Benjamin B. Olshin - Böcker

In the thirteenth century, Italian merchant and explorer Marco Polo traveled from Venice to the far reaches of Asia, a journey he chronicled in a narrative titled Il Milione, later known as The Travels of Marco Polo. While Polo's writings would go on to inspire the likes of Christopher Columbus, scholars have long debated their veracity. Now, there's new evidence connected to this historical puzzle: a very curious collection of fourteen little-known maps and related documents said to have belonged to the family of Marco Polo himself. In The Mysteries of the Marco Polo Maps, historian of cartography Benjamin B. Olshin offers the first credible book-length analysis of these artifacts, charting their course from obscure origins in the private collection of Italian-American immigrant Marcian Rossi in the 1930s; to investigations of their authenticity by the Library of Congress, J. Edgar Hoover, and the FBI; to the work of the late cartographic scholar Leo Bagrow; to Olshin's own efforts to track down and study the Rossi maps. Are the maps forgeries, facsimiles, or modernized copies?Did Marco Polo's daughters - whose names appear on several of the artifacts - preserve in them geographic information about Asia first recorded by their father? Or did they inherit maps created by him? If the maps have no connection to Marco Polo, who made them, when, and why? Regardless of the maps' provenance, Olshin's tale takes readers on a journey into Italian history, the age of exploration, and the wonders of cartography.

In Deciphering Reality: Simulations, Tests, and Designs, Benjamin B. Olshin takes a problem-based approach to the question of the nature of reality. In a series of essays, the book examines the detection of computer simulations from the inside, wrestles with the problem of visual models of reality, explores Daoist conceptions of reality, and offers possible future directions for deciphering reality.The ultimate goal of the book is to provide a more accessible approach, unlike highly complex philosophical works on metaphysics, which are inaccessible to non-academic readers, and overly abstract (and at times, highly speculative) popular works that offer a mélange of physics, philosophy, and consciousness.