Blind Scientists and A Mammoth

I always think reading detective/crime/adventure novels is a great way to travel around the world. Those stories, especially the decent ones, usually give you a pretty good glimpse on the local social norms,
legal proceedings, physical and cultural landscapes. If it is a series with a constant detective, then she/he/they is almost like a familiar tour guide in the foreign lands.

It is not unusual to mark the places you have traveled to on a world map, so why not do something similar with the books and the characters? Maybe some day I would visit those sites in the real world. (I did with some of them.)

However, with the sheer amount of the good detective stories in mind, I am aware that if I want to be comprehensive, I would not even be able to finish the data curation step. So this time, I started with only one detective, Mitarai Kiyoshi created by Soji Shimada 島田
荘司 .

A few more notes:

1. The bibliography of this map is sourced from the Japanese wiki Mitarai Kiyoshi worklist page Many works from the Detective Mitarai series have not been introduced to English audience (yet), so I took the liberty to translate their titles. Some titles are omitted in the map because I did not manage to find approximate location info. If you know about those titles, please feel free to let me know. :)
2. The map is plotted with Python folium library. The longitude and latitude coordinates are generated via geopandas Nominatim.

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I guess it is always hardest to start, but you got to start it somewhere
even with baby steps. So here it is: Hello World!

The title of this blog “Blind Scientists and A Mammoth” came from the
story of “Blind men and An
Elephant（盲人摸象）”
in ancient India. In this story, several blind men who had never know an
elephant, touched then described what the elephant was like to others.

A group of blind men heard that a strange animal, called an elephant,
had been brought to the town, but none of them were aware of its shape and
form. Out of curiosity, they said: “We must inspect and know it by touch,
of which we are capable”. So, they sought it out, and when they found it
they groped about it. The first person, whose hand landed on the trunk,
said, “This being is like a thick snake”. For another one whose hand
reached its ear, it seemed like a kind of fan. As for another person,
whose hand was upon its leg, said, the elephant is a pillar like a
tree-trunk. The blind man who placed his hand upon its side said the
elephant, “is a wall”. Another who felt its tail, described it as a rope.
The last felt its tusk, stating the elephant is that which is hard, smooth
and like a spear.

I think you probably get the obivous at this point. Although none of them
had lied, none of them had told the whole truth. What you see really
depends on where you are looking at.

Same goes to ecologists, molecular biologists, and bioinformaticians etc
when we are dealing with mammoth. Especially with mammoth. Since none of
scientists can bring these magnificent animals back (so far!), none of
them can claim that they see the whole thing. So this blog is merely
intended to record my side of experience in “touching” mammoths when I
wait for the cluster jobs to finish

(Also, I probably spent too much time on Mastodon (definitely not mammoth)
than i should. 所以也是忙人摸毛象。然此毛象非彼毛象！）