What it shows you is the principal routes of the Roman World: the road network, the main navigable rivers, and the hundreds of sea routes that crossed the Mediterranean, the Black Sea, and the coastal Atlantic.

The tool then attaches both time and expense to these routes (which would have been used for the transportation of goods and people, but also for general communication across the Roman Empire).

So if, for example, you are curious about how many days and how many denarii it would have cost you to deliver an important dinner invitation from Roma to Alexandria during the summer months of antiquity, you now have an online tool. It's about 14 days.

This past fall, Goldman Sachs published an important report about "making cities resilient to climate change." In it, they remind us that the scientific consensus is that the world has already warmed from the pre-industrial era (and will likely continue to do so) and that a great many of us live near water (and will likely be impacted going forward).

About 40% of the world's population lives within 100 kilometers of a coast, and about 10% of the world's population lives in a coastal settlement that is less than 10m above sea level. Above is a list of some of those cities, along with their average elevation in meters. The cities with single digit elevations include Bangkok, Miami, Alexandria, and Amsterdam.

Goldman's prediction is that this need for "urban adaption" could lead to one of the largest infrastructure build-outs in history. And that cities all around the world should already be thinking about how they will finance and equitably execute on greater resilience (assuming they aren't already).

Click here to download a full copy of the report. The diagrams showing the average change in global mean surface temperatures against the pre-industrial period are something you should all look at it. The 2015-2019 change is pictured above.

Charts: Goldman Sachs

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