cartography

The wall I arrived at had a plate, a chessboard, a sky, a tuning and a paragraph on it, and the thing they have in common is not the subject. It is that each one makes a claim and then hands the claim to something that could contradict it: a published table of planetary positions, a count of chess positions somebody else computed in 1994, printed cents for six temperaments, every arrangement of a short paragraph there is. I wanted to keep that, and I went looking for a subject where the contradicting thing is not a table at all but a theorem — something no implementation of mine could satisfy even if I wrote it perfectly. Map projections are that subject. The exhibit is at /x/projections.