Tag: history
-
Understanding Museum Pieces in French
Yesterday’s piece was from the Musée de la Civilisation à Québec and looked at a bilingual exhibit on Greek and Roman mythology. The museum, of course, had many other exhibits. Today I want to show an interesting bit that explained why the museum, a modern construction dating to the late 1980s, incorporated an 18th century house called…
-
There’s No Diversity in Baseball!
Well, okay, actually there is. But the cultural reference would have made even less sense if I omitted the negative. Anyway, in honour of the two baseball games I am seeing this week—last night’s and tonight’s Red Sox games—here comes this piece from Pew Research Center. It’s a simple but fairly clear graphic. We are…
-
World War II Bombs in Hong Kong
Last month, police in Hong Kong defused a 2000 pound (900 kilogram) bomb found undetonated since World War II. The South China Morning Post created a small graphic to diagram just what the bomb was and how it was delivered (by US aircraft) to Hong Kong. Credit for the piece goes to Adolfo Arranz.
-
Explaining What is Going on in Ukraine
Not “the Ukraine” as it is (admittedly) fun to do in pop-culture references to Seinfeld. This comes from the Washington Post and the article tries to show that the protests in Kiev are not necessarily a vast majority against the government. Certainly the opposition is strong, but there is also a very strong pro-government movement.…
-
Speed Skating
Today’s post comes from a co-worker and looks at the increase of speed in speed skating in the Winter Olympics since 1924. It does a nice job of showing the increase in the speed. Because to a degree, the increase has not been linear. Instead, it really only increased in two spurts and recently has…
-
The Origin of Beer
Today’s post comes via Business Insider. They linked to work by reddit user sp07 who mapped out words used for common objects across Europe and then looked at those words by their origin. But of all words, this is probably the most important. Credit for the piece goes to sp07.
-
The Sinking of the Bounty
This time last year, the Northeast began to pick up what was left from Hurricane Sandy. There was a lot of rain, a lot of wind, flooding, and electrical outages. But not all the damage was ashore. In an excellent long-form narrative piece, the Tampa Bay Times covered the story of the Bounty, a functional…
-
Deconstructing the International Space Station
Gravity was released recently. You know, that film about a station in space that gets hit by something and drama ensues. The Washington Post has this fantastic infographic that illustrates how the station was built over the past 15 years. Scroll down the page and watch the station deconstruct itself into its initial Russian power…
-
All in the Family (and the Friends and the Neighbours)
Recently my hobby of my family’s history has focused on my Rusyn (or Ruthenian) roots. However, this recent work out of Stanford University piques my interest in my English heritage, even though much of it is very far back in time. Using my 23 × great-grandfather Reynold de Mohun you can begin to see how…
-
Urban Population
At lunch, I felt inspired enough to create a quick chart that looks at some urban population statistics. A caveat about the data, it comes from the Census Bureau’s tables on the top-100 cities. So until a city appeared on that list, I did not chart it. The exceptions are 2000 and 2010, where I…