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Reblogged from theavc
Joshua, Boy 7
...as the indifferent children of the earth
Reminds me of Sid Meier’s Civilization
Cartography time maps.
A beautiful series of illustrations mapping the expansion of civilization as cartography breaking through the clouds of the ignorance.
Published by Edward Quin in 1830 as the “An Historical Atlas; In a Series of Maps of the World as Known at Different Periods”.
- The first map in the series is B.C. 2348. The Deluge.
- The third is B.C. 753. The Foundation Of Rome.
- The eighth is A.D. 1. The Roman Empire In The Augustan Age.
- And the sixteenth is A.D. 1498. The Discovery Of America.
Via: the David Rumsey Map Collection
(via fuckyeahcartography)
Darwin’s Theory Pervades Twitter Too
via The Atlantic:
In a new paper entitled Competition Among Memes in a World With Limited Attention, Indiana University researchers Lillian Weng, Alessando Flammini, Alessando Vespignani, and Filippo Menczer analyzed 120 million retweets connected to 12.5 million users and 1.3 million hashtags in order to model how information (as discrete units, or memes) disperses on the social network.
What did they find? According to co-author Vespignani, having millions of followers does not denote an important message. Rather, the messages with the most immediate relevance tend to have a higher probability of resonating within a certain network than others. Think of it as “survival of the fittest” for information: those tweets that capture the most attention, whether related to a major geopolitical or news event or a particular interest, are likely to persist longer. This competition sounds bad, but it’s generally good for messages in general: thousands of tweets about Japan’s 2011 earthquake or the ongoing conflict in Syria don’t cancel each other out, but help refocus the attention of the wider Twitter audience on those issues, which in turn provides an added lift to individual messages over other off-topic ones.
The study reinforces what most journalists and marketers have known intuitively for some time now: that piggybacking on the trending ideas that constitute “the conversation” online maximizes the ability to spread tweet-sized ideas. Where people fit into preexisting networks certainly matters: Ashton Kutcher’s millions of followers represent a powerful hub of connections. But could Mr. Kutcher’s messages about Nikon’s new camera overwhelm hundreds of tweets about Trayvon Martin from hundreds of smaller, less-connected individuals? The research suggests that it doesn’t fully matter who you are or how many connections you have, but what you’re saying relative to the existing conversation is what really matters in spreading knowledge online.
FJP: Though not a shocking revelation, it does feel nice to see research support the power of Twitter.
And now few facts about the brainless, feetless things known as slime molds:
+ Slime mold is not a plant or animal. It’s not a fungus, though it sometimes resembles one. Slime mold, in fact, is a soil-dwelling amoeba, a brainless, single-celled organism, often containing multiple nuclei.
+ For creatures without feet, they can travel incredible distances. Researchers identified slime mold from New Zealand that are genetically identical to groups found in the United States. How they got there is unknown.
+ Slime molds were likely an inspiration for the 1958 science-fiction film, “The Blob,” scientists say.
+ Slime molds find the quickest, most efficient way to food. Researchers are calling their route the “Trans-Canada Slimeways.”
What Americans buy, by NPR
NPR’s Planet Money blog published this graph today showing the biggest expenditures for Americans, and also some interesting, though sort of unnecessary, things they like to buy.
Kim Keever’s large-scale photographs are created by meticulously constructing miniature topographies in a 200-gallon tank, which is then filled with water. These dioramas of fictitious environments are brought to life with colored lights and the dispersal of pigment, producing ephemeral atmospheres that he must quickly capture with his large-format camera.
More here.
Mapping Wikipedia
Via Tracemedia:
Mapping Wikipedia is a groundbreaking visualisation of the world mapped according to articles in 7 different languages. The map displays both the global patterns and the vast number of geo-located items. The dataset was produced by the Oxford Internet Institute as part of a project that examines Wikipedia in the Middle East and North Africa…
…The project was developed using the excellent Open Layers. To display the large number of articles we wrote a subclass of the Open Layers Canvas renderer, and optimised for point plotting. As a fallback for browsers that don’t support canvas we included the FlashCanvas shim.
The Google basemap was produced using the Styled Map Wizard
To glue everything together we used jQuery.
Image: English, by Wordcount in Europe. Via Tracemedia.
H/T: Flowing Data
Otis Redding These Arms of Mine
propers to apres-midi & elohbee
Astonishingly beautiful real-time visualization of wind in the US. Have you seen it? If not, you really need to click through and see this baby in action.
(Thanks to the lovely Posey Gruener for the heads-up.)
![fotojournalismus:
Mosque of Istiqlal, Indonesia, 1996.
[Credit : Sebastião Salgado]](http://24.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_m1rgpmwh8X1r44q44o1_500.jpg)
