Life expectancy in Russia
Click the images to get PNG versions. National overview As of 2017, life expectancy at birth in Russia is 72.5 years. This is quite an improvement over the mid 1990s, when life expectancy had fallen into the low 60s, on par with much less developed countries like Sudan and Pakistan. And, for the first time, […]
Europe and Mankind—English translation
This is currently unfinished, but I want the public to be able to see the sections that I have translated so far. Europe and Mankind is an interesting essay written by Nikolai Sergeyevich Trubetzkoy (1890–1938), who happens to be a first cousin thrice removed. He was primarily a linguist, but occasionally wrote on historical and […]
Printable United States map
This is a general-purpose map of the United States, designed from the bottom up to be printable by everyone, and to look great on the humble 8.5 x 11 paper. When making maps, or just looking at data, I do a lot of sketching. I usually Google Image search some kind of basemap, and scribble […]
What if China falls apart?
I am not an expert on China or its government. I am just a casual observer with some knowledge of what happened in the USSR, and I saw some parallels that I wanted to explore, just as a thought experiment. Design shamelessly based on a great Nat Geo map hanging in my room. China is […]
France has shrunk
This is a map I made for Catholic GIS, a great organization that I worked for a couple years back. My content was never published, so I’m sharing it now here. Earlier I saw Émile Cheysson’s groundbreaking 1888 visualization, titled Accélération des voyages en France. Cheysson saw that as travel improved over the last 200 […]
US state adjacency in python
I’m working on a small project that tries to pair up US states with their twins. I was doing this in python, and needed an adjacency “matrix” but couldn’t find a good one anywhere. Here is what I made, should be self explanatory. Putting this out there to save other people some time!
List of Western countries
There is no single definition of what the West is, so the list of countries changes depending on context. The different contexts are outlined in this Wikipedia article. Since people are now visiting this page more frequently, I will present three definitions, which people can use depending on context: The Latin West (cultural definition) – […]
Vancouver movies
This guy explains it best: Vancouver never plays itself in movies. So who does Vancouver play? Mostly Seattle, apparently. But also Honduras, Las Vegas, Albany and Siberia, among other places. I took the data from Movie Maps, which has a fairly comprehensive list of every scene filmed in Vancouver. I have a series of YouTube […]
The definitive GDP map
I got tired of seeing these horrible maps: So I decided to combine them all into one to make the Definitive Arbitrarily-Classified GDP Map. Here are the bounds: Benchmark GDP (USD) Source California 2.60E+12 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economy_of_California US student debt 1.44E+12 https://studentloanhero.com/student-loan-debt-statistics/ Apple Inc market cap 8.15E+11 Google finance US military budget 5.22E+11 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Military_budget_of_the_United_States Apple cash reserves […]
In saecula saeculorum
Something I learned recently – the longest unit of time in Ancient Rome was called the Saeculum. It was the period of time from the moment that something happened (for example the founding of a city), until the point in time when all people living at the first moment had died. In other words, it’s […]