1000 years of battles

This one is rather violent: 1000 years of battles animated.  The explosions are sized to represent the number of casualties.


Actually I have few problems with this one. I don't think it adequately includes all the battles that actually happened. This seems to be rather Eurocentric, with too little representation of battles outside of Europe. While I'll grant that Europe has seen lots of mindless destruction for the last thousand years, I gotta think that the rest of the world wasn't that much better. But the animation has a justifiably massive finale.

The other problem I have is that because it effectively represents straight up body count it skews the scale of the conflagrations. The millions killed in the World Wars is impressive, but 500,000 dead in Napolean's march/retreat on/from Russia has a far larger impact when the world's population was much, much smaller.

What I'd love to see is a combination of this map with the other 1000 years of history animated map that I posted a while ago so that the battles can be seen in combination with the changing borders.  Of course then it's kind of a couple steps away from being a video game, although the game play would be somewhat pre-determined.

And that brings us to Steven Pinker's remarkable presentation about the myth of violence (synopsis: We're not nearly as violent as we used to be, and we're getting better)


Want to see Pinker animated?  Try this (not the same talk as above, but still very groovy)