But there’s a glaring problem with how streets get named: few memorialize women. A new interactive map from Mapbox developer Aruna Sankaranarayanan and her colleagues shows just how scarce female streets are in major cities around the world.
You would not know it from the headlines, but today we’re living through one of the most peaceful times in human history.This great chart from Oxford‘s Max Roser — which shows the global death rate from war over the past 600-plus years — shows just how lucky we are.
The red line in Roser’s chart shows the worldwide rate of war deaths per 100,000 people, streamlined over a 15-year moving average. Each red dot shows an individual war or episode of killing; larger dots mean more people died. The blue line, based on a different data set, shows combatant casualties only.
What you basically see is a pretty consistent amount of war over the centuries — but with some of the highest highs and lowest lows in the 20th century.
The red line stops at 2000, which is right about when global conflict was on its way to a plunge toward historic lows. You can see that in the blue line’s drastic decline.
If you zoom in a little bit on the 21st century, this trend becomes much clearer. At the dawn of the 21st century, according to both Roser and some more recent data from Steven Pinker, battle deaths appear to drop to close to zero per 100,000 people:
That’s pretty extraordinary: periods with five or 10 battle casualties per 100,000 people look like they’ve been pretty common throughout history, in addition to huge wars such as the Thirty Years’ War, the Napoleonic Wars, or World War II. By historical standards, humanity today is extraordinarily safe from war.
This is why one of the biggest and most important questions today is whether our so-called “Long Peace” will last.
A recent paper, by Nassim Nicholas Taleb and Pasquale Cirillo, argued that our current peaceful era was a statistical myth: that dips in war deaths should be expected, as Roser’s chart shows, and that there’s no reason to believe this time should be different. Pinker and others argue, by contrast, that things really have changed: that the rise of democracy, capitalism, industrial civilization, and international institutions like the UN have radically transformed the way global politics operates.
It’s impossible to know who’s right for sure. But Roser’s chart makes clear that, whatever the reason, we should be counting our blessings today.
Interesting group to check out with an array of data visualization projects.
“DensityDesign is a Research Lab in the Design Department of the Politecnico di Milano. It focuses on the visual representation of complex social, organizational and urban phenomena. Although producing, collecting, and sharing information has become much easier, robust methods and effective visual tools are still needed to observe and explore the nature of complex issues.
Our research aim is to exploit the potential of information visualization and information design and provide innovative and engaging visual artifacts to enable researchers and scholars to build solid arguments. By rearranging numeric data, reinterpreting qualitative information, locating information geographically, and building visual taxonomies, we can develop a diagrammatic visualization—a sort of graphic shortcut—to describe and unveil the hidden connections of complex systems. Our visualizations are open, inclusive, and preserve multiple interpretations of complex phenomena.
DensityDesign is committed to collaborating with other researchers and organizations devoted to academic independence and rigor, open enquiry, and risk taking to enhance our understanding of the world.”
“The most wonderful of all living structures is the human brain.”
This was Alesha Sivartha’s philosophical and scientific proposition in a book he wrote and illustrated, called The Book of Life: The Spiritual and Physical Constitution of Man.Published in 1898, the 152-page abridgment contains a collection of peculiar, hand-drawn brain maps that reveal Sivartha’s even more peculiar interpretation of the human brain’s anatomy. As an avid phrenologist, Sivartha sectioned the brain into a series of compartments, each responsible for certain traits and interests, like religion, intellect, and social status.
by: T.Rolls, C.Winters, & S.Marcondes Solstice, 2011 Public art installation with projection mapping
location 49°16’27.24”N, 123° 7’27.56”W
20’-0” x 10’-0 suspended at 15’-0” overhead from a wood canopy
Vancouver is a notoriously rainy city in the winter and on the rare sunny day; most people are stuck indoors working. Solstice was a public art installation that sought to bring the feeling of sun and warmth to the night sky for everyone to enjoy in the dreary winter months.
By collecting HD timelapse footage of bright, colourful Vancouver skies and using 3D projection mapping techniques, projected onto a custom sculpture, Solstice created a spatially augment reality for the viewer. The result was an abstract window into a brighter world. The project creates a representation of an enticing environment through a visual storytelling experience for the viewer. The physical narratives of this work are based in optics, illusion and the investigation of the>perception of reality (Hfour, 2017).
Hfour. (2017). Hexastart: A Video art installation featuring projection mapped geometric high-relief sculptures. Accessed from http://hfour.ca/portfolio-item/hexastar
About The Lost City of Z:
Based on author David Grann’s nonfiction bestseller, THE LOST CITY OF Z tells the incredible true story of British explorer Percy Fawcett (Charlie Hunnam), who journeys into the Amazon at the dawn of the 20th century and discovers evidence of a previously unknown, advanced civilization that may have once inhabited the region. Despite being ridiculed by the scientific establishment who regard indigenous populations as “savages,” the determined Fawcett – supported by his devoted wife (Sienna Miller), son (Tom Holland) and aide de camp (Robert Pattinson) – returns time and again to his beloved jungle in an attempt to prove his case, culminating in his mysterious disappearance in 1925. An epically-scaled tale of courage and obsession, told in Gray’s classic filmmaking style, THE LOST CITY OF Z is a stirring tribute to the exploratory spirit and those individuals driven to achieve greatness at any cost.
Projection Mapping creates an experience through creativity and technical excellence needed to realize the many wild and wonderful uses of projection mapped content. (Urban Projections)
Solstice: Public Art Installation 2011 in the Illuminate Yaletown Festival. Bringing sunny skies down to the ground level into the dreary winter months.