Beautiful Data

David McCandless on visualizing data. His website here. Illustration of politics here.

The Iron Horse

Alan Schwarz reports on a new paper on the effects of brain trauma. The authors have speculated that Lou Gehrig may have died from neurological disease related to trauma and not from amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (also known as Lou Gehrig's disease).

(image credit: Lou Gehrig in Columbia University uniform, 1921, from University Archives, Columbia University)

 
 

Baseball Card of the Day

The 30 Worst Baseball Cards of All Time (h/t Jimmy Kimmel). Mike Armstrong, in addition to taking an incredible baseball card, was the winning pitcher in the George Brett pine tar game. And Dan Quisenberry's baseball card recorded the save.

The New Science of Morality

John Brockman and Edge hosted a conference on the science of morality.

America in Color from 1939-1943

The Denver Post has a gallery of rare color photographs from 1939-1943. Above are school children in San Augustine County, Texas, 1943.

(image credit: Reproduction from color slide, Photo by John Vachon. Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress)

129,864,880

That's the number of books in the world according to Google's algorithm and suggests the audacity of the Google Books and Google Library project. It's the great library of the modern age and offers some continuity to a tenuous history. Sergey Brin in the NY Times:

"In the Insurance Year Book 1880-1881, which I found on Google Books, Cornelius Walford chronicles the destruction of dozens of libraries and millions of books, in the hope that such a record will 'impress the necessity of something being done' to preserve them. The famous library at Alexandria burned three times, in 48 B.C., A.D. 273 and A.D. 640, as did the Library of Congress, where a fire in 1851 destroyed two-thirds of the collection."

The first known libraries were in ancient Mesopotamia, the cradle of civilization, allowing me to reference my wife's joke Jeopardy header for a category on the end of original Mesopotamian civilization (referencing a Jennifer Love Hewitt movie):

I Know What You Did Last Sumer

Very nerdy, Cypria.

(image credit: photograph by Mark Pellegrini of copy of the Gutenberg Bible at the US Library of Congress)

War Against Thanatos

Christopher Hitchens on his diagnosis of esophageal cancer:

In one way, I suppose, I have been "in denial" for some time, knowingly burning the candle at both ends and finding that it often gives a lovely light. But for precisely that reason, I can't see myself smiting my brow with shock or hear myself whining about how it's all so unfair: I have been taunting the Reaper into taking a free scythe in my direction and have now succumbed to something so predictable and banal that it bores even me. Rage would be beside the point for the same reason. Instead, I am badly oppressed by a gnawing sense of waste.

Interview with Anderson Cooper here. Hours added together, I have spent many days of my life with Mr. Hitchens, reading his books and articles and watching his debates, and it's hard not to feel like his friend. This is terribly sad news. In solidarity, I offer this contribution to the word games detailed in Hitch-22: link.

(image credit: Photograph by John Huba, via vanityfair.com)

Sediba

60 Minutes reviewed the amazing discovery of the nearly 2 million-year-old partial skeletons of a 9-year-old male and an adult female, Australopithecus sediba.

(image credit: photo by Brett Eloff, courtesy Lee Berger)