Magical Urbanism, a website about urbanization, design and social change, is maintained by Mike Ernst. I'm an urban planner and designer based in New York City. I graduated from the 200 Years of World History in 4 Minutes
Hans Rosling, is a Professor of International Health at Karolinska Institute in Sweden and the Director of the Gapminder Foundation. He’s also an enthusiastic supporter of the use of data visualization in explaining complicated ideas. In a video made for the BBC - similar to a TED talk he gave - Professor Rosling not only debunks the myth of the “developing world” dichotomy, but he manages to explains how the past 200 years led to the current state of the world.
The BBC blurb sums it up nicely:
Now he tells the story of the world in 200 countries over 200 years using 120,000 numbers - in just four minutes.
Just in case you weren’t already impressed, Rosling is also an accomplished sword-swallower, a skill he demonstrated at TED2007 (source).
via BrainPickings
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2 Responses to “200 Years of World History in 4 Minutes”
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Who is the orange bubble that drops in 1941 almost off the graph? Fantastic visual presentation
@ Maria: I was wondering that myself! The same data that Rosling using in the presentation is also available at http://www.gapminder.org. I looked there — the orange bubble that drops off is the Ukraine. I’m guessing the huge drop is because Ukraine was a front during World War II.
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Who is the orange bubble that drops in 1941 almost off the graph? Fantastic visual presentation
@ Maria: I was wondering that myself! The same data that Rosling using in the presentation is also available at http://www.gapminder.org. I looked there — the orange bubble that drops off is the Ukraine. I’m guessing the huge drop is because Ukraine was a front during World War II.