Earth At Night

This satellite photo from NASA spans a 24-hour period showing the entire surface of the Earth in darkness. The lights obviously show the highest areas of concentration of civilization.

Note the Nile River delta, the Siberian Express railway route, the Australian coastal cities, and Africa, literally "the dark continent".

From Princeton's International Networks Archive, the old project of Jonathan Harris.

The Coming Water Wars

Another graphic from Jonathan Harris from his time at Princeton with the International Networks Archive. It's a couple years old, but absolutely still relevant. I believe this is from around 2003.

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Jonathan Harris TED Talks 2007

Jonathan Harris is working on some cool, interesting, fascinating but weird stuff. This is his presentation at TED 2007 about We Are Fine and his new project Universe. You can see this on the TED site here.

Universe is now live at universe.daylife.com, and you can enter a news topic and watch it graphically associate all of the relevant stories in the media about that topic. This would be really cool for consumer products too, but sadly that doesn't exist.

The TED Talks are now available on iTunes as free video podcasts. I've been watching some older ones from 2002-2007.

Starbucks vs. McDonalds

Found on the Princeton University website.

This one shows the accelerating takeover of the world by Starbucks and how quickly they are catching up to the reigning king of the hill, McDonalds. It's a few years old (2003) so let's see how they've done since then...

Starbucks: 6,200 locations in 2003. 11,225 in 2007. Almost double!!!

McDonalds: "Over 31,000" in 2003. Still 31,000 in 2007. No growth for McDonalds!

Do you want coffee with that?