The shortlist of winners for the 2013 Sony World Photography Awards is out, and there are some brilliant ones. Above is a piece entitled Tradition, by Reza Nezamdust of Iran. Below, is Return to Childhood Landscapes, taken by Hajdu Tamas on the train from Bucharest to Baia Mare in Romania.
The 2013 Sony World Photography Awards [TheAtlantic]
New research is suggesting that the layout of subway systems around the world is converging on some sort of ideal pattern:
After decades of urban evolution, the world’s major subway systems appear to be converging on an ideal form.
On the surface, these core-and-branch systems — evident in New York City, Tokyo, London or most any large metropolitan subway — may seem intuitively optimal. But in the absence of top-down central planning, their movement over decades toward a common mathematical space may hint at universal principles of human self-organization.
Understand those principles, and one might “make urbanism a quantitative science, and understand with data and numbers the construction of a city,” said statistical physicist Marc Barthelemy of France’s National Center for Scientific Research.
World’s Subways Converging on Ideal Form [Wired Science]
Posted in Science, Technology
Tagged Converge, Ideal, Network, Public Transit, Subway, World
Nike asked filmmaker Casey Neistat to make a movie about what it means to ‘Make It Count’. Instead of making the movie (per se) he spent then entire budget travelling around the world with his friend Max.
Posted in Five Kinds of Awesome, Places
Tagged Flight, International, Movie, Travel, World
To honour the world-renowned natural history narrators final program with the BBC, Sir David Attenborough recites the words to “What a Wonderful World” over appropriately wonderful footage.
[via]
Posted in Five Kinds of Awesome, Nature
Tagged BBC, Beautiful, David Attenborough, Documentary, Natural History, Nature, Wonderful, World
Hans Rosling with a brilliant statistical breakdown of living conditions around the world over the past 200 years.
[Thanks, Mom!]
Posted in Five Kinds of Awesome
Tagged Conditions, Disparity, Hans Rosling, Improvement, Life, Riches, Statistics, Stats, World
This chart shows the current consumption of coffee per capita around the world, according to the World Resources Institute.
[via]
Posted in Places
Tagged Caffeine, Coffee, Consumption, Fix, Map, Statistics, World
This looks fantastic.
Posted in Really Damn Cool
Tagged BBC, Documentary, Fascinating, Human, Human Being, People, Planet, World
Wheat farmer Udham Singh inspects a sample of his crop in Amritsar, India, on March 9, 2010. Part of a slideshow about farming around the world which I stared at with mouth agape.
An Ode to Farming [Foreign Policy]
Posted in Five Kinds of Awesome
Tagged Agriculture, Farming, Food, Grow, Photography, Slideshow, World
A great infographic showing the locations as well as some other data on every nuclear explosion since 1942. (Click to embiggen).
Posted in End of the World, Flaming Ball of Death, History, Technology
This is a really cool online clock that includes all manner of statistics: diseases, food production, population, etc. You can watch as they grow from the beginning of this year, week, day, or starting….now.
[Thanks, Dad!]
Posted in Science, Thought-Provoking
Tagged Clock, Day, Disease, Food, Growth, Population, Slaughter, Statistics, World
