Tag: illustration

  • The Crane Crash in Mecca

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    Brendan Barry
    in

    Sometimes when you are reading something, what you really need is context. Personally, I prefer visual context over textual, but not everybody is so thankfully we can do both. Last week a crane collapsed during inclement weather in Mecca and fell upon the Grand Mosque. I knoew that it was a large crane, but it…

  • David Ortiz Still Has 500 Home Runs

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    Brendan Barry
    in

    So what I was saying yesterday about there not being a new Boston Globe piece about David Ortiz’s 500 home runs. I was wrong. I missed it. But, here you go, in its semi-splendour (not digging the illustration of the baseballs /quibble). There are some merits to the piece in terms of the filtering—you can…

  • David Ortiz Has 500 Home Runs

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    by

    Brendan Barry
    in

    This past weekend, David Ortiz hit his 500th home run, a significant milestone in Major League Baseball attained only by a handful of players. This piece from the Boston Herald commemorates the feat—with too many photographs and embellishment for my liking—by putting his season totals on a timeline while putting Ortiz at the bottom of…

  • Comparing Elizabeth to Victoria

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    Brendan Barry
    in

    Following on from yesterday’s post about Queen Elizabeth’s timeline as she passed Queen Victoria, today we have another selection from the BBC that compares the reigns of the two queens. Unfortunately, while the screenshot below is okay, the overall graphics and illustrations strike me as a bit too simple and not terribly useful in making…

  • Organising Western Lands

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    Brendan Barry
    in

    A few weeks back I looked at my ancestral family’s land grant in Wisconsin. Unlike land on the East Coast that was surveyed and organised by pioneers in different colonies using different sets of rules, after the formation of the United States, surveyed land was organised into townships that had subdivisions. In this blog post…

  • 16th Century Maps

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    Brendan Barry
    in

    While in Philadelphia last weekend, I managed to make it to the Philadelphia Museum of Art for a little bit. And today’s piece is a nice map—ivory on ebony—from a 16th century Italian writing cabinet. Credit for the piece goes to the workshop of Iacobus Fiamengo.

  • Where’s Your Power Coming From?

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    Brendan Barry
    in

    A few weeks back the White House announced some new plans for clean electricity. The Washington Post put together an interactive graphic looking at the sources for American power. Credit for the piece goes to John Muyskens, Dan Keating, and Samuel Granados.

  • The Atomic Bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki

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    Brendan Barry
    in

    On 6 August 1945, the United States dropped one of the only two nuclear weapons used in combat on the city of Hiroshima, Japan. 70 years later, the city has been rebuilt and the war is long since done and over—the atomic bombings playing no small part in changing the Japanese calculus of surrender. But,…

  • Kepler 452b

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    Brendan Barry
    in

    So this is sort of a recycled post, in the sense that I talked about it back in April of 2013. But it’s worth revisiting in light of last month’s announcement of Kepler 452b. For those unaware, the planet is a little bit larger than Earth, but is believed to be a potentially rocky planet…

  • MH370 Found?

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    Brendan Barry
    in

    Last night (Central Daylight time), news broke that what might be part of the wing of a Boeing 777, which is the same type of aircraft as the missing Malaysian Flight 370, washed up on the French island of Réunion in the Indian Ocean. The Guardian was following the story last night and one of…