Tag: technology
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The internet’s seabed: every submarine cable, when it was laid, and the choke points
608 cables on the sea floor carry the internet between continents. I mapped when each was laid, how Google, Meta, Amazon and Microsoft came to part-own 55% of the planned length, and the straits and beaches where dozens squeeze through together.
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Where inventions came from
I mapped the world’s inventions from the first stone tools to the web: farming began in 11 places, writing in 4, and the centre of invention moved from Mesopotamia to China, Europe and North America. The open record of it is 91% Europe and North America.
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The Nobel brain drain: where laureates were born, and where they won
I drew a line from birthplace to prize for 760 Nobel prizes in the sciences and economics. 31% went to someone working outside their birth country, the United States gained 131 more laureates than it grew, Germany’s share fell from 31% to 7% after 1933, and Japan became a late riser that keeps its laureates.
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The history of AI, stitched like the Bayeux Tapestry
From Ada Lovelace to AI agents in 35 embroidered scenes: Turing’s curtain, two winters, a comet called attention, Will Smith eating spaghetti, glue on pizza, a king in a leather jacket and the band that was nobody. Scroll it sideways; every scene is sourced.
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The first websites: how the web spread around the world
From one server at CERN in December 1990 to 83 countries with a recorded website by 2000. I coded Wikipedia’s list of 119 websites founded before 1995 and added 2,208 more from Wikidata: the web began with physicists and was soon overwhelmingly American, at least in the English-language memory of it.
