A cellphone snap from a walk around the College of Agriculture at Cornell.
A considerable campus, covering over 800 acres, with its pastures, greenhouses, labs, test plots, arboretum, etc.
so I was glad to see a map on the wall of an old barn.
It turned out to be unlabeled and not much use as a guide to the campus, but still kind of intriguing.
Not roads, I think, but maybe geologic faults?
or pathways only a cow would understand
P.S.
On ceramic or enamel surfaces, it might be described as “crazed with cracks,”
so maybe this is indeed, a sign of the times, as Dave suggested.
UpState & Away - - - - Waterlooseneca.com 
Maybe the people there think that nowadays, in the age of smartphones, you don’t need a labelled map as the phone will take you around without getting lost. The fact that you were able to take that picture with your cell phone would prove their point. 😀
Have great Sunday and stay healthy,
Pit
Thanks, Pit, same to you, have a great day and stay well.
These are beautiful. And don’t you think that the lack of a map adds to the adventure?
Thank you, Michael, yes, definitely makes it more interesting 🤔
Ah ha, so you’ve jumped on the minimalist bandwagon. Maybe next time you’ll offer us a minimalist photo of that minimalist bandwagon.
Not sure I have the bandwidth for dealing with Minimalism.
I think you do, because the most minimalist is nothing. By not showing us a minimalist bandwagon you’ll maximize minimalism.
It’s modern art!
Cool! Thanks Neil
Hmmm the minimalist map! This is an abstraction of the highest order. I rather like it. But would find it useless as a ‘ you are here’ and “how to find your way there” map.
Thanks Anne, I really did think it was a map until I got pretty close
Interesting! If I were to encounter that map, I would be so confused. I’m confused by maps anyway, but that one would really do me in. It seems to lead to about six different holes that could be potentially dangerous. I will keep my eye out for these kinds of things from now on–thanks for the warning. 🙂
Thank you, Cecilia. During that walk, we passed a sort of hulking old warehouse, covered in rusty corrugated metal, that looked abandoned, but said High Energy Fusion Lab – Plasma Studies or something like that, so who knows what they’ve got cooking around there, I was worried about those black holes on the map, too.
Brilliant. The top one is Mondrian without the colour. The bottom one is Mondrian without the colour and the straight lines. Reductive Reductivism.
Haha! 🧐 Thank you for providing an analytical framework!
I didn’t realize Cornell was a land grant school (just looked this up out of curiosity), I’ve always assumed that all such designated institutions were public universities. Are there any buildings or facilities (maybe a cell phone tower?) at Cornell with Carl Sagan’s name on them? I have three nieces and nephews starting college in the fall and they’re so excited about school they’re visiting their respective campuses this week but I’ve wondered and worried what school will be like for them, some of the things they might miss out on, with the pandemic worsening. Do you know anyone who went (or goes) to Cornell?
Yeah, it’s been explained to me many times, but I’ve always been confused by the kind of hybrid setup at Cornell – – there’s the private, Ivy League liberal arts kids, taking Russian Lit, etc, at $69k/year or whatever, and then other people attending land grant colleges connected to SUNY, the state university system, somehow, paying about 1/2 that I think. The vet school is the only one in the state, incredibly hard to get in, I think. I grew up maybe forty miles away, but don’t know anybody who went there.
Yeah, this is a pretty unsettled (maybe unsettling) time for college students, everyone is scrambling to adjust, cope, make it work.
To be honest, when I read your mention of a cellphone in my first, quick glance, I thought you’d dropped your cellphone, and the spiderwebby lines were cracks. Then I took a better look, and now I’m wondering if creative, tongue-in-cheek you saw a map in a piece of lucite (or some such) that cracked over time in the heat and cold. Then, I looked again, and saw a person emerging from a doorway: facing left, with the left arm extended. What a fun image!
Oh! I hadn’t seen that image, it took me a minute, that’s cool!
Signs of the times…
Yeah, uncharted territory every morning when we look at the news, I guess.
Keep it up! I love this, Robert. 🙂
Oh, I’m glad, thank you Lynn. I really did think it was a map until I got closer to it.
Who needs a map, when you can just enjoy some interesting shapes like that? I really like the way you framed the “map” and made it even more interesting.
Thank you, Otto. I felt like an idiot, when I walked up to it, thinking it was a map, and then found it was really a faded, cracked old sign – -but then it just made laugh.