You'd Like to Buy a Globe? Fine, What Color Do You Want Your Country?

As satellites circle the earth tracking weather patterns, beaming telecommunications, and snapping huge, detailed snapshots of the water and land below, it seems that a piece of technology like Google Earth would have solved our problems for mapping planet Earth.

Hardly.

In theory, if it is just outlines of landmasses, images of mountain ranges and small, Adirondack ponds that you're looking for, well, seemingly you're in luck. Where the problem begins is, not surprisingly, when you have to draw the borders and paint the countries on top of those outlines.

A recent piece in the New York Times drops in on Italian globemaker Nova Rico. For 50 years Nova Rico has been turning out custom globes from a small Italian village south of Firenze. The Times writes up the time that Nova Rico sold a bizarre orange and yellow globe to Saddam Hussein. Strange. And it does point out that more confounding than drawing the borders between Israel and Palestine on a blue orb is actually dealing with the fact that many globes in Arab states simply do not indicate the country of Israel at all.

Cartography is a tough business, only it seems that getting nature right isn't so hard anymore, it's just the confusion that humans add to the mix that makes the art so elusive.