Charting culture

This animation distils hundreds of years of culture into just five minutes. A team of historians and scientists wanted to map cultural mobility, so they tracked the births and deaths of notable individuals like Leonardo da Vinci, from 600 BC to the present day. Using them as a proxy for skills and ideas, their map reveals intellectual hotspots and tracks how empires rise and crumble. The information comes from Freebase, a Google-owned database of well-known people and places, and other catalogues of notable individuals.

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Picture of Natan_el_Tigre52 achievements

+2 1. Natan_el_Tigre commented 10 years ago

Charting a culture of Homo sapiens on a Petri sphere.
Picture of Dmitry33 achievements

0 2. Dmitry commented 10 years ago

Just like Antz!
Picture of LaoMa28 achievements

+2 3. LaoMa commented 10 years ago

Isn't 600 BC a bit late starting point? Egypt, China etc. had pretty civilized, and relatively well documented, culture already in 2000 BC...
Picture of ughlah41 achievements

+1 4. ughlah commented 10 years ago

laoma, the first cities are from 9000 bc, but does that mean we have data about their famous inhabitants movement?
Picture of Sustagen35 achievements

0 5. Sustagen commented 10 years ago

Look, its my blue dot :)
(im an optimist)
Picture of c0mmanderKeen36 achievements

+1 6. c0mmanderKeen commented 10 years ago

It's a great effort, but poorly executed in my opinion. Very little information is conveyed, as the lines and dots are hard to follow and the names are next to impossible to read. Also, it is very confusing as to WHEN we are if you listen to the narrator... around 1400, she talks about the aftermath of the roman empire, which has been gone almost a 1000 years by now (not counting the byzantine eastern branch... which doesn't include rome at this time).
It gets much more interesting as they focus on a smaller area and time period, namely the US. but I daresay that europe would have had much more interesting "cultural charts". I feel that they may want to split this and really focus on an area and time.
And what about the great science done in the ancient middle east and arabia?
Just nagging, feels like wasted potential.. but there is probably more where this came from.
Picture of SpanneurRouge10 achievements

-1 7. SpanneurRouge commented 10 years ago

WTF is BCE and CE?!?

We are perfectly happy using AD and BC for a thousand years before these christian hating lefties came along.

If lefties dont like the culture and history we built, they should f'off and make their own - if the extremists dont eat them first.