A picture (by Margaret Bourke-White, 1904-1971) is truly worth a thousand words, or more… Thanks to Jason Funk.

The North Atlantic…

This day goes down in history as one of Titanic hubris—in 1912 it marked the sinking of the eponymous “unsinkable” passenger-liner en route to New York (at the age of 96, Millvina Dean of Southampton is today the last living of the famous ship’s 706 survivors). Besides being my brother Jim’s birthday, 15 April was also the birthday of Leonardo daVinci (in 1452), the day that Abraham Lincoln died (in 1865), the birth-date of German poet/moralist Wilhelm Busch (in 1908—remember the cretinous Max und Moritz, Jim?), and the horrific, dark day in 1945 that British and Canadian troops discovered the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in Germany.

Images: Willy Stöwer’s Untergang der Titanic; da Vinci’s John the Baptist (detail); and Wilhelm Busch’s Max und Moritz.

Somewhere in (or near) Scandinavia…

I’m blond. I married a beautiful blonde (or so I thought at the time). I suppose I’ve always had this thing for blondes—though whether or not we/they actually “have more fun” is likely a matter for debate (if it really is true, would the Nordic countries not be the happiest place on earth)?

I recently came across this diagram at Strange Maps. The map shows the one place in the world where at least 80% of the population is fair-haired—in Norway, Sweden and Finland. Indicating the varying degrees of ‘blondness’ in Europe, it shows “how fair hair gets rarer further away from this core area—towards the south, as one intuitively might presume, but also towards the east, west and even towards the north. The consecutive bands (coloured in such a way as to approximately represent the ‘average’ hair colour in each area) surrounding the core blonde area in Scandinavia in most cases don’t correspond with national boundaries, but could be taken to represent certain degrees of ethnic variation, often with a possible historical explanation.” For the full scoop, visit here.

Q: How do you get a blond or blonde out of a tree? A: Wave. :-)

Washington, DC

George W. Bush today once again defended the costs of the war, in lives and money, declaring that his decision to order more troops to Iraq last year had averted potential defeat there and that withdrawing would be catastrophic to American interests. Speaking at the White House to a small audience that included Vice President Dick Cheney, the secretaries of State and Defense, and representatives of veterans’ organizations, he signaled that an American force nearly as large as at any other point in the last five years would remain in Iraq through his presidency. He left any significant changes in policy to the next president. “Fifteen months ago, Americans were worried about the prospect of failure in Iraq,” he said, sounding a triumphant note about his decision last year to send 30,000 additional troops. “Today, thanks to the surge, we’ve renewed and revived the prospect of success.”

Please, please, get a grip on reality Mr. Bush… the world—along with the hapless and the hopeful in your own nation—deserve so much better! Listen to what recently-returned veterans have to say (from Winter Soldier: Iraq and Afghanistan, Eyewitness Accounts of the Occupation), for example here.

Story Source: The New York Times

Somewhere in the USA…

From the “strange but true” side of things… It seems that in 1961, The American Medical Association (AMA) hired the Gipper for a viral marketing campaign dubbed ‘Operation Coffeecup.’ “Doing his part to scuttle the arrival of Medicare, Reagan lays down an 11 minute rap explaining how ‘Socialized Medicine’ can only lead to an America where men are not free. This record was then mailed out to the “ladies auxiliary” (doctors’ wives) of the AMA in each county. Was it this little record that kept Medicare from being signed into law until July 1965?”

Could this possibly be why we our American neighbours still don’t have Universal Health Care? Give a listen: Reagan Speaks Out Against Socialized Medicine here (mp3). Then, give your head a shake…

Atlanta, Georgia

Forty years ago today, Martin Luther King, Jr. was gunned down in Memphis, Tennessee at the age of 39. Baptist minister, world-renowned civil rights leader, and powerful advocate of non-violence, King’s influence fundamentally changed civil rights for African Americans in the United States. In 1964, he became the youngest person to receive the Nobel Peace Prize in recognition of his efforts to end segregation and racial discrimination through civil disobedience and other non-violent means.

“We must learn to live together as brothers or perish together as fools.”
—Martin Luther King, Jr.

Washington, D.C.

Well, today marks five horrific years since the “pre-emptive strike” on Iraq by the U.S., based on conclusive “intelligence” it had collected regarding the threat that Baghdad posed to the world’s fear-ridden superpower… we all know where things are actually at—though this is what George W. Bush had to say today (please listen to the dear man’s voice for full effect).

Because sometimes the best thing you can do is laugh, here’s a link to a more humorous take on things (language warning)—thanks to Shirley Hicks in Toronto for that, from an exchange on the GDC Listserv today. I also heard Phil Donohue on CBC Radio while driving to work (I don’t normally listen to American talk-show hosts, I’ll have you know…) here’s what Phil had to say.

Sad, very sad, a very sad day indeed… thankfully spring arrives within a few hours from now, as Tom Waits quips here….

Winnipeg, Canada

Forty years ago today, U.S. Army forces massacred hundreds of women and children in the Vietnamese hamlet of My Lai (the My Lai Massacre). The incident prompted widespread outrage around the world and led to reduced U.S. support at home for the Vietnam War… one wonders why, four decades later, the latest U.S.-led war in Iraq still has the support it does (especially given the information available at our fingertips, e.g. the torture and abuse at Abu Ghraib).

Has our age become inured to suffering, brutality, and injustice? I was an impressionable 13 years old when the incident at My Lai took place, and I certainly remember….

Harrison Bergeron

THE YEAR WAS 2081, and everybody was finally equal. They weren’t only equal before God and the law. They were equal every which way. Nobody was smarter than anybody else. Nobody was better looking than anybody else. Nobody was stronger or quicker than anybody else. All this equality was due to the 211th, 212th, and 213th Amendments to the Constitution, and to the unceasing vigilance of agents of the United States Handicapper General.

Some things about living still weren’t quite right, though. April, for instance, still drove people crazy by not being springtime. And it was in that clammy month that the H-G men took George and Hazel Bergeron’s fourteen-year-old son, Harrison, away.

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

I recently stumbled across this remarkable short story by Kurt Vonnegut online… all I can say is, if you (also) tend to side with underdogs and/or if you’ve ever pondered the ultimate implications of egalitarianism, I think you’ll enjoy his compellingly dystopian story (written in 1961) here. 

Photo by Jill Krementz (Kurt’s wife)

Source: The Economist

“A good graphic can tell a story, bring a lump to the throat, even change policies…” read the opening lines of a feature piece in the December 19th edition of The Economist. Cited by author Edward Tufte as “the best statistical graphic ever drawn,” the chart above also tells the story of a war: Napoleon’s Russian campaign of 1812. “It was drawn half a century afterwards by Charles Joseph Minard, a French civil engineer who worked on dams, canals and bridges. He was 80 years old and long retired when, in 1861, he called on the innovative techniques he had invented for the purpose of displaying flows of people, in order to tell the tragic tale in a single image.”

“Minard’s chart shows six types of information: geography, time, temperature, the course and direction of the army’s movement, and the number of troops remaining. The widths of the gold (outward) and black (returning) paths represent the size of the force, one millimetre to 10,000 men. Geographical features and major battles are marked and named, and plummeting temperatures on the return journey are shown along the bottom.”

“The chart tells the dreadful story with painful clarity: in 1812, the Grand Army set out from Poland with a force of 422,000; only 100,000 reached Moscow; and only 10,000 returned. The detail and understatement with which such horrifying loss is represented combine to bring a lump to the throat. As men tried, and mostly failed, to cross the Bérézina river under heavy attack, the width of the black line halves: another 20,000 or so gone. The French now use the expression “C’est la Bérézina” to describe a total disaster.”

“In 1871, the year after Minard died, his obituarist cited particularly his graphical innovations: ‘For the dry and complicated columns of statistical data, of which the analysis and the discussion always require a great sustained mental effort, he had substituted images mathematically proportioned, that the first glance takes in and knows without fatigue, and which manifest immediately the natural consequences or the comparisons unforeseen.’ The chart shown here is singled out for special mention: it “inspires bitter reflections on the cost to humanity of the madnesses of conquerors and the merciless thirst of military glory.”

Read the full The Economist piece online here. Download a high resolution JPG of the Minard Map (568 KB) here.