Maps: Fighting Disease and Skewing Borders
A while back, we blogged about a site called Strange Maps, which features all sorts of strange, fascinating, and even influential maps. (Maps in general have since come up on this blog quite a few times.)
Frank Jacobs, the London-based journalist and creator of Strange Maps, has now published a book, Strange Maps: An Atlas of Cartographic Curiosities.
He has agreed to answer a few of our questions about maps and why he finds them so compelling. Read More »
Happiness in Australia
I’m currently back home in Australia for a couple of weeks, and just want to give a heads-up to the locals that I’ll be giving a talk at ANU this Wednesday. Read More »
Is Jaywalking in the Eye of the Beholder?
When cars entered the mainstream in the 1920s, they were considered a menace to pedestrians, who were killed in great numbers. Cars rarely hit pedestrians any more; they hit jaywalkers. The term, jaywalking, shifted the blame for accidents from motorists to walkers, and ownership of the streets from walkers to motorists. Read More »
Is Ford Once Again Leading the Way in Auto Safety?
In SuperFreakonomics, we tell the story of how Robert Strange McNamara, an outsider at the Ford Motor Co., led the charge the put seat belts in automobiles at Ford. It was not a popular decision within the company nor with the public; pushing for a safety device in a car did a bit too good of a job of reminding people that cars could be quite unsafe. But McNamara got his way. Over time (a long time, it turned out), the seat belt won widespread adoption, saving roughly 250,000 lives in the U.S. alone since 1975. Read More »
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