Every Thing You Need To Know About May Day*

by | posted in: ACM Infographics, Ape Con Myth, Features | 1

By next Tuesday you are going to stop asking questions about whether or not the Occupy Movement really made it through the winter and the coordinated crackdowns of the camps around the world.  Why?  Because by next Tuesday, Earth is going to feel very Occupied.

What’s going on?  That’s what the Every Thing You Need To Know About May Day * But Were Afraid To Ask chart is here to answer…

(click to enlarge)

Join the world in a much needed day off on a Tuesday and SPREAD THE WORD ABOUT MAY 1ST!

Banks Saying Sorry (or What You Won’t Find When You Open Up Your Letterbox Tomorrow)

by | posted in: External Images, Features, The Economics Devision | 0

What if this really was a letter from Bank of America’s CEO offering up a confession?  Go ahead, pretend…

It’s not the real McCoy of course.  Unknown person(s) have taken it upon themselves to write this letter for Bank of America and you can find out more about why at YourBofA.com.  The site has been set up to solicit ideas and encourage creativity in reimagining your Bank of America, including a bank ad meme generator, for which Ape Con Myth wrote a few entries.  Click through to share your favorite!

In situations like this, it’s important to start out light.

Ease into your subject.  What is the point of a bank in the first place?

If a bank is a business, then should banking be a mutually beneficial arrangement?

Bank of America was a presumptuous name from the start.  General Bank might have been a more appropriate choice, but they wanted the whole enchilada.  The question is, was it a self-fulfilling prophecy that they turned out to be as bad with their money as us?

[Your Bank of America via Forbes] [Related: Hungry, Hungry Hippos (or Banking Mergers 1990-2009]

Comfortably Numb? (or The Mere Fact That You Call It COMFCOMF Tells Me You’re Not Ready)

by | posted in: External Charts, The Economics Devision | 0

Every week 250 lucky American consumers are quizzed on their thoughts about the economy, the “buying climate” and their own personal finances.  The result is called the Bloomberg US Weekly Consumer Comfort Index, or COMFCOMF if you’re sitting at a Bloomberg terminal, and for the last five years the response has indicated consistent discomfort.

(click for interactive chart)

What’s behind the recent jump in sentiment?  We don’t know either but if you find out put it in the comments.

Where the Trees Are

by | posted in: Maps, The Geography Club | 0

Trees.  They’re great, until they’re in the way.  Forests once covered half the land on Earth and now claim less than a third of it.  Why might we care?  Here’s NASA with a few reasons:

Trees cool and moisten our air and fill it with oxygen. They calm the winds and shade the land from sunlight. They shelter countless species, anchor the soil, and slow the movement of water. They provide food, fuel, medicines, and building materials for human activity.

Modern life is great at detaching us from our natural surroundings.  While the paragraph above contains words like ‘oxygen’, ‘soil’, ‘water’, ‘food’, ‘fuel’ and ‘medicine’, which on The $100,000 Pyramid could elicit “Things Critical To Human Life”, it still doesn’t necessarily make the connection.  We know we need trees.  That’s why we’re using them.


Thanks to a six year collaboration between the Woods Hole Research Center, the U.S. Forest Service and the U.S. Geological Survey, we now have very detailed knowledge of the state of biomass in the United States.  4 pixels per acre to be exact…

(click for much larger image)

It’s good someone is paying attention.  Don’t think for a second we couldn’t chop every one of them down.  (Think buffalo.)  Now with the tree inventory, we’ve hopefully got what we need to carve out a future without it falling down all around us.

[Maps from NASA 1, 2, 3 via Geek.com]

A History of Things Worth Knowing

by | posted in: Library, The Time Bandits | 1

If you think you can get lost surfing the internet, try adding another dimension to it by going through old newspapers online.  It can be a strange experience looking at a past that is at once so familiar and yet somehow alien.  A quarter page might be more than most can handle and a close look at a single ad can send you down the most random of rabbit holes.

Take this ad from the November 27th, 1873 edition of The Weekly Kansas Chief…

Turns out we’ve been attempting to assemble useful knowledge into a single volume for longer than you’d think.  Didn’t they know they were clueless back in 2012 1873?   Yes, as one reviewer on Amazon notes of Joseph Triemens’ Manual of Ready Reference, “the material in this book is out of date”, but that doesn’t mean we still can’t learn something from it.  Project Gutenburg has a copy of the 1911 edition you can peruse for free to find out how to keep your canary birds “healthy and in good song”, be reminded that duration of copyright is “fifty-six years in all” or hear that:

the two great apostles of the evolution theory were Charles Darwin and Herbert Spencer. The latter began his great work, the “First Principles of Philosophy,” showing the application of evolution in the facts of life, in 1852. In 1859 appeared Darwin’s “Origin of Species.” The hypothesis of the latter was that different species originated in spontaneous variation, and the survival of the fittest through natural selection and the struggle for existence. This theory was further elaborated and applied by Spencer, Darwin, Huxley, and other writers in Europe and America, and though to-day by no means all the ideas upheld by these early advocates of the theory are still accepted, evolution as a principle is now acknowledged by nearly all scientists. It is taken to be an established fact in nature, a valid induction from man’s knowledge of natural order.

Looks like we need to send a few copies of this one to some people in the present.  If you find yourself unearthing some gems from its pages, please share your favorite “Things Worth Knowing” in the comments.

[Image from the Library of Congress’ Chronicling America archive]

We’re Not Going To Take It and It Would Help If You Didn’t Either

by | posted in: Library, The Cultural Devision, Video | 0

It’s easy to do what everyone else is doing and eventually we might find out that’s been our only problem all along.  If you question how different daily life could be, witness what one artist and a 90 piece marching band were able to do in the city of Denver.

Now imagine what kind of show 7 billion people could be putting on if everyone wasn’t so busy taking it.

[from Lee Walton‘s Playing Apart] [See also: 7 of 27]

With Choices Like These

by | posted in: Ape Con Myth, External Images, Internal Memo | 0

Ape Con Myth
Internal Memo
April 11, 2012

Re: With Choices Like These

Who forgot to open a file on advertising?  00265 it is then.  Thanks to Hulu for the incredible specimen with which we start this collection.

How many people do you think found out?

Perhaps the first thing to do here is not start a long game of what’s wrong with this picture.  Let’s find out for ourselves.  Not about Scientology, but advertising. While it would seem we are all so connected these days that word of mouth could save us from the constant interruption and visual noise, let’s go the other direction with it first and be part of the supposed problem.

Is it alright that it only takes a few cents to get this in front of thousands of eyeballs?

From Big Bangs Come Big Histories

by | posted in: External Viz, The Time Bandits | 0

Between the beginning of our universe and the present moment lies 13.5 billions years and so much data that the Information Age hasn’t even put a dent into it yet.  Not only did Earth not come together, literally, until 9 billion years after the party started, we, relatively speaking, just showed up a few moments ago.  That’s a lot of inside jokes we’ve missed out on, not to mention all the other universes or unknown entities potentially beyond our present understanding.

Despite the disadvantage, the field of Big History was born in the 1980’s with the simple goal of studying history from the beginning of time to the present across multiple disciplines of knowledge.  How’s it going so far?  Judge for yourself by checking out ChronoZoom, a collaboration between Microsoft Research, UC Berkeley and Moscow State University.

(click to explore ChronoZoom)

While visually impressive, you might still wonder where you are going to find the time to dive into such a study or why you should even care given that you haven’t filed your taxes yet, but perhaps Bill Gates will one day save up enough money to give us all a couple of days off for such a purpose.  Until then, more information can be found at the Big History Project and from David Christian’s TED talk on the subject.

[via Flowing Data] [Related Posts: Carl Sagan’s Cosmic Calendar, Get Your Perspective On]
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