From the studio who brought us Wallace and Grommit, here’s “Dot”, a stop motion film shot entirely with a Nokia cellphone with a 50x microscope attachment.

You wouldn’t expect to find such beauty in the Statistical Atlas of the United States, Based on the Ninth Census (1870) from the Library of Congress, would you? Sophisticated data visualizations, hand-calculated and hand-engraved, in beautiful colors, prepared by a staff headed by Francis A. Walker, M. A., superintedent of the ninth census.

The display above shows you, for each U. S. state and territory, the proportion of the church-going population (the colored boxes) relative to the total population (the shaded box in which the colored boxes are set), as well as the breakdown by the top 11 denominations!

I highly recommend that you check out all the charts and maps!

um… cool

As fans of feedback thought you might enjoy this example of one of those exciting moments of discovery.

Following up on my post below (“What Is Fire?”):

“The only way to be happy is for everyone to be made equal. So, we must burn the books, Montag – all the books.”

It’s Francois Truffaut’s only film in English: Fahrenheit 451.

It’s that time of year once again. Posting Nina Paley’s excellent sticker (h/t to lulutsg!) sent me scurrying to the far corners of the web, and I found this little Christmas tidbit courtesy of the Massachusetts Foundation for the Humanities:

in 1659, a law was passed by the General Court of Massachusetts Bay Colony requiring a five-shilling fine from anyone caught “observing any such day as Christmas or the like, either by forbearing of labor, feasting, or any other way.” Christmas Day was deemed by the Puritans to be a time of seasonal excess with no Biblical authority. The law was repealed in 1681 along with several other laws, under pressure from the government in London. It was not until 1856 that Christmas Day became a state holiday in Massachusetts. For two centuries preceding that date, the observance of Christmas — or lack thereof — represented a cultural tug of war between Puritan ideals and British tradition.

The law makes for strange bedfellows. In this case… I expect I’ll be waking up next to the younger Reverend Mather. And, perhaps, I’ll finally learn why they called him “Increase!”

Maybe I’ve just not been paying attention, but in this age of micro-blogging, I’m surprised that Paul Klee’s 1922 The Twittering Machine hasn’t gotten more play.

Embiggen.

No, that’s not a green grocer chanting… that’s friend of the blog MK, in an earlier incarnation as high school TV production teacher. This photo’s for him:

(For the record, that’s a billboard takeover in the UK by mob ster.)

Yeah, I saw it on The Daily What. Didn’t you?

File this one under “E” for “EPIC WIN”! Cameron Booth created this idealized map of the United States Interstate Highway System, after the style of H. C. Beck’s original London Underground maps.