2026-09-12 01:19:59
9/11 in Realtime, developed by Robbie Byrd, replays the news on the day of the attacks through television broadcasts, radio stations, and traffic control.
Students entering high school this fall were born more than a decade after the attacks, and many of their teachers have no first-hand memory of the day. The 9/11 Realtime Archive was built for them: rather than summarizing history, it replays the primary record itself, alongside curriculum guidance for classroom use and clear content advisories.
“I started this project because, as a college student pulling an all-nighter on September 10, 2001, I slept through most of the next morning,” said Robbie Byrd, the independent developer who created the project. “I created this site to help others who didn’t–or couldn’t–experience the day as it happened.”
This was tough to watch and listen to, but it is an extensive and interactive archive that accurately represents what the country was witnessing on September 11.
Tags: 9/11, news, real-time, Robbie Byrd
2026-09-11 17:46:17
In 2013, a video on U.S. wealth inequality was posted to YouTube by the user Politizane. (It was one of the best visualization projects for the year.) An updated version for 2026 is now available for your viewing pleasure, with even more inequality and much larger stacks of abstract money allotted to fewer people.
2026-09-10 21:11:16
Riley Walz charted drawing trends on student art portfolio Artsonia.
Kids shape culture, and their drawings show what captures their attention. I scraped over 100 million drawings and paintings from Artsonia, an online student art gallery, to explore almost 20 years of favorite characters, passing obsessions, and everyday life.
Just search for a topic and you can see the trend line for the past couple decades along with charming artwork. I think Baby Yoda’s appeal is just about worn.
Tags: Artsonia, drawing, Riley Walz, trends
2026-09-10 21:06:05
This is No. 405 of the Process, where we use the tools available to us to visualize data effectively. I’m Nathan Yau. This week is about adapting our visualization workflow as the tools change dramatically.
Become a member for access to this — plus tutorials, courses, and guides.
2026-09-09 15:42:49
Mathematician Terence Tao, a 2006 Fields Medal winner and professor at UCLA, discusses with Big Think solving problems with AI and the process of finding solutions without. By using AI to effectively skip over the mistakes, challenges, and learning towards a solution, our creative thinking skills could diminish. On the other hand, real progress can be made.
Tao uses the tools for “secondary tasks like doing literature searches or checking a proof or writing some code, proof reading something that I wrote to see if there’s any opportunity to make things a little bit tighter.” This seems to be a common workflow among experts in their respective fields.
I keep thinking back to my graduate school days when I didn’t know what I was doing a lot of the time. The struggle was the most valuable part of the experience. I don’t know if I get as much out it if today’s tools were available then.
Tags: Big Think, math, paradox, Terence Tao
2026-09-08 15:48:57
Last year, the African Union pushed for wider adoption of the Equal Area map projection so that the size of Africa is more accurately shown around the world. A few days ago, the United Nations voted in favor of the more accurate projection.
For the Guardian, Eromo Egbejule reports:
At the session, 164 countries voted in favour of the resolution. Only the US voted no, with its representative saying the resolution was “superfluous”. There were six abstentions.
UN resolutions are non-enforceable, so countries and institutions will not be mandated to use only the new projection or forbidden from using the old one. However, the outcome is expected to result in an update of classroom curriculums and everyday technology given the wide usage of the Mercator projection in education, technology and governance.
The Mercator projection, which is good for local directions, makes Africa appear much smaller.
See also from last year: a primer on projections and the math that affects how regions are perceived.
Tags: Africa, area, cartography, Guardian, projections
