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I recently heard Dr.
Juan Enriquez, a leading authority on life science, explain that human
DNA has a 98.8-percent overlap with simians. The genetic building blocks
that produced me (and you, no offense meant) vary from a monkey’s
by only 1.2 percent! Yes, I’ve been listening to big thinkers again,
and once more charts came to my mind (see “Stupid Chart Tricks,”
January 2004). You see Enriquez went on to explain that the relatively
small but key difference between humans and chimps is not tools or talk
but the ability to communicate information across time, the capacity to
create alphabets, books, constitutions, computer code, and—shaking
my vine most especially—maps.
For years I’ve
lived in awe of the nautical chart, which I first experienced as a large
piece of paper brimming with valuable information expressed with a carefully
developed graphic alphabet. On a single sheet you can see the work of
explorers, surveyors, and cartographers working together over generations
to locate, catalog, and diagram all the above- and underwater features
you need to safely navigate that square of ocean. When you become adept
at reading a chart, you can vividly picture what the area looks like,
and better yet, it’s also designed to be the workspace you use to
actually get there. I love charts and concur with Enriquez that they are
one of the most evolved of human accomplishments.
Moreover, charts can
be beautiful, particularly the old-fashioned ones that were etched by
hand. Look at the level and artfulness of detail on the bit of 1853 San
Francisco harbor chart on page 46. You could have used it to find a decent
place to anchor or sail up to a particular dock, then to get around town.
Up in the corner (outside the illustration) there’s even a key, in
a fine script, to important locations like the harbormaster, post office,
and jail. Maybe I have an overactive imagination, but I can practically
smell the tarred manila and hear my gold-crazed passengers clambering
down the gangway. Today this piece of paper is also dramatic graphic evidence
of the city’s incredible growth, a process in which charts played
an important part, which is why, in addition to world exploration and
empire building, Enriquez characterizes map-making as a cornerstone of
civilization.
But now we’re going
digital. All the world’s alphabets, graphical and musical included,
are collapsing into sublimely simple but powerful 0s and 1s. Ironically,
and delightfully, the high-resolution San Francisco image and thousands
of other antique chart scans are available for your perusal and downloading
in the historical section of NOAA’s Web site, www.chartmaker.ncd.noaa.gov.
You can even print them onto paper, though the unusual file format NOAA
uses makes that quite a chore.
The topic of formats
brings me to some less-pleasant aspects of our paper-to-digital transition.
According to a marine-industry committee working on the issue, electronic
charts are currently in at least 15 different data formats delivered via
at least 13 different media formats. I can recollect days in Hispaniola
using scrounged charts printed in Spanish, and I got by; maybe I had to
puzzle over some of the notes with a bilingual dictionary, but the medium,
paper, is universal, and so are most of the graphics. Today, if you try
to stick anything in your plotter except the right type of memory cartridge
with the right type of charts on it, you’ll get nada. This is not
an advancement of our noble ability to share information.
Maybe one format of
electronic charts will serve all your needs? It is true that the major
vendors have huge portfolios, but as best as I can determine, no one has
everything. And in some parts of the world, one hydrographic office—which
is where vendors get most of their data—did better work than another.
Plus many of the chart companies are beginning to license privately made
cartography, even doing their own surveying, a nifty trend that I’ll
cover next month in part two of this column.
Next page >
Part 2: The major change in BSB4 is that the charts
are encrypted, a move that’s unfortunately long overdue. >
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5, 6, 7
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