Leaf peeper alert: this series of maps forecasts peak fall foliage across the U.S. www.citylab.com/life/2019/09/fall-colors-map-when-will-leaves-change-autumn-peak-foliage/598300/

This interesting article by a PhD candidate in philosophy and published in the online journal Aeon (UK) introduces readers to the idea of "moral hydraulics":

"Has the behaviour of another person ever made you feel ashamed? Not because they set out to shame you but because they acted so virtuously that it made you feel inadequate by comparison. If so, then it is likely that, at least for a brief moment in time, you felt motivated to improve as a person. Perhaps you found yourself thinking that you should be kinder, tidier, less jealous, more hardworking or just generally better: to live up to your full potential. If the feeling was powerful enough, it might have changed your behaviour for a few minutes, days, weeks, months, years or a lifetime. Such change is the result of a mechanism I shall call ‘moral hydraulics’. ... In short, hydraulics operate as follows: the elevation of one desire in a closed system causes a proportional diminution in another. ... In [Immanuel Kant's] view, the subordination of self-interest removes, or at least diminishes, hindrances to willing the good. For Kant, the denigration of one’s pathological interests is thus tantamount to removing barriers to acting well. This pivotal mechanism of moral education could be classed as a form of sublimation or diversion, whereby inappropriate desires are channelled into higher pursuits. ... ‘Experimental’ moral education, as Kant describes it, involves exemplary individuals. These are people who have the ability to cause profound shifts in the motivational landscapes of their spectators. This is achieved through the ‘striking down’ of pathological character (the province of our lower drives), corresponding with the elevation of the rational side of our nature. By exhibiting moral goodness, exemplars thus effect the aforementioned seesawing ‘hydraulic’ motivational changes in their onlookers. In so doing, they also impart confidence in the power and practicability of morality. ... [E]xemplars do not make any decisions for us: they merely elevate us morally by causing us to feel shame, a pain-tinged contempt towards our own shortcomings. In this picture, we can think of moral hydraulics as being like a kind of radiotherapy for lower desires, whereby shame ranging over those desires shrinks them until psychological control is returned to the patient’s faculty of reason."
aeon.co/essays/on-immanuel-kants-hydraulic-model-of-moral-education

This map looks at plastic exports, by dollar value. China exports nearly 1/4 of the world's plastic products. The top four countries -- China, Germany, the U.S., and Italy -- account for more than half of the $79 billion global plastics production. howmuch.net/articles/plastic-trade-around-the-world

The New York Times is offering an unusual photo contest for teens: "What stereotypes about teenagers do the adults you know seem to hold? ... What can you show us from your own life, or the lives of those around you, that might help make that portrait more interesting, nuanced, complete or real? In this contest we invite young people to take photographs that depict some aspect of teenage life that you think may be misunderstood, ignored or largely unknown, and, in a short artist’s statement, tell us why." The deadline for submissions is Oct. 15.
www.nytimes.com/2019/08/21/learning/our-second-annual-show-us-your-generation-photo-contest-for-teenagers.html

My "10 Weeks in Asia" class is studying Indonesia this week, and I came across this map that underscores the population (and population density) of the Indonesian island of Java (shown in orange): www.wowshack.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/09/JavaCountries.jpg

Forty years ago this week, a U.S. satellite picked up the distinctive "double flash" of a nuclear bomb being tested. This article from Foreign Policy looks at the historical context of Israel's unauthorized nuclear test and why the U.S. pretended it didn't happen.

"On Sept. 22, 1979, the U.S. Vela satellite recorded the telltale light signal from a nuclear test using detectors called bhangmeters. The satellite, known as Vela 5B or Vela 6911, was one of a number launched in the wake of the 1963 Partial Test Ban Treaty (PTBT), which banned nuclear tests in the atmosphere, underwater, and in outer space. The detected signal was a 'double flash' characteristic of nuclear test signals recorded on 41 previous occasions by Vela satellites. ... Until 1979, they had not detected any illicit explosions among the 41 recorded nuclear events. The satellite in question, Vela 6911, had in fact been retired. ... When it recorded a double flash in 1979, the signal could have come from anywhere within a diameter of several thousand miles. Suspicion quickly fell on South Africa, which was known to be working on a bomb, and even more so on Israel, which had close military connections with South Africa and had an untested nuclear arsenal. ... An Israeli test would force [U.S. president Jimmy Carter] to deal not only with violation of the PTBT, but also with U.S. nonproliferation legislation. The 1977 Glenn Amendment to the Arms Export Control Act mandated an end to arms assistance, and an automatic application of extensive U.S. sanctions, if the president determined any state (other than the nuclear states authorized by the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty) detonated a nuclear explosive after 1977. ... The Carter administration was so afraid to enforce the PTBT against Israel’s 1979 violation that it did what it could to erase or keep hidden evidence of its detection of a test. Subsequent administrations, Republican and Democratic alike, went along with this, and the U.S. government still pretends it knows nothing about any Israeli nuclear weapons."
foreignpolicy.com/2019/09/22/blast-from-the-past-vela-satellite-israel-nuclear-double-flash-1979-ptbt-south-atlantic-south-africa/

The coming shift from 4G to 5G cellular network technology often makes the news. Much less has been said about the move from 2-D satellite mapping to 3-D lidar mapping. This article from Geographical (UK) provides a peek at lidar.

"A self-driving car needs to know where it’s going. But if that car is going to not only transport its passengers from A-to-B, but also get them there alive, it needs to know a lot more. It needs to be able to locate every object around it – be it a lamppost, pothole or a wayward child – and it needs to make sense of that vast quantity of data in order to navigate. In short, it needs an incredibly detailed, 3D map. The maps we use every day aren’t yet up to the job. The most popular digital maps are largely stitched together from satellite imagery (GPS) and aerial photography, supplemented by people driving around in cars snapping photos. While this is ideal for most individuals going about their business, GPS is only accurate to about five metres and that’s nowhere near good enough to keep that driverless car out of trouble. ...

"Of all the tools utilised by these living maps, lidar is one of the most hyped. ... A lidar instrument fires rapid pulses of light at a surface and measures the time they take to return to the source. In doing so it can calculate the distance between itself and the object, building up a ‘map’ of the surface it is measuring that’s usually accurate to 15 cm vertically and 40cm horizontally. Lidar can help create slope and sunlight exposure maps of fields, enabling farmers to identify specific areas that need water or fertiliser; it can penetrate water in order to map the depth of rivers; it can even create images of particulate matter to build maps of pollution. ...

"In May, [the UK’s national mapping agency, the Ordnance Survey] announced the launch of trials to create a series of high-precision maps of lampposts, manholes, traffic lights and other objects on British roads. The trials will be conducted in partnership with an Intel-owned company called Mobileye and the maps are created by fitting-out vehicles with Mobileye’s 360-degree cameras. ... The idea is that cars owned by delivery groups, utility companies and members of the public will install Mobileye cameras, constantly gathering vast amounts of data as they go about their normal business. ... Northumbrian Water was the first to sign-up to the project; the maps can help utility companies identify and monitor the condition of above-ground and underground assets, though this is really only the beginning. ... With so much imagery and data being collected, what about data protection?"
geographical.co.uk/places/mapping/item/3371-the-future-of-mapping

WalletHub released its annual ranking of U.S. states by happiness, with Hawaii, Utah, and Minnesota at the top of the list. (And West Virginia, Arkansas, and Alaska at the bottom of the list.) Follow the link for details on all 50 states and methodology. wallethub.com/edu/happiest-states/6959/

Those interested in the philosophy of language may enjoy this provocatively titled article "Do Languages Exist?" from Philosophy Now (UK):

"Languages seem an important feature of our lives. The languages we speak determine who we can communicate with, where we can work, and what we can read or listen to. Languages are also political. For instance, recent years have seen laws requiring migrants to the UK to learn English. An apparent decline in numbers of Welsh speakers led to calls for government money to be spent on Welsh language promotion. Kiev saw rioting in 2012 in response to moves to allow the Russian language, rather than Ukrainian, to be used in public institutions. Given the powerful role that languages play, it is perhaps surprising that some thinkers claim that such languages do not actually exist. ...

"[A]lthough at first sight it seems simple to identify different languages as ‘English’, ‘Welsh’, and so on, on closer examination, our way of dividing linguistic phenomena into so-called ‘languages’ seems arbitrary. To use [American linguist Noam] Chomsky’s example in Knowledge of Language (1986), Dutch and German are traditionally treated as separate languages. However, some German dialects are closer to Dutch than to other German dialects, with which they are not mutually intelligible. Thus, our standard way of dividing different forms of speech into ‘Dutch’ or ‘German’ does not capture any real aspect of the world, but arbitrarily groups together linguistic phenomena. ... [S]ome folks believe that the phenomenon of human language is best understood not as a series of languages like English or Welsh, but as a series of idiolects. An idiolect is the language of one individual. A description of one person’s idiolect includes all the vocabulary and grammatical features of that individual’s personal way of speaking (or writing). Their idiolect is an independent, self-contained system. ... This view holds that individuals’ idiolects, as opposed to mass languages like English, are the only form of language that exists. ... Of course, there are similarities between idiolects. For instance, most people living in Germany use idiolects similar to those of other German residents. However, there is no such thing as ‘the German language’; only overlapping independent idiolects. ...

"One alternative to the idiolectal view sees a language as a social convention. ... Take the convention of driving on the left-hand side of the road. This convention, which existed long before it was written into law, arose for obvious practical purposes, such as preventing crashes. [The late Princeton philosopher David] Lewis notes that this convention only functions because all British, Australian, etc drivers recognise that it is in force, follow it, and expect and hope that others follow it too. Of course, they could equally well have followed the French and American convention of driving on the right to achieve the same ends. However, once a convention is in place, it often remains that way for as long as it is generally useful. A language, Lewis argues, is established and maintained in a similar way. Take the English expression “It’s raining.” The convention that we utter “It’s raining” only when we believe that it is raining exists for useful communicative purposes. Of course, for the convention on this use of sounds to work, we all have to recognise that it is in force, follow it, and expect and hope that others follow it too. ... On this ‘public language’ view, English, Welsh, and other languages, can be seen as complex systems of conventions. The conventions arise and endure because they solve coordination problems between individuals in a society. Thus, a language is essentially interpersonal. In contrast to the idiolectal view, a language cannot be regarded as a system confined to one individual."
philosophynow.org/issues/100/Do_Languages_Exist

During the last ice age, global geography would have appeared quite different, with extensive land and sea ice lowering ocean levels significantly. This Reddit map tries to recreate global geography as it would have existed 21,000 years ago. Although the ice coverage is eye catching, a careful look at southeast Asia, western Asia, and Oceania, for example, shows the way a drop in sea level changed the geography of these regions dramatically, a history that still echoes in their biogeography. i.redd.it/drvhvjbtw3b31.jpg

Does your student enjoy online quizzes? Use the free quiz-making site Sporcle to create your own customized quizzes. www.sporcle.com/ (As an example, you can try the quiz I made to test out the site:  www.sporcle.com/games/keenteam/your-future-world-1.)

Last weekend's attack on a Saudi oil facility sent global oil prices higher, but which countries are most dependent on Saudi oil? This map, based on 2017 OEC data, shows the top four destinations for Saudi petroleum products: China ($29.1B), Japan ($25B), India ($19.4B), and South Korea ($17.7B). China and Japan both import roughly 50% more Saudi oil than does the U.S., which is the 5th biggest importer of Saudi oil ($17.3B).

This article from Foreign Policy summarizes the research that has been conducted on terrorism since 9/11 and comes to six conclusions, some of which may surprise you:
beta.washingtonpost.com/politics/2019/09/11/six-things-weve-learned-about-terrorism-since

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) developed the Science on a Sphere projection software for interactive 3D museum displays in 2004. Now, NOAA has released a free app to bring the same information, drawn from 140+ datasets and including real-time information, to bring geographic animations to the small screen. Users can track storms, monitor ocean temperature, check cropland, watch air traffic, map earthquakes, and much, much more. SOS Explorer or SOSx is available for iOS and Android. sos.noaa.gov/sos-explorer/about-sos-explorer/

In the U.S., "the Midwest" is one of those vaguely defined geographic terms. What are the boundaries of the Midwest anyhow? CityLab is running a simple quiz, linked to in this article, asking people if they live in the Midwest or not. The areas in dark green on this map have an 80-100% self-identification as being in the Midwest.  But even some residents of places like Buffalo, NY, think they are Midwesterners. (Being from the Midwest, I have very specific ideas on the answer to this question and can't imagine what people in some of the light green areas were thinking when they said no and would exclude many people who seem to want to include themselves :-).) www.citylab.com/life/2019/08/where-is-the-midwest-map-geography-great-lakes-rust-belt/597082/

This article, from Foreign Policy, argues that it is time to dust off existentialism and consider how we are forced to choose, today and always:

"In the summer of 1940, an extraordinary event took place. Attacked by Nazi Germany, France’s military forces, along with its republican institutions, collapsed within a matter of weeks. By summer’s end, an authoritarian French state had—with the assent of the great majority of France’s political and military leaders, and the relief of the great majority of French citizens—launched a policy of active collaboration with the Third Reich. Everything that had once seemed solid—civil laws, liberal values, democratic practices, revolutionary traditions—had, from one day to the next, evaporated into thin air. ... This month marks the 75th anniversary of the moment not only that France was freed from German occupation and the authoritarian Vichy regime, but also that a group of Parisian thinkers, formed by the experience of wartime absurdity, unofficially launched—with a seminal essay by the group’s figurehead, Sartre—the most famous philosophical movement of modern times: existentialism. ... Just as existentialist thinkers wrote in response to the unprecedented events of the 1930s and 1940s—the rise of totalitarian states in Central and Eastern Europe, the burgeoning of illiberal movements in Western Europe, the proliferation of state propaganda, and the building of concentration and death camps—their writings might help us make moral sense of similar trends in our own post-truth and post-fact era. ...

"During the so-called 'années noires' between 1940 and 1944, the French were, as Sartre declared, 'condemned to freedom.' By this, Sartre and Camus meant that they and their fellow French, though not free to choose their situation, were nevertheless free to respond to it. In the famously paradoxical opening line of 'The Republic of Silence'—an article that Sartre wrote in September 1944 for another underground newspaper—he captured the existential nature of everyday life in occupied Paris: 'Never were we more free than under the Germans.' It was precisely because of foreign rulers and local collaborators, official censorship and unofficial denunciations, immoral laws and moral impasses that the French were forced to reflect on what they had always taken for granted. ...

"Seventy-five years after the launching of existentialism, it continues to speak to the human situation—especially today, with the rise of authoritarian leaders and illiberal democracies on both sides of the Atlantic that deny the humanity of those who do not resemble them. As Jean Tarrou, another character in [Albert Camus's existentialist novel] The Plague, concludes, 'there are pestilences and there are victims, and it’s up to us, so far as possible, not to join forces with the pestilences.'"
foreignpolicy.com/2019/08/20/make-america-existentialist-again

Beginning in the middle of September 1845, farmers in Ireland began noticing that when they went to harvest their potato crops, some of the potatoes were little more than black mush. Thus began the Irish Potato Famine that lasted through 1849. This map shows the impact on the population of Ireland. (The areas showing population gains are the cities of Dublin and Cork, to which people migrated from the countryside.)
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Ireland_population_change_1841_1851.png

Bring National Geographic explorers to you via National Geographic's free Explorer Classroom program. These are live webcasts with free teacher's guides and the opportunity for students to ask questions of the explorers.  September's theme is ocean plastics, starting, later this morning, with an environmental journalist who is writing about Taiwan's innovative plastics and electronics recycling. Can't do the session live? The programs are archived on YouTube as well. www.nationalgeographic.org/education/student-experiences/explorer-classroom/sessions/#inthefield

The U.S. recently marked the 400th anniversary of the arrival of the first ship of enslaved people from Africa to U.S. shores. Yet, as my "Your Future World" students are always surprised to learn when we study Brazil, the U.S. accounted for only about 3% of the Transatlantic slave trade, with Brazil accounting for about 40% and the Caribbean accounting for another 40-45%. This map shows both destinations and origins of enslaved people, some of whom were from coastal communities in western Africa while others were captured in interior regions and sold to slavers at the coast. www.statista.com/chart/19068/trans-atlantic-slave-trade-by-country-region/

This thought-provoking article by the late philosopher Mary Midgley challenges our ideas about "security.":

"During a series of colonial wars in the nineteenth century, the British army gradually changed the colour of its soldiers’ uniforms from the traditional scarlet to khaki. Its reasons for doing this are perhaps fairly obvious, but the innovation was sharply resisted. Regiments who were still dressed in scarlet sneered at their transformed colleagues, disgustedly calling them ‘khakis’ (the word was well-known to be a ‘native’ one, the Urdu term for the colour of dust or mud). ... The public, too, had a scandalized sense that it was no longer being properly protected. Thus in 1892 a columnist in The Pall Mall Gazette wrote in some alarm, “Khaki is not showy enough, except when it is new and well-made-up. If worn constantly, it tends to promote slovenliness.” As we know, in the end practical considerations prevailed. All armies now wear khaki, often with the even less dignified addition of camouflage. But it is worthwhile to think for a moment about the kind of reasons which disturbed the protesters so deeply. Colourful uniforms did, of course, originally have a good practical point: they made it easy to distinguish friend from foe ­– which can be quite important in fighting on an open plain. But this was surely not what mainly worried the protesters. They seem to have been moved chiefly by the powerful symbolism involved. The bright colour looked bold and vigorous; it suggested a confident nation that faced its enemies readily, a belligerent one that had no need to skulk in hiding. Khaki did not have that meaning at all. And behind that symbolism there lay another emotive factor which was perhaps still more powerful – the influence of habit. Scarlet uniforms were habitual. They were normal. People were used to them. ‘Business as usual’ always tends to seem more practical, more realistic, than these fanciful new schemes we’re not used to. So scarlet was what made the public feel safe.

"Indirect factors like this, which we seldom think about and never mention, play a huge part in deciding what we put our trust in, and therefore what we understand by Security. Among the many dangers in the world, we pick out a few which we find specially alarming at the time and we concentrate on certain selected precautions against those dangers. We don’t easily notice how the balance of risk may be changing. Nor do we easily see how that balance may look to other people in different situations. ... We see dangers that seem to threaten ourselves clearly and sharply; but the dangers that other people see us as posing them are often quite invisible to us. For instance, the huge arsenal that has been built up in the West during the last half-century does not seem to those who own it to be alarming at all. We call it defence, and it strikes us as something quite static, innocuous and unthreatening. As is often said, it is just an umbrella, a fire-extinguisher, an insurance policy. It is merely the necessary guarantee of our Security.

"To people who don’t own it however, it looks surprisingly different. The trouble arises from a profound psychological quirk about the way in which we interpret threat. There is an immense difference between what may be called the front view and the back view of any weapon. Weapons are not just tools. They are powerful symbols, carrying messages that go far beyond the conscious intentions of those who wield them. This is why what is meant as deterrence often turns out to act as provocation. The owner who is, so to speak, sitting quietly behind his machine-gun, sees it merely as a comfortable defensive shield. He just innocently puts it (as it were) in his front window, and sits down behind it to read Proust. But the passers-by who come within range of it don’t see it in the same way at all. They tend to assume that if he has taken the trouble to buy the thing he probably has a use for it, and that he may already have some idea what that use will be. The owner can of course tell them reassuringly that the gun actually doesn’t mean anything at all, that it is just a harmless, neutral ‘umbrella’ of a kind that everybody needs. But in so far as the passers-by believe this they are liable to imitate him. They may then go off and order umbrellas for themselves, thus giving rise to a lot more misunderstanding."
philosophynow.org/issues/61/What_Do_We_Mean_By_Security

As they grow, cities develop into all sorts of shapes. But one principle seems to remain constant: the shape depends on prevailing transportation technologies and routes. In 1994, an Italian physicist, Cesare Marchetti, observed that across history most people have been willing to accept a commute of 30 minutes or less.  This article looks at the way the Marchetti Constant has influenced the development of urban areas from ancient Rome forward, depending on if the prevailing technology was walking, carriage ride, railroad, street car, subway, automobile, etc., and what it might mean for the future of urban planning. www.citylab.com/transportation/2019/08/commute-time-city-size-transportation-urban-planning-history/597055

This GIF shows air traffic over the U.S. the morning of Sept. 11, 2001. www.reddit.com/r/MapPorn/comments/9f5eqr/us_airspace_on_911_notice_the_dip_at_942_am_right/

This piece from The Philosophers' Magazine discusses how to read philosophy, including one of the requests I make of my "Philosophically Speaking" students, which is to approach our discussions and our readings with a generous dose of intellectual humility.

"What excites me so much about reading philosophy is the opportunity to have my beliefs and values challenged. I read philosophy to identify, clarify, and test my current beliefs and values. As such, reading philosophy is an act of creation, self-creation of perspicuous wisdom regarding how to live well with others. As a step toward this wisdom making, I hope that the first-year students in my philosophy courses become more intellectually humble and less dogmatic as a result of reading philosophy. For most people, these goals are unattainable unless they give themselves over to the strangeness and disquiet that so often comes with reading philosophy. ... Some passages are particularly thorny. As a result, it is very common to read philosophy much slower than one reads other texts. Indeed, many philosophers stop at the end of sections, and sometimes paragraphs or even sentences, to check if they can restate the ideas in their own words. If it is difficult to do so, some re-reading before moving on is necessary. For the most difficult texts, I create paragraph by paragraph summaries as I go by writing a clause or a sentence that is a paraphrase of the central content of a paragraph. By making sure that I understand a paragraph well enough to state its main point in my own words, I know I am ready to move on. ... After sufficient time, move from evaluating the arguments to your own conclusions. Is the author right, wrong, or, more likely, partly right and partly wrong? About what, if anything, ought you change your mind? Once you’ve decided what you think about the ideas in the essay, pick up another one that contains new arguments that might change your mind again."
www.philosophersmag.com/essays/201-reading-as-a-philosopher

Diet is a key component of cultural geography. In many countries, such as China, meat eating has increased with growing affluence. This geo-graphic, though, looks at the growth in vegetarianism, with some surprising countries out on top (at least as far as percentage change is concerned): www.statista.com/chart/18852/countries-with-the-biggest-increase-of-the-vegetarian-population-between-2016-and-2017/

Want to spend a summer or a school year studying a critical language and living in another country for free?! The NSLI-Y program, funded by the U.S. State Department, provides full scholarships for American high school students who want to study Arabic, Chinese (Mandarin), Hindi, Bahasa Indonesian, Korean, Persian (Tajiki), Russian, or Turkish in countries where those languages are spoken. Applications for Summer 2020 and the 2020-21 school year are due by Oct. 30, and the selection process is competitive.  For those students who might not have the time or inclination to go abroad, later this year one can also apply for the new NSLI-Y digital classroom to learn Arabic, Chinese (Mandarin), Korean, or Russian for free.  Applications for the 2020-21 digital classroom will be due in June 2020 for the following school year. www.nsliforyouth.org/