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A word about Big Ideas and Themes — The architecture of Big Think
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Themes are the seven broad umbrellas under which we organize the hundreds of big ideas that populate Big Think. They include New World Order, Earth and Beyond, 21st Century Living, Going Mental, Extreme Biology, Power and Influence, and Inventing the Future.
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Cartographic curiosities
Exactly 110 years ago this month, New York suffered the second-deadliest disaster in its history. Only 9/11 would claim more lives than the wreck of the General Slocum [1] on 15 June 1904. The 1,021 people who burned alive on board or drowned in the East River while fleeing the flames represented a ...
Political cartooning, curious cartography and questionable punning all rolled into one: what's not to love about an artwork like Crimea River? The photorealist painting shows a pouting Putin, shedding a crocodile tear in the shape of Crimea, the Ukrainian region illegally annexed by Russia last ...
Tell me where you do your grocery shopping, and I'll tell you where you are. Well, more or less. For even in a huge and homogenised market like the United States, many large grocery chains are still recognisably regional brands. As shown by this kaleidoscopic overview of grocery brands, each ...
Belgium and its provinces have had roughly the same shape since independence in 1830. It's taken those 184 years to make a shocking discovery: hidden inside Belgium is another Belgium. For the borders of the province of Liège are an eerie copy of the entire country's international borders. And what ...
Elections for the European Parliament have been held every five years since 1979, but none have been as crucial as this 8th edition, taking place from 22 to 25 May. The euroskeptic parties poised to win are set on freezing, or even reversing half a century of European integration. Not that the ...
Planet Voronoi looks almost exactly like our own Earth. The continents are all in the same place. The number of countries hasn't changed, nor has the location of their capitals. But the international borders are all wrong. Interestingly wrong. Just take a look at those straight borders, all ...
German writer Timur Vermes's 2012 bestseller is titled Er ist wieder da ('Look Who's Back'). The cover illustration leaves no doubt as to who the protagonist is: the trademark curtained hair and toothbrush moustache are enough to identify Adolf Hitler. The Führer's hairstyle choices (among a few ...
So Cheney Lavonia has a job for me. In Thailand. Could I email her back? The message is spam and the name is fake, but the pseudonym is both mellifluous and intriguing. It seems haphazardly soldered together from a roster of vice presidents and an atlas of vanished kingdoms. Perhaps someone ...
Cuddly toys, ripped to pieces. Their limbs and tails, snouts and eyepatches strung up and nailed to a museum wall. Teddy bears and their furry friends are supposed to be a child's last line of defence against night terrors. But here, perversely, they themselves become the terror: cruelly chopped up ...
“How can we possibly be giving £1 billion a month to Bongo Bongo Land when we're in this kind of debt is completely beyond me”, Godfrey Bloom said in August of last year. That comment went too far even for the Little Englanders of the UK Independence Party, for which Bloom was then still a Member ...
The average adult human consists of 55% water. A newborn baby is made up of about 75% water. A jellyfish contains between 95 and 98% water. Portugal could be a jellyfish: it is 97% water. Which seems alarmingly aquatic for a country of 10 million, visited annually by at least as many tourists ...
We expect maps to tell us the truth. That is their eternal promise. But maps can't help lying to us. That is their original sin. To be more precise: the map's lie (or sin) is one of omission. They show us just one version of the truth, carefully edited by the cartographer. This map does one ...
Oceans and deserts are on opposite ends of the humidity scale, yet at some weird level, the extremes are interchangeable. Rolling desert dunes are reminiscent of ocean waves, and as monotonous. Not coincidentally, the main vehicle of those sandy wastes, the camel, is nicknamed the 'ship of the ...
Remember Syria? It's the war everyone was talking about before the one about to erupt over Crimea invaded our screens. Turkey hasn't forgotten, though. Syria's northern neighbour has seen a burdensome spillover, in refugees and violence, from the civil war raging on its southern flank. But ...