Tag: illustration

  • Exposing More of China’s Crimes in Xinjiang

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    Brendan Barry
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    For those who don’t know, China currently engages in ethnocide, or cultural genocide in its western province of Xinjiang, a province with a majority of its population being Uighurs, a Turkic Muslim people. Ethnocide is a term I prefer over genocide as genocide more commonly refers to practices like those in Nazi Germany or 1990s…

  • Hey, Cousin!

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    Brendan Barry
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    As many of my long-time readers know, I count genealogy as one of my hobbies. A few weeks ago for Orthodox Easter I travelled up to the hometown of my late grandfather. There I get to see people to whom I’m related as many of us can point to ancestors from the same few villages…

  • Off the Deep End

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    Brendan Barry
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    Summer rapidly approaches. As does this weekend. Combining those two elements, we can thank xkcd for a wonderful explainer about how the deep ends of pools form. Credit for the piece goes to Randall Munroe.

  • The B-52s

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    Brendan Barry
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    Not the band, but the long-range strategic bomber employed by the United States Air Force. This isn’t strictly related to Ukraine, but it’s military adjacent if you will. I thought about creating a graphic a few years ago to celebrate the longevity of the B-52 Stratofortress, more commonly called the BUFF, Big Ugly Fat Fucker.…

  • Battalion Tactical Groups

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    Brendan Barry
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    As Russia redeploys its forces in and around Ukraine, you can expect to hear more about how they are attempting to reconstitute their battalion tactical groups. But what exactly is a battalion tactical group? Recently in Russia, the army has been reorganised increasingly away from regiments and divisions and towards smaller, more integrated units that…

  • Keeping Things in Scale

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    Brendan Barry
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    Another week of amazing, happy, awesome news. So let’s keep it all in perspective with this graphic from xkcd. We all made it to Friday, so enjoy your weekend, everyone. Credit for the piece goes to Randall Munroe.

  • Let There Be Light

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    Brendan Barry
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    In several decades… Just a quick little piece today, a neat illustration from the BBC that shows how the process of nuclear fusion works. The graphic supports an article detailing a significant breakthrough in the development of nuclear fusion. Long story short, a smaller sort-of prototype successfully proved the design underpinning a much larger fusion…

  • Tea. Earl Grey. Hot.

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    Brendan Barry
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    Any science fiction fan—and likely many who are not—can identify the character who utters those words in that order: Jean-Luc Picard, Star Trek’s captain of the USS Enterprise, NCC-1701-D. Ask your Amazon Alexa for it. Or your Google Home. Thanks to the work of xkcd, we now know that Jean-Luc—may I call him Jean-Luc?—had a…

  • Even Older Family Trees

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    Brendan Barry
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    Yesterday we looked at a graphic about an old family tree, revealed by ancient DNA. But at the end of the day it is a family tree of descent for a human male. But mankind itself fits within a kind of family tree, the circle family tree of life. The tree of life continues to…

  • Sunshield

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    Brendan Barry
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    Happy Friday, everyone. At the beginning of the week, we looked at the launch and deployment of the new James Webb telescope. If you recall, one of the key elements of the satellite’s design is its sunshield. As the name says, it shields the satellite from the sun, thus keeping the equipment super cold, which…