Maarten Lambrechts

An early world map using the Mercator projection, which makes the northern hemisphere appear lager. It takes the form of two circular maps, one for N/S America, the other for Africa/Europe/Asia

Portrait of Gerardus Mercator

#TodayinHistory #dataviz #Onthisday #OTD 📊
🎂Mar 5, 1512 Gerardus Mercator born in Rupelmonde, Flanders, Belgium 🇧🇪

1569: he Invented of cylindrical projection for portraying the globe on maps, to preserve straightness of rhumb lines
(for better or worse, but it helped Europeans navigate the seas)

NEW MARSUPIALS

Satellite images from NASA Worldview on March 5 reveal the extent of the blackout in Cuba. A failure at the most important power plant, combined with the US blockade on fuel shipments in the country has left nearly 70% of the island's inhabitants without power.

Straße von Hormus: So legt der Krieg die Straße von Hormus lahm Seit Samstag droht der Iran damit, Schiffe anzugreifen, die die Straße von Hormus passieren. Sehen Sie hier, welche Folgen das für den Verkehr in der Meerenge hat.

I made an animated map of ship movements in the Straights of Hormuz using data from marinetraffic.com.

Ship track frames rendered using #ggplot, base map created using #gdal, video editing using #ffmpeg, video player written in #svelte.

🎁 www.zeit.de/wirtschaft/2...

If anyone is friends with any Georgian air traffic controllers, buy them a nice bottle of wine. As guardians of pretty much the only narrow gap still available between Europe and Asia that avoids both Iran, the Gulf, Ukraine and Russia, they are under some substantial pressure.

Brilliant idea, or... that wasn't in the data :)

Trump's trying to find the guy who did this.

I built a free tool that shows how night-time lights have changed anywhere on Earth.

Here's how it works and why it's useful for monitoring conflict, disasters, development and growth. 👇

What a difference a year makes! In mid-February 2025, northeastern Morocco was affected by severe drought. One year later and after 2 months of rain, these Copernicus Sentinel-3 images show that the region has been transformed into an expanse of green vegetation.

Diagram showing “Understanding” (blue) and “Execution” (orange) over time. For most of history, they rise together from the same point. After a dashed horizontal line labeled as the present, execution curves upward more steeply than understanding. Text reads: “With AI, execution increasingly outpaces understanding” and “For most of history, what we could do was evidence of what we understood.”

using LLMs for certain types of coding tasks has made me crank output faster but I can actively feel my understanding and my sense of craftsmanship diminishing, and I don't like that feeling at all

Don't know if he is a historian, but: bsky.app/profile/kirk...

“We have all been here before
We have all been here before…”

I am almost certainly going

Why not?

An AI Agent Published a Hit Piece on Me – More Things Have Happened Context: An AI agent of unknown ownership autonomously wrote and published a personalized hit piece about me after I rejected its code, attempting to damage my reputation and shame me into acceptin…

1. Dataviz package author closes PR from a bot
2. Bot angry, writes hit piece on package author
3. Tech news site reports
4. Tech news site needs to retract article: contains hallucinated quotes from package author
5. Me: seriously questioning career choices

theshamblog.com/an-ai-agent-...

Cartoon showing a street in the rain. A man on a bike is delivering food, while another courier is delivering packages from Amazon. Two other workers are collecting garbage. Inside one of the houses on the street, we see robots labeled 'AI' sitting dry and warm, engaged in making a paining, playing the violin and writing.

The robot apocalypse hasn't happened yet, but still I can't escape the feeling that something has gone horribly wrong... Cartoon for Dutch newspaper @trouw.nl.

More of my work for Trouw: www.trouw.nl/cartoons/tje...

#ArtificialIntelligence #creativity #work #GenerativeAI

Grazalema, Spain, received over 2,000 mm (78 inches) of rain in just the last 20 days.

Over a year’s worth of rain — and it’s only early February. This is hydrologically absurd.

I've seen similar things in Belgian population maps. Usually either jails, or addresses where homeless people or refugees are registered administratively

Spotlighting The World Factbook as We Bid a Fond Farewell Somewhat devastating news today from the CIA: One of CIA’s oldest and most recognizable intelligence publications, The World Factbook, has sunset. There's not even a hint as to why they …

The CIA just stopped publishing their World Factbook and took every page, including the archived copies of previous versions!

This sucks. It was public domain, so I recovered the 2020 edition (the last one published as a zip file) and shared it to GitHub simonwillison.net/2026/Feb/5/t...

RIP www.cia.gov/stories/stor...

A male Asian fairy-bluebird with brilliant blue back and deep black plumage, featuring striking red eyes, perched on a branch.

Top 10 bird family names:

10. Irenidae

Means "peaceful". Has three members, the Fairy-bluebirds, which are just A++ birds and I would squee if I saw any of them.

This infographic from The White House, titled "U.S. STEEL PRODUCTION INCREASES," uses a bar chart to compare total production in 2024 versus 2025, but it employs a heavily truncated y-axis to exaggerate the appearance of growth. The vertical axis begins at 80.2 million tonnes (Mt) rather than zero, which makes the 2025 green bar (representing approximately 81.8 Mt) appear roughly five times taller than the 2024 red bar (representing approximately 80.9 Mt). In reality, this indicates a modest increase of approximately 1.1%, though the visual presentation suggests a massive, multi-fold surge in production.

I'd like to report a y-axis crime…

This #map title could be "Retirement with a sea view in Belgium".
See online version on Eurostat website: tinyurl.com/2ps59n6a

Recently discussed what the best year was, after which things started to go South. We settled on 2007, pre-financial crisis. The main news events from that year seem so small compared to today, and alsof have positive things (iPhone, ...)

India's electrification shortcut! ⚡️🇮🇳

Solar, wind, batteries, electric vehicles...India's economy has different tools available than the US and China did at the same stage in their economic development.

The result? An early turn away from fossil molecules towards electrons.

Or, according to their position in the Economist Democracy Index:
Trump's "Board of Peace": 152, 91, 133, 118, 55, 82, 129, -, 125, 75, 66, 146, 138, 117, 59.

Trump’s Board of Peace logo is basically the UN logo, except dipped in gold and edited so the world only includes America.