Posts Tagged ‘infographics’
“Science is what you know, philosophy is what you don’t know”*…
A small section of the interactive Philosopher’s Web
When data scientist Grant Louis Oliveira decided he wanted to undertake a self-guided course of study to “more rigorously explore my ideas,” he began with the honest admission, “I find the world of philosophy a bit impenetrable.”
Where some of us might make an outline, a spreadsheet, or a humble reading list, Oliveira created a complex “social network visualization” of “a history of philosophy” to act as his guide.
“What I imagined,” he writes, “is something like a tree arranged down a timeline. More influential philosophers would be bigger nodes, and the size of the lines between the nodes would perhaps be variable by strength of influence.”
The project, called “Philosopher’s Web,” shows us an impressively dense collection of names—hundreds of names—held together by what look like the bendy filaments in a fiber-optic cable. Each blue dot represents a philosopher, the thin gray lines between the dots represent lines of influence…
More on Oliveira’s opus at “‘The Philosopher’s Web,’ an Interactive Data Visualization Shows the Web of Influences Connecting Ancient & Modern Philosophers“; poke around in it here.
See also:
The History of Philosophy, from 600 B.C.E. to 1935, Visualized in Two Massive, 44-Foot High Diagrams
The History of Philosophy Visualized
* Bertrand Russell
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As we realize that it’s all about the questions, we might send sensuously-written birthday greetings to Ambroise Paul Toussaint Jules Valéry; he was born on this date in 1871. An educator, essayist, and philosopher, he is best remembered as a poet– the last of the great French Symbolists. His best-known work is probably la Jeune Parque.
A member of the Académie Française, Valéry was stripped of his academic positions and distinctions because of his quiet refusal to collaborate with Vichy and the German occupation during World War II. He was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature in 12 different years.
“Everything has a time of being – a birth, a life span, and a death”*…
In 2014, the United States ranked 41st in the world in life expectancy, with an average American expected to live to age 78. But, like most averages, that doesn’t paint the whole picture. Life expectancy is more like Norway’s in some parts of the country and more like Kazakhstan’s in others.
That’s why it’s more useful to look at it county by county…
An interactive map that allows one to do exactly that: “How life expectancy in U.S. counties compares to other countries.”
*Dixie Lee Ray
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As we take our vitamins, we might send carefully-conserved birthday greetings to Gifford Pinchot; he was born on this date in 1865. An American forester, he became the first chief of the Forest Service in 1905. By 1910, with President Theodore Roosevelt’s backing, he built 60 forest reserves covering 56 million acres into 150 national forests covering 172 million acres. Roosevelt’s successor, President Taft– no environmentalist– fired Pinchot. Still Pinchot’s efforts earned him the honorific, “the father of conservation.”
“Caveat lector”*…
* “Let the reader beware,” Latin phrase
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As we interrogate our sources, we might recall that it was on this date in 1789 that Representative (later, President) James Madison introduced nine amendments to the U.S. Constitution in the House of Representatives; subsequently, Madison added three more, ten of which (including 7 of his original nine) became the Bill of Rights.
Madison, often called “the Father of the Constitution,” created the amendments to appease anti-Federalists on the heels of the oftentimes bitter 1787–88 battle over ratification of the U.S. Constitution– in the drafting of which he had also played a central role.
Madison
“The human body is the best picture of the human soul”*…
DID YOU KNOW:
• Bill Gates is actually worth $1,956
• Canadian pop star Justin Bieber has five times fewer cells in his brain than in his liver
• Top tennis player Serena Williams has 24.5 trillion red blood cells powering her body
• Internet and social media pioneer Mark Zuckerberg’s body contains 800MB of data
• President Barack Obama’s head rules his heart; his brain weighs 1.4kg, his heart just 0.4kgWelcome to The Making of Me and You, a unique, new digital interactive from BBC Earth that details extraordinary personalised facts.
Just input your date of birth, sex at birth, height and weight, and choose the metric or imperial units that make most sense to you.
And instantly find out:
• The chemical ingredients that make up you, and what your body is worth
• How many atoms you are made of, and what can be made with them
• How many fat, blood, skin and brain cells you have
• How much genetic data is inside you
• How many other microbes live on your body with you
• The size and weight of your internal organs
• How much wee, poo, sperm or eggs you have produced so far
• How many times you have blinked, breathed, yawned and farted
• And so much more
Try it at: “The Making of You and Me.”
* Ludwig Wittgenstein
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As we take our measures, we might recall that it was on this date in 1988 that the United States Patent and Trademark Office granted U.S. Patent 4,736,866 to Harvard College for “a transgenic non-human mammal whose germ cells and somatic cells contain a recombinant activated oncogene sequence introduced into said mammal…”– the first U.S. patent issued on a mammalian life form. The Oncomouse (as it was known, a mouse altered to be highly susceptible to breast cancer) was called the product of the year by a major financial magazine.
Although the mouse was genetically modified following a process designed by Philip Leder and Timothy A Stewart of Harvard, and the patent was owned by Harvard Medical School, it was developed with funding from DuPont, which scored a commercialization arrangement that entitled DuPont to exclusive license of the patent. Until the patent was ruled expired in 2005, DuPont claimed patent protection on any anticancer product derived from the mice.
The first patent for a life form was issued seven years earlier for a genetically engineered bacterium.
“In this country American means white. Everybody else has to hyphenate”*…
From electricity, giant telescopes, escalators, diesel turbines, and talking movies, the 1900 World’s Fair promised dazzling technology for the 50 million visitors who flocked to Paris. But among the expo’s 80,000 exhibitions, one comparatively low-tech production from the American contingent demonstrated perhaps the most consequential achievement of that time.
“The Exhibit of American Negroes” enshrined the contributions of African Americans to the US economy, just 35 years after slavery was abolished in the US. The showcase within the fair’s Palace of Social Economy featured a gallery of photographs, 350 patents awarded to black inventors, a small statue of abolitionist Frederick Douglass, 200 books and periodicals by black scholars including an illustrated study by the noted sociologist and civil rights activist W.E.B. Du Bois…
The extraordinary works that Du Bois had his students (at [Clark] Atlanta University) create are riveting both for their account of Africa-American life at the turn of the last century and for their remarkable power as infographics. See them at “Hand-drawn infographics commissioned by W.E.B. Du Bois illuminate how Black Americans lived in the 1900s.”
* Toni Morrison
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As we agree with Ali,** we might send utilitarian birthday greetings to Jeremy Bentham; the author, jurist, philosopher, and legal and social reformer was born on this date in 1748. Bentham is considered a founder of modern Utilitarianism (via his own work, and that of students including James Mill and his son, John Stuart Mill); he actively advocated individual and economic freedom, the separation of church and state, freedom of expression, equal rights for women, the right to divorce, and the decriminalizing of homosexual acts. He argued for the abolition of slavery and the death penalty, and for the abolition of physical punishment, including that of children.
Bentham was involved in the founding of University College (then, the University of London), the first in England to admit all, regardless of race, creed, or political belief. On his death, he was dissected as part of a public anatomy lecture– as he specified in his will. Afterward– again, as Bentham’s will specified– the skeleton and head were preserved and stored in a wooden cabinet called the “Auto-icon”, with the skeleton stuffed out with hay and dressed in Bentham’s clothes. Bentham had intended the Auto-icon to incorporate his actual head, preserved to resemble its appearance in life. But experimental efforts at mummification, though technically successful, left the head looking alarmingly macabre, with dried and darkened skin stretched tautly over the skull. So the Auto-icon was given a wax head, fitted with some of Bentham’s own hair.
It is normally kept on public display at the end of the South Cloisters in the main building of University College. The real head was displayed in the same case as the Auto-icon for many years, but became the target of repeated student pranks, so is now locked away.
see a virtual, 360-degree rotatable version here
** “Hating people because of their color is wrong. And it doesn’t matter which color does the hating. It’s just plain wrong.” – Muhammad Ali
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