A Map Animation of the Atomic Age

Via Boing Boing and The New Yorker, a map animation that shows every detonation of a nuclear bomb until 1998, by Japanese artist Isao Hashimoto:



Says The New Yorker:

It is the sort of set of pictures that makes you want to read—to learn more, for example, about how it came to be that France exploded more than a tenth of those bombs (two hundred and ten); China blew up forty-five. Not that anyone was taking cover in Provence: if you don’t watch the icons above and below the map, you might think that Algeria, and not France, was the world’s fourth nuclear-armed power (and that Australia, not Britain, was the third). The Gerboise Bleue explosion, of a seventy-kiloton device, took place in 1960, in the Sahara desert, in the midst of the Algerian war; several others followed. (Later, after Algeria gained its independence, France’s tests moved to French Polynesia; its last one was in 1996.)

It's a wonder Nevada's even still habitable - though I guess you could make an argument that it's not, really...

The Decline and Fall of Assorted Empires

A visualization of four European empires over the course of the 19th and 20th Centuries:



The bubbles respresent "the evolution of the top 4 maritime empires of the XIX and XX centuries by [areal] extent"; hence Britain's loss of Canada looks like a more significant bursting of the imperial bubble than its loss of India, even though India is obviously a far more important place than Canada.

Via Andrew Sullivan and 3quarksdaily.

Touring the Tour de France

Like cycling? Like maps? The New York Times has a nice interactive map of the Tour de France course:



Stages are numbered; Wednesday's 5th stage is highlighted.

Clicking on a stage lets you view its profile, like this one of the Pyreneesian 8th stage:



Tour de France, if my language skills are not failing me, translates literally as "Tour of France." But France only amounts to 1/6 of the countries through which the Tour travels. Clearly the planning for the Tour suffered from an appalling oversight in this regard; must be embarrassing for the organizers...