Map & Territory
The Constant: A History of Getting Things Wrong
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A Short Story on Exactitude in Science
In 1946, the incomparable Argentine Jorge Luis Bores wrote a short story on exactitude in science. It was meant as a quotation from Suarez Miranda's Travels of Well-behaved Young Gentlemen circa 1658. In Lewis Carroll's last novel, Sylvie and Bruno, he tells a similar story about an empire that built maps larger and larger until they were useless. Here it is, in its entirety, as translated by Nikos Salangaros.
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