Lapidarium notes

ChronoZoom ☞ The history of life, the universe and everything - visualised

                                                                 Click image to explore

“Imagine a timeline of the universe, complete with high-resolution videos and images, in which you could zoom from a chronology of Egypt’s dynasties and pyramids to the tale of a Japanese-American couple interned in a World War II relocation camp to a discussion of a mass extinction that occurred on Earth 200 million years ago – all in seconds. (…)

A University of California, Berkeley, geologist and his students have teamed up with Microsoft Research Connections engineers to make this web-based software possible. (…)

The idea arose in a UC Berkeley course about Big History taught by Walter Alvarez, the campus geologist who first proposed that a comet or asteroid smashed into the Earth 65 million years ago and killed off the dinosaurs. Big History is a unified, interdisciplinary way of looking at and teaching the history of the cosmos, Earth, life and humanity: the history of everything.

One of the difficulties of teaching history –- and teaching Big History, in particular –- is conveying a sense of the time scale, which ranges from the 50,000-year time span of modern humans to the 13.7 billion-year history of the universe, Alvarez said. Human history compared to cosmic history is like “a postage stamp relative to the whole size of the United States.”

“With ChronoZoom, you are browsing history, not digging it out piece by piece,” said Alvarez, a Professor of the Graduate School in the Department of Earth and Planetary Science. (…)

ChronoZoom is a visualization tool allowing for the first time people to mash up data from all sorts of different places in different formats enabling new insights that would never have been possible before.”

— ChronoZoom: A deep dive into the history of everything

See also:

David Christian: Big History Project | TED

‘Backed by stunning illustrations, David Christian narrates a complete history of the universe, from the Big Bang to the Internet, in a riveting 18 minutes. This is “Big History”: an enlightening, wide-angle look at complexity, life and humanity, set against our slim share of the cosmic timeline.”

— David Christian, David Christian: Big history, TED, March 2011.

☞ Timeline tag on Lapidarium notes

When history was made - an alternative timeline for the past two millennia

“Some people recite history from above, recording the grand deeds of great men. Others tell history from below, arguing that one person’s life is just as much a part of mankind’s story as another’s. If people do make history, as this democratic view suggests, then two people make twice as much history as one. Since there are almost 7 billion people alive today, it follows that they are making seven times as much history as the 1 billion alive in 1811. The chart below shows a population-weighted history of the past two millennia. By this reckoning, over 28% of all the history made since the birth of Christ was made in the 20th century. Measured in years lived, the present century, which is only ten years old, is already “longer” than the whole of the 17th century. This century has made an even bigger contribution to economic history. Over 23% of all the goods and services made since 1AD were produced from 2001 to 2010, according to an updated version of Angus Maddison’s figures.”

— Two thousand years in one chart, The Economist, Jun 28th 2011

Conflict History ☞ browse the timeline of war and conflicts across the globe (interactive map)

                                         (Click image to see timeline)

From Cave Paintings to the Internet ☞ Chronological and Thematic Studies on the History of Information and Media (Timeline)

“A chronological record of significant events … often including an explanation of their causes.” — definition of history from the Merriam Webster Online Dictionary, accessed 12-2010.

“The information overload that we associate with the Internet is not new. While the Internet is undoubtedly compounding an old problem, its instant searchability offers new means of exploring the rapidly expanding universe of information. From Cave Paintings to the Internet cannot save you from information overload and offers no panacea for information insufficiency. Using Internet technology, it is designed to help you follow the development of information and media, and attitudes about them, from the beginning of records to the present. Containing annotated references to discoveries, developments of a social, scientific, theoretical or technological nature, as well as references to physical books, documents, artifacts, art works, and to websites and other digital media, it arranges, both chronologically and thematically, selected historical examples and recent developments of the methods used to record, distribute, exchange, organize, store, and search information. The database is designed to allow you to approach the topics in a wide variety of ways.”

— Jeremy Norman’s 2,500,000 BCE to 8,000 BCE Timeline: From Cave Paintings to the Internet

☞ See also: Jeremy Norman’s History of Science.com

Timeline of Major Western Philosophers

Source: Department of Philosophy College of Liberal Arts Rochester Institute of Technology

See also:

☞ Timeline of Western philosophers, Wiki
☞ Timeline of Western philosophers, Opentopia
☞ Philosophy timeline (interactive), Thomson Wadsworth
☞ History of Western philosophy - Brief timeline, Global Oneness
☞ The Chronology, Squashed Philosophers Abridged Editions
☞ Philosophers, Timeline Index
☞ Timeline of Early Chinese Philosophy
☞ Hellenistic Philosophy (300BCE-200CE)
☞ Timeline of Philosophy, The Radical Academy