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WHY ISN’T MY TIME ZONE HIGHLIGHTED ON THE WORLD MAP? ////////////////////////////////The Old New Thing - Raymond Chen

In the original release of Windows 95, you could change your time zone by clicking on

the map, and the time zone you selected would highlight. Similarly, you could change

your Region Settings by clicking on the world map. This was one of those little touches

that made Windows 95 that much more fun to use.

But we had to remove those features within months of release, even though we based

both of the maps on the borders officially recognized by the United Nations.

In early 1995, a border war broke out between Peru and Ecuador and the Peruvian

government complained to Microsoft that the border was incorrectly placed. Of course,

if we complied and moved the border northward, we'd get an equally angry letter from

the Ecuadorian government demanding that we move it back. So we removed the

feature altogether.

The time zone map met a similar fate. The Indian government threatened to ban

all Microsoft software from the country because we assigned a disputed region to

Pakistan in the time zone map. (Any map that depicts an unfavorable border must

bear a government stamp warning the end-user that the borders are incorrect. You

can't stamp software.) We had to make a special version of Windows 95 for them.

Geopolitics is a very sensitive subject.

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Borders are scratched across the hearts of men, by strangers with a calm, judicial pen, and when the borders bleed we watch with dread the lines of ink along the map turn red. — Marya Mannes

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Borders are scratched across the hearts of men, by strangers with a calm, judicial pen, and when the borders bleed we watch with dread the lines of ink along the map turn red. — Marya Mannes

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Maps of national territory have much in

common with real-property maps but at a broader

scale. As a tool for asserting territorial rights,

maps can promote peace between neighboring

countries as well as civility between adjoining

landowners. And because oundaries are barriers

to movement, prohibiitive crtography becomes

a rhetorical tool for restricting immigration,

interdicting contraband, regulating trade, and

sheltering money in much the same way that

property maps ward off trespassers and maped

easements sanction underground gas lines. Even

so, international boundaries are markedly different

from lot lines, which lack the instant recognition

of tiny maps on ostage stamps and the careful

scrutiny of military planners and the World Court.

Cartographic Insults That small, fleeting boundary maps can

trigger massive reactions surprises many

Americans. Why, they ask, would the Indian

government ban the Windows 95 operating system

because of a world map displayed briefly during

installation? Although the map merely asked

users to indicate their time zone, its international

borders were deemed much too generous to

China and Pakistan, which controlled parts of

Kashmir claimed by India. At issue were eight

of the map’s 800,000 pixels -- a tiny fraction

of the cartographic stage but a huge expense

for Microsoft, which recalled 200,000 copies of

the offending software. That anyone noticed an

eight-pixel discrecpancy is hardly surprising: India

is the world’s second most populous country, and

its deeply-felt claim to Kashmir had prompted

previous embargos of politically unacceptaple

maps and atlases.

Make no mistake: a simple map of national

boundaries can be a powerful symbol, imprinted

in the minds of citizens and public officials who

react quickly to aberrant representation, however

minor or unintentional. Microsoft thought it was

acting properly in basing its borders on a UN

map but lacked the space for a caveat advising

users of the territorial dispute. The firm suffered a

similar reaction from Peru over its portrayal of that

country’s border with Ecuador. Because no single

world map with international boundaries can

please everyone, Windows now merely asks users

to choose a time zone from a list of major cities.

The Date and Time Properties menu in the control

panel on my laptop displays a small, largely

decoratie world map, which merely distinguishes

land from water.

Occasionally a complaint seems blatantly

contrived, as in 2006, when British newspapers

bashed a European Union (EU) initiative to

promote cross-boundary cooperation in tourism

and environmental protection as “a German-led

‘conspiracy of cartographers’ [designed] to give

Brussels the power to change national boundaries.”

Pliticians wary of surrendering British sovereignty

to an international government uncovered an EU

Web site on which bland maps with thin borders

and nonthreatening pastels highlighted borderland

areas eligible fror program suppor. The Sunday

Telegraph broke the story with a shrill headline

warning that anew EU map makes Kent part of

same ‘nation’ as France” The next day the Daily

Mail mapped this “reshaped View of Europe” with

bold dashed lines spearating five zones outlined

in primary colors, including bright green for the

TransManche (cross-channel) Region, tying Kent

to Calais. Althought the story faded quickl when

readers realized the EU delineations were more

than two years old, it underscored the power of

maps to exaggerate and inflame.

Perhaps the most telling tale of map-induced

hysteria occurred in the early years of World War II,

shortly before Germany overran France. The cover

KEEP OFF!///////////////////////////////////////////////////No Dig, No Fly, No Go - Mark Monmonier

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of the March 16, 1940, issue of L’Illustration, a

French weekly newsmagazine, pictured two U.S.

diplomats, Sumner Welles and Robert Murphy,

in the office of French finance minister Paul

Reynaud. Resting on an easel near the center of

the photo was a large map of Europe. More a prop

than a focus of discussion, the map was seen by

some readers as a scheme to reconfigure Europe’s

boundaries. German officials in Berlin denounced

France for denying the Third Reich’s recent

acquisitions, and Hitler’s allies in Rome were

equally incensed that the map ignored Italy’s

annexation of Trieste after World War I. Equally

bewildering but less controversial were missing

borders between Denmark and Germany and

between Belgium and The Netherlands as well

as some odd kinks in the Franco-German frontier

-- distortions not particularly advantageous for the

French.

As amused journalists soon discovered, the

apparent conspiracy had more to do with penny-

pinching than geopolitical conniving. The map

had been prined in 1919, and the French finance

ministry used colored chalk to avoid buying a new

one -- Reynaud had reportedly updated the map

himself with red for Germany’s recent conquests

and yellow for Russia’s. When the red and the

yellow turned out sole black on the photo, a

consor wary of treating Russia as alighed with

Germany ordered the printer to make Europe

a uniform gray. Thinking that a map without

borders just didn’t look right, the retoucher added

osme boundaries, apparently from memory and

clearly in haste. The controversy escalated until

the French ministry produced the original map

and its photographic offspring, which calmed

the Germans and the Italians but did little to

discredit the widely held belief that maps and

photographs don’t lie.

More deliberate cartographic easures can be

found in contemporary Arab maps of Palestine

that omit Israel as well as on sixteenth- through

nineteenth-century European maps of North

America that denied the presence of native

peoples. Cartographic rhetoric is equally obvious

on Argentinean maps that claim sovereignty over

the Falkland Islands, a former Spanish colony

known in Buenos Aires as the “Islas Malvina.”

After sparating from spain in 1816, Argentina

intermittently controlled the Malvinas until 1833,

when Britain forcibly reasserted an even earlier

claim. Maps in Argentina’s schoolbooks and on

its postage stamps never onceded the loss. As

persistent symbols of historical entitlement

and national identity, they partly underlie the

unsuccessful attempt to retake the island in

1982.

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Only after one understands how freedom and rights are being suppressed by the managers of imperial states — even as they preach peace, freedom, justice, rights, and majority rule to their citizens to maintain their beliefs in the morality of their society, and thus assure the continued support of the masses for inflicting such violence upon the world — can one write honest history. If one does not understand that process, one is almost certain to write a history in which, unbeknownst to the author, the background and documentation have been carefully created to give Managers of State the freedom to suppress other people’s rights and transfer their wealth to the imperial center through unequal trades.— J.W. Smith, Economic Democracy; The Political Struggle for the 21st Century, (M.E. Sharpe, 2000), p.95

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Only after one understands how freedom and rights are being suppressed by the managers of imperial states — even as they preach peace, freedom, justice, rights, and majority rule to their citizens to maintain their beliefs in the morality of their society, and thus assure the continued support of the masses for inflicting such violence upon the world — can one write honest history. If one does not understand that process, one is almost certain to write a history in which, unbeknownst to the author, the background and documentation have been carefully created to give Managers of State the freedom to suppress other people’s rights and transfer their wealth to the imperial center through unequal trades.— J.W. Smith, Economic Democracy; The Political Struggle for the 21st Century, (M.E. Sharpe, 2000), p.95

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MINE

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MINE

Men would live exceedingly quiet if these two words, mine and thine, were taken away.—Anaxagorus

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