This is a video with almost too much information and is best seen on a large monitor or a television with one’s finger ready to hit the pause button often. However, it’s also fascinating, not just to see who ran for president, but how every state and county voted as well as seeing the way population shifts have changed the number of electors that states have.
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US Geological Survey Earthquake Map
Unfortunately, this map does not allow for embedding, but it’s a neat one and can be found here: https://earthquake.usgs.gov/earthquakes/map/.
The subject came up because the kids asked what a tsunami is. Of course, even if it’s not “time for school”, I ended up explaining to them what a tsunami is and how it is related to earthquakes, and refreshed them a bit on tectonic plates and the different types of earthquakes there are, explaining then about the Pacific “Ring of Fire” when they wanted to know why there really aren’t tsunamis in the Atlantic.
In any case, I told them if they were interested in seeing a little bit about how there is always movement between the plates and such, I’d show them this map. The crazy thing is that I found the map after experiencing a very strange sensation in the middle of the night, and I wanted to confirm, indeed, that it was an earthquake. And yes, it was one of the rare upper Midwest earthquakes that happen from time to time. (Magnitude 3.5 or so)
History of the World: Every Year
I meant to post this nearly three years ago, but it’s still a fantastic graphic. I think it is very useful, for many of us, to be able to visualize history a little better, and in that regard, this is amazing.
Shipping routes map (2012)
This site, Shipmap.org is a site with a fascinating, interactive map showing the routes of cargo ships for the year 2012. It was created by a firm called Klin, ostensibly to try to calculate CO2 emissions of cargo ships over the course of a year. (I would embed it into the post, but WordPress isn’t allowing it.)
By itself, it’s fascinating to watch, but it also can be used in a number of different ways for teaching.
I zoomed into the area around Lake Superior and Lake Michigan, then asked Tabitha to take a look. I didn’t have any labels on, and I asked her what she saw on the screen. “Lake Michigan”, she said as I pointed the mouse to Lake Michigan. I then pointed to Lake Superior and asked her what that was. “Lake Superior”, she said, without hesitating. I then pointed to a couple of places along the edge of the water that had little dots appearing nearby. “And do you know what is here?” She didn’t, but once I pointed to the locations of a couple of places that we’ve been, she got pretty excited about it. Not a long lesson, but kind of cool, especially for an impromptu session. (I did the same thing with Asher, and even at 5, he recognized the shape of Lake Michigan.)
Depending on age and interests, this map could spark all sorts of interesting things. Of course, there’s place location, but one can also see how goods move and where. One thing that was interesting to me was seeing how there are still ships that travel out past the Aleutian islands, probably mainly linking Korea and Japan to the United States. Russian traders first came out that way for things like fishing and trapping, and in the process colonized much of Alaska (including establishing Orthodox churches there), but as one can see now, this has changed dramatically (though those northern routes are still important). I’m sure there are countless stories, if one wants to dig into histories of particular areas.
Also neat to note is that this is a Mercador projection map, which, of course, has its distortions, but also makes obvious which are the circle routes just by the arcs that the ships’ tracks make.
And I’m sure, if one watches long enough, patterns such as seasonality show up as well, not to mention getting into the specifics of the types of goods going where. The developers claim that there are more than 250 million data points that put this map together, and it is a very, very neat thing to take some time to look at.
Their Education Begins Here 