Month: June 2026

Cartes imaginaires: Inventer des mondes

Published on by Jonathan Crowe

Cartes imaginaires: Inventer des mondes, an exhibition at the Bibliothèque nationale de France running from 24 March to 19 July 2026, explores maps of the imaginary, the legendary and the literary from medieval to modern times. A symposium this past April on maps and popular culture was held in conjunction with this exhibition, but I somehow missed reporting on the exhibition itself. Fortunately, Surekha Davies has attended it, and has this report: “I went around this show a couple of times with different friends. From Tolkien’s map of Middle Earth to a map of Guiana derived from Sir Walter Ralegh’s travel narrative about the region, it felt at times like the library had put this show on specially for me!”

(Though she disagrees with placing sea monsters in the same category as fantasy maps: she argues that they’re a representation of the hidden, inaccessible or strange, not the fanciful. On which she points to her 2020 essay in Aeon, which is worth reading.)

Previously: Monsters and Maps; A Paris Symposium on Maps and Popular Culture.

Space Jam

Published on by Jonathan Crowe

GPS jamming has come to space. Researchers have identified a Russian satellite as the source of 10-second radio bursts that have been disrupting GNSS signals.

Occasional bursts of energy from a Russian missile-detection satellite have been briefly disrupting satellite navigation across large parts of Europe, a pattern that may indicate a “qualitative escalation in GNSS [global navigation satellite system] interference.” 

At least 75 times between 2019 and 2026, University of Texas researchers observed 10-second bursts of high-powered radio signals at 1558.5 MHz: the frequency used by GPS and European navigation satellites to transmit signals to Earth. The bursts disrupted GPS antennas from Romania to Greenland, the researchers write in a paper published this month in the journal Navigation.

Pokémon Go Player Scans Being Used for Military Drone Navigation, Per Report

Published on by Jonathan Crowe

Haye Kesteloo reports at DroneXL: “Hundreds of millions of Pokémon Go players spent years filming the streets, parks, and buildings around them to earn in-game rewards. Those roughly 30 billion environmental scans are now owned by Niantic Spatial, and they helped train a camera-based navigation model that a U.S. defense contractor is preparing to put into drones and other military robots. Most of the players had no idea.” The data is being used for a visual navigation system (VPS) that can operate even when GPS signals are jammed or otherwise unavailable.

[Warning: The linked page is extremely resource intensive, eating up 6-7 GB of RAM on my machine, which is pure nonsense for a web article.]

Renaissance Maps at the American Museum in Bath

Published on by Jonathan Crowe

The American Museum and Gardens in Bath, England has a collection of Renaissance maps that came to them from the private collection of the museum’s co-founder, Dallas Pratt. This collection was the subject of an exhibition at the museum last year, Myths and Memories: Renaissance Maps, as well as a talk given earlier this year by curator Kate Hebert. That talk is now available on YouTube.