Tag: science

  • Twinkle, Twinkle, Little—Damn That’s Bright.

    We’ve had a lot of the rough and gritty politics of late. So now for some  bright and starry-eyed idealism. Well, maybe less idealism and more stars. Lots of them. Courtesy a Google Chrome experiment.

  • Uncertain Planet

    Someday humanity will find a planet amongst the stars similar in temperament to Earth. One of the best star systems to explore is Gliese 581, a small and faint star some 20 light years away. Calculations show that there are a few planets that could exist in or near what is often called the Goldilocks Zone. The…

  • How a Dead Panda Should Have Grown

    Earlier this month a panda was born in Washington. The Post did a small infographic looking at how a panda cub grows over the course of its first year. I decided I would probably wait until sometime later this week to publish it. Except it died yesterday. So before the moment is gone, here’s a…

  • Timeline of the History of the World

    Evolution is a myth. Creationism is where it’s at. So thankfully we have this new timeline that takes into account the age of fossils, radiocarbon dating, and all that other science-y stuff. I’m just glad to know that the reason we won World War I was because we had the raptors on our side. The…

  • Better, Safer Driving

    Hannah Fairfield at the New York Times created a great infographic a few years ago that looked at the history of the price of gasoline and how many miles, on average, an American drove in a car per year. The piece told some rather interesting stories starting in the 1950s with the explosion of the…

  • Ivory Trade

    This graphic from the New York Times looks at the illegal ivory trade out of Africa and into, primarily, the markets of Asia. I think the map works fairly well in showing why certain countries are centres for the illicit industry. But the two donut charts integrated into the graphic as part of the Indian…

  • Climate Change

    When I was younger—albeit not by much—I applied my interests in geography, history, and politics to create maps of fictional places. I used knowledge of things like the Hadley cell and the Koppen climate classification system to figure where on the maps I drew people would be able to live in temperate climates and where…

  • Space. Something About a Frontier?

    Today’s post comes via one of my co-workers. I don’t have any information on it other than it being an infographic looking at our exploration of the solar system (and in the near future beyond, thanks Voyager). My guess is that it isn’t particularly new, as I would imagine that the designer would have liked…

  • Hurricane Isaac vs Hurricane Katrina

    I live in the Midwest but I grew up on the East Coast. I spent my summers at the Jersey shore. (No, not that one.) I know a thing or two about hurricanes. Isaac is expected to make landfall later today in the New Orleans area almost seven years to the day when Katrina made…

  • Opportunity

    Curiosity is not the only rover on Mars, eight years after a 90-day mission, we still have Opportunity rolling around. The Los Angeles Times published this graphic detailing the exploration conducted by Opportunity. This is a map of Opportunity’s section of Mars. Credit for the piece goes to Julie Sheer, Lorena Iñiguez, Raoul Rañoa, and Anthony…