Null Island is not just a silly place to think about when cartographers are bored, it is a phenomenon that repeatedly and annoyingly asserts itself in the middle of day-to-day cartographic work, often when you least expect it. Sometimes you load a new dataset into your GIS program, but the coordinates aren’t parsed correctly and they turn into all zeroes: your data is on Null Island. Or sometimes if the map projection file for your data is wrong, you’ll find a tiny scaled-down copy of your coordinates floating around Null Island. Or even worse, maybe most of your data is showing up in the right place, but only a few of your records are missing coordinates; if you don’t think to check for it, you won’t even realize that some of your data points have “taken a trip to Null Island.”
Indeed, within the sub-field of philosophy of mathematics, mathematicians, philosophers and quantum physicists advance and argue about theories regarding the “realness” of numbers and the logical systems by which they are used in mathematics. The views on this range from “the universe is pure mathematics” to “mathematics is an internally-consistent logical construct with no relation to real things in the real world.” Much of the discussion depends on the historical development of mathematical thought and scientific understanding — but digging deeper into the question might challenge our assumptions about not only the nature of numbers, but the nature of the universe itself. Or it might inspire us to take up math.
A Better Tomorrow: Life Lessons in Hope and Strength is Mina Smallman’s account of the devastation experienced by bereaved friends and relatives after this grotesque violence. It’s also a study of the faults and faultlines of modern-day policing and crime reporting, an examination of institutional racism and misogyny, and a wrenching tribute to two daughters. Furthermore, it is an attempt to transmute “swirling confusion, horror and raw grief” into action.