locus communis

The Topology of Flavor, from Flavor network and the principles of food pairing, Ahn et. al 2011

courtneybolton:

Mapping the 7 Deadly Sins, by Adam Crowe.

Travel Times to the Remote Corners of the World

(click through picture for good looking large version)

“The maps are based on a model which calculated how long it would take to travel to the nearest city of 50,000 or more people by land or water. The model combines information on terrain and access to road, rail and river networks. It also considers how factors such as altitude, steepness of terrain and hold-ups like border crossings slow travel. Plotted onto a map, the results throw up surprises. First, less than 10 per cent of the world’s land is more than 48 hours of ground-based travel from the nearest city. What’s more, many areas considered remote and inaccessible are not as far from civilisation as you might think. In the Amazon, for example, extensive river networks and an increasing number of roads mean that only 20 per cent of the land is more than two days from a city - around the same proportion as Canada’s Quebec province.”

Even more interesting to me than the travel and spread of memes is the spread of atoms. As you can see from the map, the hardest places to get to are those in which the geography is unsuitable, by early 21st century standards, for urban habitation. There are no large cities that are not accessible in the 1-day time range. The hyper accessibility of 60% + of the planet has heavy implications for the spread of pandemics, but also makes possible next day shipping and lessens the cost of a globalized economy.

Since the advent of UPS & FedEx, the level of accessibility as shown on this map has not changed much, and will not change until a technological leap in air or space travel occurs. It would take wide adoption of supersonic air travel or the famed space plane that can go from Los Angeles to London in 2 hours to really be a game changer on this front. For now, packages will have to happily travel in less than a day to virtually anywhere on the planet.