#TodayinHistory #dataviz #Onthisday #OTD 📊
🎂Mar 5, 1512 Gerardus Mercator born in Rupelmonde, Flanders, Belgium 🇧🇪
1569: he Invented of cylindrical projection for portraying the globe on maps, to preserve straightness of rhumb lines
(for better or worse, but it helped Europeans navigate the seas)
NEW MARSUPIALS
Satellite images from NASA Worldview on March 5 reveal the extent of the blackout in Cuba. A failure at the most important power plant, combined with the US blockade on fuel shipments in the country has left nearly 70% of the island's inhabitants without power.
I made an animated map of ship movements in the Straights of Hormuz using data from marinetraffic.com.
Ship track frames rendered using #ggplot, base map created using #gdal, video editing using #ffmpeg, video player written in #svelte.
🎁 www.zeit.de/wirtschaft/2...
If anyone is friends with any Georgian air traffic controllers, buy them a nice bottle of wine. As guardians of pretty much the only narrow gap still available between Europe and Asia that avoids both Iran, the Gulf, Ukraine and Russia, they are under some substantial pressure.
Brilliant idea, or... that wasn't in the data :)
Trump's trying to find the guy who did this.
I built a free tool that shows how night-time lights have changed anywhere on Earth.
Here's how it works and why it's useful for monitoring conflict, disasters, development and growth. 👇
What a difference a year makes! In mid-February 2025, northeastern Morocco was affected by severe drought. One year later and after 2 months of rain, these Copernicus Sentinel-3 images show that the region has been transformed into an expanse of green vegetation.
using LLMs for certain types of coding tasks has made me crank output faster but I can actively feel my understanding and my sense of craftsmanship diminishing, and I don't like that feeling at all
Don't know if he is a historian, but: bsky.app/profile/kirk...
“We have all been here before
We have all been here before…”
I am almost certainly going
Why not?
1. Dataviz package author closes PR from a bot
2. Bot angry, writes hit piece on package author
3. Tech news site reports
4. Tech news site needs to retract article: contains hallucinated quotes from package author
5. Me: seriously questioning career choices
theshamblog.com/an-ai-agent-...
The robot apocalypse hasn't happened yet, but still I can't escape the feeling that something has gone horribly wrong... Cartoon for Dutch newspaper @trouw.nl.
More of my work for Trouw: www.trouw.nl/cartoons/tje...
#ArtificialIntelligence #creativity #work #GenerativeAI
Grazalema, Spain, received over 2,000 mm (78 inches) of rain in just the last 20 days.
Over a year’s worth of rain — and it’s only early February. This is hydrologically absurd.
I've seen similar things in Belgian population maps. Usually either jails, or addresses where homeless people or refugees are registered administratively
The CIA just stopped publishing their World Factbook and took every page, including the archived copies of previous versions!
This sucks. It was public domain, so I recovered the 2020 edition (the last one published as a zip file) and shared it to GitHub simonwillison.net/2026/Feb/5/t...
RIP www.cia.gov/stories/stor...
Top 10 bird family names:
10. Irenidae
Means "peaceful". Has three members, the Fairy-bluebirds, which are just A++ birds and I would squee if I saw any of them.
I'd like to report a y-axis crime…
This #map title could be "Retirement with a sea view in Belgium".
See online version on Eurostat website: tinyurl.com/2ps59n6a
Recently discussed what the best year was, after which things started to go South. We settled on 2007, pre-financial crisis. The main news events from that year seem so small compared to today, and alsof have positive things (iPhone, ...)
India's electrification shortcut! ⚡️🇮🇳
Solar, wind, batteries, electric vehicles...India's economy has different tools available than the US and China did at the same stage in their economic development.
The result? An early turn away from fossil molecules towards electrons.
Or, according to their position in the Economist Democracy Index:
Trump's "Board of Peace": 152, 91, 133, 118, 55, 82, 129, -, 125, 75, 66, 146, 138, 117, 59.
Trump’s Board of Peace logo is basically the UN logo, except dipped in gold and edited so the world only includes America.
