flickering pictures

Nathan over at FlowingData has stumbled upon yet another neat-o tool that’s as unscientific as it is fun to play with:

StateStats is like Google Insights but on a state level. Type in a search term and get Google search levels with correlations to certain “metrics” like obesity or support for Obama.

Since he’s a mature sort, […]

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Once again, the folks at FlowingData have taken reams and reams of inane-seeming data, compared it to scads and scads of other inane-seeming data, and turned the whole reamy scaddy mess into something fascinating. Check out these maps of cotton-picking intensity in 1860 and presidential voting today in America’s South — see anything interesting?

And […]

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Strange Maps, a delightful little site that has quickly become one of my favourites, tells the story of the “Routefinder,” a dapper-looking set of wrist-mounted scrolls that provided step-by-step directions for British intercity travel in the roaring 20’s:

The technology - a curious cross between the space age and the stone age - consisted of a […]

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I’m not usually this philosophical in the morning, but watching this video I kept thinking about how incredibly neat it is that humans have created a new circulatory system for the Earth, with ebbs and flows regulated by the planet’s rotation. There’s something beautiful about this.
It’s also instructive to see that Africa, with its […]

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The New York Times has put together a nifty interactive timeline-map highlighting how many medals each country has won in every Summer Olympics since 1896. You can click on a year to see the medal counts from a given Olympiad by country, and view the results by geographic distribution (as above) or as a […]

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That beast up there is Tokyo’s subway map (click the map for a larger image), and it scares the bejeesus out of me. According to Infoplease, it provides 2.6 billion rides each year, and is over 281km long.
Tokyo’s subway is by no means the longest though — the Beijing network, pictured below, is set […]

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Wow, there’s just really no way to say that concisely, is there?
I always said that when I finally put together my very own blog, I’d never apologize if I didn’t have a chance to post for a couple of days. Then again, I never expected that there would be hundreds of you to apologize […]

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