In today's comments, we theorized about the curious habits of predators and prey, looked at the very saddest of the sad Hulks (the Sulks!), and tried to pin-point just how to make the most perfect of imperfect maps.
In response to this post on Bonini's Paradox — the more perfectly a model or map represents something the less useful it is — commenter tamnonlinear points us to someone else who told us the same story through fiction: Lewis Carroll.
In Lewis Carroll's books, he had two great examples of maps. In The Hunting of the Snark, the crew of the boat had a map that dispensed with the unnecessary distractions of conventional markings - the map was a perfect and absolute blank. In Sylvie and Bruno, on the other hand, the inhabitants of a small country had a perfectly accurate map with scale of 1 in = 1 in, but found that it was difficult to unroll, as the farmers complained that it covered the crops, and besides, the real world served nearly as well.
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