Dobson never had to contend with this level of complexity back when he was working in print. "Old time cartographers couldn't present that much detail because they couldn't print a book that big," he said, let alone produce with such frequency. But now with every new zoom or feature, digital mappers are grappling with a whole new world of potential failure. The code renders maps in a staggering, almost miraculous level of detail, but that can also be a curse when it comes to diagnosing a single error. "It really is the essential problem of digital mapping," he said. "If you mess up any of those switches, if you mess up any of that metadata, it's a world of hurt to figure out what that thing is."

More than anyone, cartographers understand the intrinsic connection people feel to their geography. At Rand McNally, Dobson regularly fielded phone calls from small-town residents demanding to know why their hamlet wasn't pictured. He'd usually have to politely explain that it was actually on page 26, right south of the river, but that there wasn't enough space to list them in the index. "Almost everyone wants their place to be on the map," he said. He also recalled a time when he counseled a distressed spa owner in Southern California that found his blog and pleaded for help. A boundary error had produced faulty directions in Google Maps and had been sending potential customers zooming past his business. "This poor guy was almost in tears."



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Accessible only by ferry, small boat, or water taxi, Jura is only home to under 200 people, far fewer than its 5,500 roaming red deer. But what it lacks in bodies, it appears to make up for with spirit, legendary literary folklore, and good whiskey.



Most notably, it's the place where George Orwell sought creative refuge from the grind of weekly London journalism starting in 1946. (In 1945, he had penned 110,000 words for an assortment of publications.) In an isolated and modest farmhouse known as Barnhill on the northern end of the island (reachable only by a 20-mile drive along a narrow road, followed by five or so miles of hiking or motorcycling over potholed bog), he began scrawling his classic 1984.

Orwell's old stomping grounds (Wikimedia Commons)

His existence there was almost primitive -- "busy shooting rabbits, catching fish etc. to get enough to eat," according to a 1946 letter to his French translator -- but it also had a certain rugged mystique. He captured the splendor of that balance in another letter anticipating the visit of his future wife, Sonia Brownell, in April 1947:



I am afraid I am making this all sound very intimidating, but really it's easy enough & the house is quite comfortable. The room you would have is rather small, but it looks out on the sea. I do so want to have you here. By that time I hope we'll have got hold of an engine for the boat, & if we get decent weather we can go round to the completely uninhabited bays on the west side of the island, where there is beautiful white sand & clear water with seals swimming about in it. At one of them there is a cave where we can take shelter when it rains, & at another there is a shepherd's hut which is disused but quite livable where one could even picnic for a day or two.



Not more than two months after the letter was sent, Orwell attempted to navigate his boat back from the west side of the island to his home in the east through the treacherous waters of the infamous Corrievreckan Whirlpool on the northern coast, where he nearly drowned. His son, Richard Blair (Orwell's given name was Eric Arthur Blair), remembers the misadventure in incredible detail:

