Hans Rosling for BBC: 200 Countries Over 200 Years in 4 Minutes

Statistical stuntsman Hans Rosling, mastermind of revolutionary visualization platform Gapminder, is a longtime Brain Pickings darling. From his blockbuster TED talks, better described as performances than mere talks, to his projection of the future of humanity in LEGO, Rosling is easily the most vocal and engaging advocate for data visualization as a sensemaking mechanism for culture and the world.

Now, The Hans strikes again with an absolutely brilliant 4-minute distillation of 200 countries over 200 years, part of BBC’s The Joy of Stats. (An excellent companion to The Beauty of Maps.) With his signature sports commentator style, Rosling narrates two centuries worth of income and life expectancy data in a way he never has before: Using augmented reality animation. To see the impact of historical and political milestones, from colonization to the Industrial Revolution to WWII, in such a visceral way contextualizes these events and their aftermath in a way no history book or verbal storytelling ever could — a living manifesto for the power and importance of data visualization as a storytelling device.

For more on the storytelling and sensemaking art and science of data visualization, the journalistic importance of which we’ve previously examined, we highly recommend Data Flow 2 and Beautiful Data: The Stories Behind Elegant Data Solutions, both of which reference Rosling’s work, among countless other masters of the discipline.

HT @TEDchris

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Historical Milestones As Famous Pop Songs

What Lady Gaga has to do with the guillotine, or how ABBA took down Henry VIII’s wives.

We’re big proponents of remix culture and today we have something from its most bizarre yet brilliant fringes: Behold historyteachers, a “History for Music Lovers” project adapting famous historical events and figures to famous songs.

From the French Revolution via Lady Gaga’s “Bad Romance” to The Canterbury Tales via “California Dreamin’” to Pompeii via Nancy Sinatra’s “Bang Bang”, the pairings are done with a bit of a thematic insider’s wink that only adds to the kooky genius of the concept.

Despite the decidedly absurd proposition, the videos actually feature surprisingly excellent vocals, lyrical adaptation and production value, not to mention impressively accurate impressions of the original performers, out-Gagaing Gaga and nailing Debbie Harry’s famous mic-dance-hop to the T.

The brainchild of a Hawaiian history teacher duo, mysteriously titled Mrs. B and Mr. H, the project is a piece of pure remix genius. Catch all 47 videos on the historyteachers YouTube channel and marvel at the wonderful intersection of geekery, creativity and quirk.

In 2010, we spent more than 4,500 hours bringing you Brain Pickings. If you found any joy and inspiration here this year, please consider supporting us with a modest donation — it lets us know we’re doing something right and helps pay the bills.

Brain Pickings has a free weekly newsletter and people say it’s cool. It comes out on Sundays and offers the week’s best articles. Here’s an example. Like? Sign up.

Steve Shapiro’s Taxi Driver: Rare Photos of Cinema History

Taxi Driver is revered as one of cinema’s greatest masterpieces, the powers of Scorsese and DeNiro converging to create a milestone that would influence generations of filmmakers to come and forever imprint film audiences worldwide. In 1976, it was a piece of ambitious cinematic innovation, blending the noir and crime thriller genres in an unexpected way unlike any film had dared before. Today, the world gets a rare new look at the set of the iconic film in the form of Steve Schapiro, Taxi Driver — a stride-stopping 328-page volume of never-before-seen photographs by Steve Shapiro (of The Godfather Family Album fame), the special photographer on the set of Taxi Driver in 1975.

The limited-edition comes in only 1,000 copies, each numbered and signed by Shapiro himself, at $700 a piece. (Then again, we suspect serious cinema lovers and Scorsese fans would gladly give a kidney for this Taschen gem, so the pricetag may indeed be quite alright.)

With a foreword by Martin Scorsese himself and priceless images of a young De Niro, as well as a rare glimpse of a long-lost New York City, Steve Schapiro, Taxi Driver offers a priceless timecapsule of film history bound — and clamshell-boxed — to delight film buffs, New York lovers and vintage photography aficionados alike.

In 2010, we spent more than 4,500 hours bringing you Brain Pickings — the blog, the newsletter and the Twitter feed — over which we could’ve seen 53 feature-length films, listened to 135 music albums or taken 1,872 trips to the bathroom. If you found any joy and inspiration here this year, please consider supporting us with a modest donation — it lets us know we’re doing something right.

We’ve got a free weekly newsletter and people say it’s cool. It comes out on Sundays, offers the week’s main articles, and features short-form interestingness from our PICKED series. Here’s an example. Like? Sign up.