The most excellent Tumblr of the Sunlight Foundation
womenofthe113th: in water colors!
Amnesty International’s ‘Trial by Timeline’ scans Facebook, maps out your crimes across the globe
The 10 Best Biking Cities in America
via FastCompany:
Biking map site BikeScore has released a new ranking of the country’s best cities for biking, accounting for factors like bike lanes, hilliness, route options, and number of commuters. How does your city rank?
Spacecraft Kepler’s lead investigator says data already received from the mission could reveal more planets.
Why does the IRS regulate political groups? A look at the complex world of campaign finance
1955 Map Shows No-Go Zones for Soviet Travelers in the U.S.
If you were one of select few private Soviet citizens granted permission to visit the United States in 1955, you could take in a Cubs game or ski Jackson Hole, but if you wanted to sample Memphis barbecue or check out the factories in Youngstown, Ohio, you’d be out of luck. That’s because a National Security Council directive had, on Jan. 3, 1955, allowed some “Soviet citizens in possession of valid Soviet passports” into the country, while extending controls previously placed on visiting Soviet diplomats and official representatives to apply to their travel.
See Inside a Butterfly Chrysalis
Just like everyone else, you learned about how a caterpillar turns into a butterfly (or moth) inside a chrysalis (or cocoon) and you desperately tried to envision what happens inside and what it looks like. Scientists who’ve opened a lot of chrysalises will tell you the caterpillar turns to goop and then a butterfly, but that’s not completely accurate, and the process of opening one destroys the structure anyway.
53 years of nuclear tests as electronic music
I’ve seen this video described as a musical depiction of all the nuclear bombs ever detonated. But that sort of makes it sound like you’re about to get a particularly bombastic version of the 1812 Overture. Instead, “1945-1998” by Isao Hashimoto is more like an infographic with sound effects — or, possibly, a mash-up of the games Simon and Global Thermonuclear War.
Joseph Heller’s chart outline for Catch-22. Check out the full gallery of Famous Authors’ Handwritten Outlines.
How Half a Second of High Frequency Stock Trading Looks Like
The movie shown below, developed by a real-time trading software developer Nanex, shows the stock trading activity in Johnson & Johnson (JNJ) as it occurred during a particular half a second on May 2, 2013.
Policy stalls as campaign spending by fossil fuel industries and greenhouse gases rise to historic levels.
More: http://reporting.sunlightfoundation.com/2013/whats-wrong-picture-greenhouse-gas-all-time-high/
Exploring Space
The BBC has created a monster infographic illustrating “every attempt to leave Earth’s orbit and reach a destination in extraterrestrial space – be it with probes, orbiters, rovers, or of course manned missions.”
The graphic shows successful and failed missions, country of launch origin and type of mission (eg., fly-by, rover, actual landing).
Related: How Big is Space?
Image: Screenshot, detail from Spacial Awareness: Ultimate guide to exploring space, via the BBC. Select to embiggen.
Operation Black Buck by Section Design
A personal project inspired by reading a book about what was at the time the longest and most complicated bombing raid ever devised. The book itself had several illustrations which I found a bit lacking, so I had a go myself and it ended up being an A1-sized poster.
