Once you figure out what’s happening here, it’s pretty cool. These guys — BBC software engineers Gareth Lloyd and Tom Martin — took 14,238 Wikipedia pages of historic events, grabbed the coordinates, and mapped them out in an animated visualization of where they occurred (with a year counter in the lower right to tell you where you are in the historic timeline), A History of the World in 100 Seconds:
A History of the World in 100 Seconds from Gareth Lloyd on Vimeo.
Understand that this is English-language Wikipedia’s view of history, so it starts out extremely Eurocentric, spreads to Asia, then ultimately explodes with North American datapoints and spreads into more of the world; by the end, you can make out continents more easily. It is not representative of everything that ever happened, everywhere. But it’s an interesting way to look at a certain perspective on recorded history.
HT: Daily What, FlowingData
Around A.D. 800 to 1000 the Americas begin to look like the constellation of Orion.
Cool.
Whoa, we’ve been waging nuclear warfare since 500BC?
Reminds me quite a bit of this game: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=36eul8IGOQA
(Defcon)
@GuanoLad At least you’re not canadian.
I grew up in New Zealand. Our History classes for our own country were pathetic because we barely had 200 years of westernised occupation, and for the Maori occupation before that the timeline was vague and plagued by myth. Compared to Europe, Asia, and America, we had no history at all.
Whoa, that was awesome. It would be great to see it with a map, especially at the beginning, to see where exactly some of the outliers were.