Many Americans have a romanticized view of trains, rooted in a bygone era of elaborately adorned rail cars lit by flickering gas lamps and pulled by smoke-belching steam locomotives.
Conflict photographers grapple with two worlds that are themselves often in conflict - the one where bombs fall and bullets fly, where adrenaline runs high, and the other, back home, which is comparatively secure, and where the big event of the day may involve selecting swatches of fabric for a new sofa.
Right up until the late 18th century, when the first weighted lines were used to probe the ocean depths, many people believed the seas were bottomless - the watery equivalent of infinite outer space.
The ocean is the last frontier of human empirical knowledge; even the contours on that eighth-grader's globe are the product of a mix of scientific measurement, inference and conjecture.
Most of the planet's terrestrial surfaces are visually accessible through video cameras and satellite imagery, if not physically within reach. Even the approaches to Mount Everest are now littered with human debris. One can drive to Timbuktu, which for centuries was synonymous with inaccessibility.
In our quest to define and describe the world, we have crisscrossed the oceans and continents, compiling exhaustive knowledge about its life forms and features, and extended our physical reach through technology, which provides us instantaneous and pervasive access to information about seemingly everything.
Historically, war journalists have embedded themselves with one side, which means the greatest threat comes from the clearly delineated enemy of that side.
Poor laborers from all parts of Asia as well as Africa, the Americas and even Europe are transported by plane each day to wealthier nations where low-tier jobs are plentiful; sometimes the travelers board without even knowing their final destination.
Aside from its parks and nature areas, Singapore is intensively developed, and due to the shortage of land, is building up, down and on manmade islands and landfills.
Historically, maritime travelers had to pass around the entire mass of North and South America, including the bottom tip, the tempestuous Cape Horn, which was littered with shipwrecks.
When President Teddy Roosevelt posed for the cameras astride a massive steam shovel during construction of the Panama Canal in 1906, it was more than a simple photo op. Though the scene was clearly staged, it symbolized a crucial moment in American history.
