Globes

Globes
Author: Sylvia Sumira
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Total Pages: 231
Release: 2014-05-01
Genre: Science
ISBN: 022613914X

The concept of the earth as a sphere has been around for centuries, emerging around the time of Pythagoras in the sixth century BC, and eventually becoming dominant as other thinkers of the ancient world, including Plato and Aristotle, accepted the idea. The first record of an actual globe being made is found in verse, written by the poet Aratus of Soli, who describes a celestial sphere of the stars by Greek astronomer Eudoxus of Cnidus (ca. 408–355 BC). The oldest surviving globe—a celestial globe held up by Atlas’s shoulders—dates back to 150 AD, but in the West, globes were not made again for about a thousand years. It was not until the fifteenth century that terrestrial globes gained importance, culminating when German geographer Martin Behaim created what is thought to be the oldest surviving terrestrial globe. In Globes: 400 Years of Exploration, Navigation, and Power, Sylvia Sumira, beginning with Behaim’s globe, offers a authoritative and striking illustrated history of the subsequent four hundred years of globe making. Showcasing the impressive collection of globes held by the British Library, Sumira traces the inception and progression of globes during the period in which they were most widely used—from the late fifteenth century to the late nineteenth century—shedding light on their purpose, function, influence, and manufacture, as well as the cartographers, printers, and instrument makers who created them. She takes readers on a chronological journey around the world to examine a wide variety of globes, from those of the Renaissance that demonstrated a renewed interest in classical thinkers; to those of James Wilson, the first successful commercial globe maker in America; to those mass-produced in Boston and New York beginning in the 1800s. Along the way, Sumira not only details the historical significance of each globe, but also pays special attention to their materials and methods of manufacture and how these evolved over the centuries. A stunning and accessible guide to one of the great tools of human exploration, Globes will appeal to historians, collectors, and anyone who has ever examined this classroom accessory and wondered when, why, and how they came to be made.

The Art and History of Globes

The Art and History of Globes
Author: Sylvia Sumira
Publisher:
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2014
Genre: Cartography
ISBN: 9780712358682

From medieval globes made when much of the world was unexplored to the huge, decorative examples made for the princely courts of Renaissance Europe, this book celebrates the art and history of the globe, focusing on the 400 years when the printed globe - as navigational tool, scientific instrument and powerful status symbol - occupied an important place in the history of European exploration.

Maps and Globes

Maps and Globes
Author: Perfection Learning Corporation
Publisher: Turtleback
Total Pages: 48
Release: 1986
Genre:
ISBN: 9781690388364

3D Engine Design for Virtual Globes

3D Engine Design for Virtual Globes
Author: Patrick Cozzi
Publisher: CRC Press
Total Pages: 522
Release: 2011-06-24
Genre: Computers
ISBN: 1568817118

Supported with code examples and the authors’ real-world experience, this book offers the first guide to engine design and rendering algorithms for virtual globe applications like Google Earth and NASA World Wind. The content is also useful for general graphics and games, especially planet and massive-world engines. With pragmatic advice throughout, it is essential reading for practitioners, researchers, and hobbyists in these areas, and can be used as a text for a special topics course in computer graphics. Topics covered include: Rendering globes, planet-sized terrain, and vector data Multithread resource management Out-of-core algorithms Shader-based renderer design

Sphaerae Mundi

Sphaerae Mundi
Author: Edward Dahl
Publisher: McGill-Queen's Press - MQUP
Total Pages: 210
Release: 2000-06-29
Genre: Travel
ISBN: 0773569073

Advances in modern science and technology have made present-day terrestrial and celestial globes scientifically obsolete and aesthetically banal. From the Renaissance to the mid-nineteenth century, however, they were indispensable tools for the study of geography and astronomy. Beginning with an overview of early globes, the authors examine how the modern era in globe making, which began in Flemish and Dutch shops in the early seventeenth century, show how globe making spread throughout Europe, and explain how what were both decorative and scientific objects became symbols of power, universal knowledge, intellectual status, and personal vanity. Beginning with the collection's earliest globe, dated 1533, the authors introduce us to the life and works of some of the greatest Dutch, French, English, German, Italian, and Swedish globe makers. The 120 colour illustrations allow the reader to savour these rare and unusual works and include numerous detailed reproductions of both terrestrial and celestial map images. Sphæræ Mundi charts developments and changes over three centuries of globe making, considering the globes as indicators of scientific advance and geographical exploration as well as artifacts and providing a unique opportunity to become familiar with these complex and beautiful objects.

Bubbles

Bubbles
Author: Peter Sloterdijk
Publisher: Semiotext(e)
Total Pages: 664
Release: 2011-10-14
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 9781584351047

The first volume in Peter Sloterdijk's monumental Spheres trilogy: an investigation of humanity's engagement with intimate spaces. An epic project in both size and purview, Peter Sloterdijk's three-volume, 2,500-page Spheres is the late-twentieth-century bookend to Heidegger's Being and Time. Rejecting the century's predominant philosophical focus on temporality, Sloterdijk, a self-described “student of the air,” reinterprets the history of Western metaphysics as an inherently spatial and immunological project, from the discovery of self (bubble) to the exploration of world (globe) to the poetics of plurality (foam). Exploring macro- and micro-space from the Greek agora to the contemporary urban apartment, Sloterdijk is able to synthesize, with immense erudition, the spatial theories of Aristotle, René Descartes, Gaston Bachelard, Walter Benjamin, and Georges Bataille into a morphology of shared, or multipolar, dwelling—identifying the question of being as one bound up with the aerial technology of architectonics and anthropogenesis. Sloterdijk describes Bubbles, the first volume of Spheres, as a general theory of the structures that allow couplings—or as the book's original intended subtitle put it, an “archeology of the intimate.” Bubbles includes a wide array of images, not to illustrate Sloterdijk's discourse, but to offer a spatial and visual “parallel narrative” to his exploration of bubbles. Written over the course of a decade, the Spheres trilogy has waited another decade for its much-anticipated English translation from Semiotext(e). Volumes II, Globes, and III, Foam, will be published in the coming seasons.

Looking at Maps and Globes

Looking at Maps and Globes
Author: Rebecca Olien
Publisher:
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2017
Genre:
ISBN: 9780531240724

Illustrations and text provide an introduction to the many uses of maps and globes.