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Keep Track of All the World’s Territorial Disputes With This Amazing Interactive Map

All over the world, there are people who could live in one country or another. Some of these territorial disputes are relatively minor, while others could be the flashpoints that lead to all-out war. There are a lot of these, and they’re hard to keep track of. Enter Max Galka, a mapmaker whose work we’ve…

These Charts Will Make You Want to Throw Your Television Off a Cliff

Television has a well-documented diversity problem when it comes to writing staffs—especially when it comes to race. But if anything, the problem is even bigger when it comes to who actually directs episodes. Over in Variety, Maureen Ryan has created a devastatingly well-researched and in-depth report about diversity behind the camera on television. Anybody who…

Get To Know The Incredible Starships of Ann Leckie’s Ancillary Trilogy

The third book in Ann Leckie’s Imperial Radch trilogy, Ancillary Mercy, comes out next week. Need a refresher course in the ships and personnel of her thrilling space-opera universe? We’ve got an exclusive infographic from Orbit Books. Here’s the complete infographic, which explains the relative sizes and strengths of the three different classes of ships…

These Charts Show Just How Bad The Problem of Gender Bias in Science Fiction Awards Really Is

Are men better than women at writing science fiction and fantasy books? The major awards in the field certainly seem to think so. And in case you weren’t aware of how widespread the problem is, a groundbreaking new research project has generated some utterly staggering charts. The folks over at Ladybusiness spent over 100 hours…

11 Most Useless And Misleading Infographics On The Internet

Everybody loves infographics. Facts (and assertions) just spring to life when you make them into cool pictures. But this powerful tool is all too often misused. Here are 11 infographics that are either completely misleading or totally useless. Artwork by Jim Cooke. It’s easy to create a chart that presents wrong data, cherry-picks correct data,…

Women Destroy the Hugo Awards! How much visibility have women authors received in recent years, versus the past? Livejournal user Kalimac did a statistical analysis of Hugo nominations by gender going back to 1959, and found two spikes — one in the mid-1990s, and one from 2010 onwards.

10 Charts That Show How The Climate Has Already Changed

Climate change isn’t just coming — it’s already here. Just check out these 10 charts that show everything from how much it costs to heat or cool our homes to the amount of rain we’ve been getting. The National Climate Assessment, a government report on the rapidly changing climate in the U.S., was released today.…

Fascinating Chart: Top 20 Metropolitan Areas in the U.S.A., 1790-2010

This amazing chart follows the rise and fall — and in some cases, rise and fall and rise — of American cities. Peak Bagger has charted the rank of 20 metropolitan areas every decade from 1790 to 2010. Poor Detroit. Most interestingly — New York City took the number one spot over 200 years ago,…

Interactive map shows all the spots on Earth that have been photographed from the ISS

If you want to see what the Golden Gate Bridge or the delta of the Nile looks like from space with the click of a mouse, head over to Our World From The ISS. This interactive map, created by Dave MacLean of the Centre of Geographic Sciences, collects the gorgeous photos tweeted by Chris Hadfield…

Visualizing 5 years of traffic fatalities: what is the deadliest time to drive?

Data visualization expert John Nelson uses graphic design to illustrate risk. In his latest infographic, he plots the perilousness of driving — something many of us will be doing a lot of in the coming weeks. Using traffic fatality data collected between 2006 and 2010, Nelson set out to look for daily, weekly, monthly, and…

Behold, ALL the birds

Feast your eyes on the first complete evolutionary tree for all known modern bird species. It’s exhaustive, colorful, and beautiful to behold – a little like an avicular Hillis Plot. But for all that this diagram tells us about birds’ evolutionary histories, what’s really interesting is what it says about how birds continue to evolve…

At Last, Official Maps of George R.R. Martin’s World, From Westeros to Qarth

We’ve seen some amazing maps of the lands of Westeros and Essos, from George R.R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire series. There are nifty maps in the front of every volume of Martin’s series, but also fans have created detailed, stylized, spoilery and Easter Egg-filled cartographies. https://gizmodo.com/the-most-detailed-map-of-the-game-of-thrones-world-yet-5892140 https://gizmodo.com/stylized-game-of-thrones-maps-make-westeros-and-essos-l-5928086 https://gizmodo.com/this-spoiler-filled-map-tracks-the-travels-of-every-maj-5917835 https://gizmodo.com/massive-easter-egg-filled-map-of-game-of-thrones-seven-5819555 But now at…

Explore the strange lands of David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest with a new map and interactive atlas!

If you’re one of those people who can’t stop obsessing about David Foster Wallace’s confounding, dense novel Infinite Jest — and quite right, too — then there’s a brand new resource. William Beutler has created Infinite Atlas, an interactive guide to the version of Boston in Wallace’s book, enabled by Google Maps and including brief…

A chart of every death in Breaking Bad that can be tied back to Walter White

Walter White’s metamorphosis from a mild-mannered high school chemistry teacher into a lethal force of meth-slinging nature has been one of the most fascinating character transformations ever to unfold on screen. Now, in the wake of Breaking Bad’s jarring (mid-season) finale, we’re left to digest that transformation, and speculate on how it will play into…

This gorgeous world map depicts all of Earth’s hurricanes since 1851

Data visualization expert John Nelson likes to illustrate risk. Usually he focuses on individual events, but in recent months he’s directed his design talents towards a series of bigger projects, in the interest of communicating information about “general geographic trends in existential risk.” Translation: beautiful maps depicting the distribution of natural disasters over time. Using…

Map Reveals That Wildfires Release As Much Energy As Nuclear Power Plants

If we’ve learned anything from the Waldo Canyon fire in Colorado, it’s that major wildfires are devastatingly powerful. They’re so intense, in fact, that their energy output can actually be represented in terms of nuclear power plant output. Now, data visualization wizard John Nelson has done exactly that. Nelson — who’s made something of a…

A Luminescent Map of the World’s Earthquakes Since 1898

You’re looking at the latest work of John Nelson, who is becoming well known for combining natural-disaster data with brilliant visualizations. The Michigan-based designer first captured our attention with a series of fantastic maps of U.S. tornado data. Now, he’s used his talents to chart a century’s worth of earthquakes (a staggering 203,186 of them)…

The Rules of Magic, According to the Greatest Fantasy Sagas of All Time

Magic is mysterious and ancient, and its workings are often beyond the understanding of mere mortals. But that doesn’t mean that magic doesn’t have rules. Now updated, with tons of corrections from the comments! Thanks to everybody who provided some tweaks to the accuracy of our chart. Every fantasy saga has its own rules for…

Handy Flowchart for Choosing Among NPR’s Top 100 Science Fiction and Fantasy Books

Now that we officially know the 100 greatest science fiction and fantasy books, according to NPR’s fine readers, there’s some great reading material waiting for all of us. But which of these great books is best for you? It’s a dazzling amount of options, after all. Fear not — SF Signal, which gave us that…

Chart: Who owns our modern myths and legends?

Our modern era doesn’t just celebrate stories about gods and demi-gods — we have a whole host of new mythic figures that we obsess about, from Luke Skywalker to Superman to Captain Kirk. But who owns these legends? We decided to find out. Top image: Superman Vs. Spider-Man, by Alex Ross. We’ve compiled a chart,…