Creative use of stopaction photography:
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From the category archives:
General
Two excellent graphs making the rounds – the first showing Obama the Pirate-Slayer:
And the second with historical context (that being the First and Second Barbary Wars):
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Switzerland is running an ad campaign with the tagline “We do whatever it takes to make your vacation perfect.” This accompanying video is excellent:
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Anyone who has visited the South has probably heard a conversation like this:
Waitress: What would you like to drink?
Southerner: I’ll have a coke.
Waitress: What kind of coke?
Southerner: I’ll have a Coke.
And after this bizarre back and forth, the waitress goes off and comes back with (surprise!) a Coke. Like this:
But this is also a coke:
And so is this:
Yeah, Southerners are weird; obviously only one of those is a Coke. But this twilight zone of soft drinks doesn’t end there – if you were at a diner in the Midwest they’d be offering you “pop” as if you were stuck in Pleasantville around 1950.
And what do you say in a bar – I’ll have a Jack and pop? If you don’t know the local custom you might end up with a very different drink than you ordered. Or a very awkward conversation. Or both. (And speaking of, I wonder if Southerners visiting the Northeast are terrified of ordering vodka sodas?)
This has driven me crazy for some time, but finally someone has done the research and crunched the numbers and categorically demonstrated all the crazy things people say when they mean to say “soda” (click to zoom):
See Strange Maps for the full details (I really like this site, if you hadn’t noticed).
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From the Freakonomics Blog:
You might have learned about the hidden elves of Iceland if you read the Michael Lewis article we blogged about recently. (Note: for Icelandic pushback to Lewis’s colorful tales, see here.) The Icelandic government apparently takes these elves very seriously, and often requires that new construction sites be certified as clear of elves before building begins. So how do you find an elf? Slate’s Explainer has the answer. Among the interesting factoids: 3 percent of Icelanders swear they have seen an elf in their lifetime. Not long ago, we ran Nathan Myhrvold’s compelling photos of Iceland. Sadly, there are no elves in the frames … or so you think.
The Icelandic rebuttal contains this excellent line:
But if you’re going to introduce the notion that some kind of Ministry of Elf Inspection exists within the ranks of the Icelandic government, you might as well also note that we take the Hogwart’s Express to the office every day.
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One of my favorite music videos is Royskopp’s Remind Me, because of it’s cleverly informative visual style, not unlike an animated airplane safety card or pictograph instruction pamphlet:
Recently, a student named Tomas Nilsson has reinterpreted the classic story of Little Red Riding Hood in similar fashion:
In fact, the style bears some resemblance to the Microsoft 2019 visualization I posted yesterday.
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This is awesome. Take some Welshmen, some sheep, some LED’s and a camera and you get:
(Via swissmiss / Cultural Fuel)
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This is the one they meant to make 7 years ago: Casting Out Devils, BMW’s 7 Becomes More Heavenly.
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