What Would You See If You Could Speed Up Human History?

Want to see human populations grow like bacteria in a petri dish?

Melissa Lewis shared this great video with me, and I thought I'd pass it on (though in her incarnation here she teaches English, she used to teach History in Yuma):

Population Connection: World Population

Skip the intro, but watch the middle: it's fascinating -- it's a time-lapse video of human population from AD 0 through (projected) AD 2030 - each white dot = 1 million humans.  You can see things like the devastating effects of the Mongol invasion of China, the black plague -- and the phenomenal growth after the Industrial Revolution -- major events are noted.

Thanks, Melissa!

Also, if you haven't seen these yet, check out Hans Rosling for some amazing (and really entertaining) data on international trends in health, standard of living, and other indicators.

He completely really upends traditional notions about poverty, East vs. West, etc., with the data, culled largely from UN databanks.

He has essentially created an almost infinite bank of time-lapse movies that compare countries against each other over time -- for wealth, health, and any number of indicators.

Here are two samples of his talks.  There are 6 more on the TED Talks website -- about HIV, child mortality, and so on.  Astoundingly, they are overall, very positive in tone + message):

Hans Rosling shows the best stats you've ever seen

Hans Rosling's new insights on poverty

(In this video, he demos Dollar Street, an incredible program which really shows what different standards of living look like -- and at the end, he does an amazing and ridiculous stunt of sword-swallowing, which is somehow moving and inspiring.  Sadly, Dollar Street only works on PC computers.)

Here's his website, Gapminder -- where students can explore the data sets, and create graphs like those he displays in his talks -- but using indicators they choose: