(Source: daltreymoonmercury)
Infant mortality
Portrait of the deceased boy with vanitassymboler, 17th century. Unknown Flemish artist.
Victorians were famous for mourning photography - in which the dead are posed as if they were “just sleeping” and photographed, creating an expensive memento mori that was often the only photograph a family would have of the deceased loved one.
However, there is a sub-genre of mourning photography, in which photographers clamp and pose the dearly departed in such a way that they look fully awake — usually standing up, eyes either held open by some unknown mechanism or with pupils painted over closed eyes.
The girl in the photo above is dead. If you look closely you can see a base behind the girl’s feet and a post would go up from that with clamps at the waist and neck and the clothing would be open at the back. The arms would have stiff wires running at the back to hold them in place. Also notice the strange placement of the hands. The pupils are painted on the closed eyelids.
A healthy human brain (left) compared to the brain of a 90 year old (right) which is only two thirds the size of the young brain. Over time, white matter decreases and the brain shrinks. This gradual shrinkage is most extreme between age 70 and 80.
Hans Rosling’s 200 Countries, 200 Years, 4 Minutes - The Joy of Stats - BBC Four (via BBC)
Hans Rosling’s famous lectures combine enormous quantities of public data with a sport’s commentator’s style to reveal the story of the world’s past, present and future development. Now he explores stats in a way he has never done before - using augmented reality animation. In this spectacular section of ‘The Joy of Stats’ he tells the story of the world in 200 countries over 200 years using 120,000 numbers - in just four minutes. Plotting life expectancy against income for every country since 1810, Hans shows how the world we live in is radically different from the world most of us imagine.
Here’s another hilarious gag about dying. Probably should have drawn the talking woman with a little more girth, but maybe that would have made it too mean. I’d hate for people to think I’m being mean to old ladies. I’d especially hate for old ladies to think that, because they usually make the best pie.
Mmm, pie.
7 Billion, National Geographic Magazine
(via NationalGeographic)
Frenetic infographic trailer for National Geographic’s series on world population.
Related Posts: