A Pretty 1940 Map of American Diversity, Annotated by Langston Hughes

Slate: This map, issued by the Council Against Intolerance in America in 1940, shows the ethnic groups living in the United States, offering a picture of their geographical locations, typical employment, and religious commitments.

The map omits state boundaries, opting instead to show the mix of ethnic groups by area. For heavily-populated areas, such as the Northeast or Chicago, pop-out keys framed with line drawings of people engaged in typical industries show the diversity of urban citizenry.

Altas Obscura: “Maps of this kind were not particularly common and especially not at this scale,” says Ian Fowler, the director of Osher Map Library at the University of Southern Maine, who notes that the physical map itself is quite large. “While this map does borrow stylistic elements from pictorial maps produced during the 1920s and ‘30s, it is very unique in its emphasis and display of information.”

See also

• Distribution of the slave population of the southern United States, 1860 — In 1861, in an attempt to raise money for sick and wounded soldiers, the Census Office produced and sold a map that showed the population distribution of slaves in the southern United States.
• WEB Du Bois: Using data to show inequality, updated — The civil rights pioneer and scholar is most famous for his book The Souls of Black Folk, but his use of data to show inequality is still profound today.
• The divided states of America: A cartogram of the 2016 election results — Two cartograms from Benjamin Hennig’s Views of the World website showing how the US voted in the 2016 election and how the UK voted in the EU referendum.

How aircraft carriers work

Cities at Sea: How Aircraft Carriers Work

Wendover Productions on the logistics of these huge military cities at sea.

Just Add Water: The Dark Past of Sea Monkeys

The Dark Past of Sea Monkeys

Great Big Story: This is the story of how a tiny, magical creature was transformed into a cultural phenomenon by inventor, marketing genius and complicated eccentric Harold von Braunhut. Full of fun facts (both charming and disturbing), Just Add Water is a colorful short film about a half-century of marketing directly to children, the force of nostalgia in pop culture, and an unlikely meeting of flim-flam and hard science. A film by Penny Lane.

The stories maps tell

Entertain the Elk talks about the history of real world maps and the design of the fantasy maps for Lord of the Rings, Chronicles of Narnia and Game of Thrones.

Throughout history, maps have always communicated ideas and stories to its audience, but what about maps of fictional worlds? In this video, I examine the maps of Middle Earth (Lord of the Rings), Narnia (The Chronicles of Narnia), and The Known World (Game of Thrones) in order to find the tiny details the mapmakers chose to include that point to their larger stories.

See also

• J.R.R. Tolkien’s annotated map of Middle-earth discovered
  & See the sketches Tolkien used to build Middle-Earth
• Concept art for the Game of Thrones opening title sequence
• Urbano Monte’s remarkable 430-year-old map of the world
  

Why an elbow is one of Time magazine’s people of 2017

Why this elbow is a Time Person of the Year

Vox: That elbow in the lower right-hand corner is attached to a young hospital worker from Texas, who anonymously reported her harassment for fear of the negative impact it could have on her and her family. It represents a much larger contingent than the women on the cover: the silence keepers.

The Story Behind the Woman You Don’t See…

Time: The worker, who made a sexual harassment complaint anonymously, told TIME she remembers vivid details about what happened to her, and she couldn’t stop wondering whether she could have prevented the encounter. She said: “I thought, What just happened? Why didn’t I react? I kept thinking, Did I do something, did I say something, did I look a certain way to make him think that was O.K.?”

See also: Other posts tagged ‘equality’.

Do you need to be a dick to be a successful leader?

DICKS: Do you need to be one to be a successful leader?

Max Joseph: This is a question that has been eating away at me for a long time, so I decided to make a movie about it.

See also: The Peter Principle: the scientific reason everything is a bit shit

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The Universal Declaration of Human Rights by Zen Pencils, a website where inspirational quotes from famous people are adapted into cartoons by Gavin Aung Than.

another beautiful story: In our latest episode, we speak to Melbourne based cartoonist Gavin Aung Than of Zen Pencils. ⋮ “A lot of people think I’m just living an exciting life, thinking of ideas and drawing, but being a cartoonist is a lot of hard work”. And while it may be hard work for Gavin to continually push out good quality comics, the cartoonist reveals in this video why his readers feedback, has in-turn made him find his calling.

• Bill Watterson: A cartoonist’s advice — The Zen Pencils comic most popular with readers.
• Theodore Roosevelt: The Man in the Arena — Gavin’s favourite quote.

Bill Watterson

Theodore Roosevelt

WEB Du Bois: retracing his attempt to challenge racism with data

The Guardian: The civil rights pioneer and scholar is most famous for his book The Souls of Black Folk, but his use of data to show inequality is still profound today

Original illustration (left) created by WEB Du Bois, and updated version (right) by Mona Chalabi

Mona Chalabi has updated WEB Du Bois’ visualizations with recent data, while staying faithful to the design of the original illustrations.

I thought about DuBois while drawing these. Not just his outstanding craft (how did he manage to get those lines so straight? Those labels so neat?) but how he would feel to look at data 117 years later about the “present condition” of black Americans.

“Yes, the fact that black illiteracy has fallen to 1.6% does seem like progress. But even as late as 1979, illiteracy among black Americans was still four times higher than it was for white Americans.”

“The story is bleak. [Today] For every dollar a black household in America has in net assets, a white household has 16.5 more.”

“At first glance, this looks like another story of progress. It’s not.”

See also

• Map showing the distribution of the slave population of the southern states of the United States — compiled from the census of 1860.
• Slavery Evolved: From slavery to mass incarceration — Slavery did not end in 1865, it evolved.
• The divided states of America: A cartogram of the 2016 election results — Benjamin Hennig is a geographer whose work looks at social inequalities.

Anglo Saxon London Map

A map by Matt Brown at Londonist: In 2011, we put together a map showing the London area in Anglo Saxon times (roughly speaking, 500－1066AD). It’s pieced together from many resources, showing our guess at the roads, rivers, forests and marshland that characterised the region.

The main purpose was to highlight the many villages, hamlets and farmsteads whose names are still part of modern London. For example, the map shows ‘Wemba Lea’, the land belonging to a local chieftain by the name of Wemba. We know nothing about Mr Wemba, yet his name is familiar to millions, perhaps billions, through its continuation into our own times as Wembley. Similarly, Croydon is a corruption of Crog Dene, which meant something like ‘valley of the crocuses’.

Central London was once largely marshland. The first major Anglo Saxon settlement was Lundenwic (now Covent Garden/Aldwych). Later, King Alfred re-established a town within the old Roman walls, known as Lundenburh.

North-west London, with the ‘nose-shaped hill’ (Neasdun), Wemba Lea and the curling River Brent, which still flows through the area.

See also

• Seminal William ‘Strata’ Smith geology map rediscovered — …acknowledged as the first geological map of a country ever produced. ⋮ Smith spent the better part of 15 years collecting the information needed to compile the map. It is said he covered about 10,000 miles a year on foot, on horse and in carriage, cataloguing the locations of all the formations that make up the geology of the three home nations.
• Recovering The Doves Type from the bottom of the Thames — In 1916, the Doves Type was seemingly lost forever after it was thrown into the River Thames.
• Distribution of the slave population of the southern United States, 1860 — Based on data from the 1860 census, this map was the Census Office’s first attempt to map population density.

The Mammoth Pirates

Amos Chapple (RFE/RL): With the sale of elephant tusks under close scrutiny, “ethical ivory” from the extinct woolly mammoth is now feeding an insatiable market in China. This rush on mammoth ivory is luring a fresh breed of miner – the tusker – into the Russian wilderness and creating dollar millionaires in some of the poorest villages of Siberia.

This 65-kilogram tusk, photographed a moment after it was plucked from the permafrost, was sold for $34,000. The two men who found it unearthed three more in just over a week, including one weighing 72 kilograms.

Some tuskers use the excavating power of the pressurized water to bore deep underground. Others carve enormous caverns under the frozen ground.

Triumphant tuskers, one flashing the “cash” gesture.

Ravaged landscape is the obvious result of the tusk hunters’ methods, but the impact on Yakutia’s waterways is far-reaching.

This young tusker converted the engine from a Soviet-era Buran snowmobile into a water pump.

Mosquitoes are a near constant plague. Only the coldest mornings offer an hour or two of relief.

See also

• Related news: China banning ivory trade in 2017 in ‘game changer’ move for Africa’s elephant
• Man wearing gas mask and sandals explores Fukushima’s Exclusion Zone — Takes time to check out 2011 porn.
• The most dangerous selfies ever taken — Rolling Stone hang out at the top of the world with Moscow’s death-defying ‘roofers’
• Movile Cave: The unique life isolated deep underground for 5.5 million years — Despite a complete absence of light and a poisonous atmosphere, the cave is crawling with life. There are unique spiders, scorpions, woodlice and centipedes, many never before seen by humans, and all of them owe their lives to a strange floating mat of bacteria.

Explore the International Space Station in 4K

Space Station Fisheye Fly-Through 4K (Ultra HD)

NASA: Join us for a fly-through of the International Space Station. Produced by Harmonic exclusively for NASA TV UHD, the footage was shot in Ultra High Definition (4K) using a fisheye lens for extreme focus and depth of field.

(via Kottke)

See also: Stunning 4K timelapse of Earth from the ISS

Secret Hitler

A hidden identity game for 5-10 players by Max Temkin, creator of Cards Against Humanity. The first production run was funded on Kickstarter and the game should be available to all soon.

Secret Hitler is a dramatic game of political intrigue and betrayal set in 1930’s Germany. Players are secretly divided into two teams – liberals and fascists. Known only to each other, the fascists coordinate to sow distrust and install their cold-blooded leader. The liberals must find and stop the Secret Hitler before it’s too late.

We’ve released the entire game as a free print-and-play project – you can download the game [PDF] and the rules [PDF].

See also

• The Secret Hitler Kickstarter campaign page.
• Secret Hitler on BoardGameGeek.com (Avg. Rating 7.5/10)
• Temkin is also the co-founder of Blackbox, ‘a new shipping company that helps independent artists send physical goods to their customers’. I love the pixel art on this website so much.

• Blacks & Whites — A ’70s board game about race, housing, and privilege
• The Mystical Universe of Magic: The Gathering — Magic continues to flourish since its phenomenal debut in 1993.
• Archicards — Architectural playing card designs by Italian architect Federico Babina.

See also

The first variant of the patch of the Russian-American-Brazilian crew of the Soyuz TMA-8 spaceship.

Atlas Obscura: These rare Russian insignia are a colorful relic of Soviet space travel

The patch of the Russian-French crew on the Cassiopée program, 1996–1997. On this mission, astronaut Claudie André-Deshays became the first French woman in space.

This patch is a variant used by the Soviet-Czechoslovakian crew, in 1978 for Soyuz-28.

The personal badge of cosmonaut Gennadi Manakov, used in 1996.

Patch for the Apollo-Soyuz Test Project, the first joint flight between the Soviets and the U.S.

• The creepy, kitschy and geeky patches of US spy satellite launches — “If anything, it’s an internal gag. Like, how far can you take it without being reprimanded? Or maybe the patches represent jokes that cropped up in the processing of the satellites, which we’ll never know unless they’re declassified—and maybe not even then.”
• The story behind the NRO’s sinister octopus logo — “It’s really neat to me. It’s kind of saying the enemy has nowhere to run.”
• What does the red swoosh in NASA’s ‘meatball’ logo mean? — The distinctive red shape wasn’t just a designerly flourish.
• Trippy retro DEA patches — DEA and other federal agencies created their own patches to identify different units, and they had a particularly definitive flair during the 1970s, ’80s, and ’90s.