[The_Blade]

nice, you beat me to this gem (with a side of Lewis Carroll and Baudrillard) because I was finishing work

the lesson is, never try

edit OH and the other part is that it was staged literary forgery by "Suarez Miranda, Viajes de varones prudentes, Libro IV, Cap. XLV, Lerida, 1658." Borges overclocked the meta

[noonething]

I was thinking about this the other day and it seems like the problem of map size is also the problem of the story of our lives. How much detail is really necessary.

[barrysteve]

But a massive precise map is the perfect seed for a useful simplified map.

Simplifying from a non-complex source is a waste of time.