Big History is a field of study that crosses multiple disciplines such as biology, natural history, and economics to form a single timeline that starts at the beginning of time and ends in the present. It’s the history of everything, essentially. ChronoZoom, a collaboration between UC Berkeley, Moscow State University, and Microsoft Research, aims to visualize this seemingly endless timeline.

You can browse years on top, and rectangles in the main view represent different scopes such as the Cosmos and Earth and the Solar System. Click on one those rectangles, and ChronoZoom, as you might guess, zooms in on the corresponding window of time. Circles within the rectangles provide videos and explanations for significant events in history.

To get right into it though, move your mouse to the top right. There’s a thing that looks like a bar graph, which is actually navigation for the scopes. Click on Humanity and watch it go.

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With NCAA March Madness in full swing, the basketball graphics are out in full force. This one by Angi Chau, shows the probabilities of teams winning each game, and eventually the championship, based on simulated bracket rankings. Done with D3, each node represents a game and teams are circled on the outside. Roll over a team, and get all the probabilities for that team going to the end or roll over a game to see the probability of teams winning that game. Sorry, Colorado. You have a 0% chance of winning it all. You, too, Vermont.

Hopefully, Chau keeps updating throughout the tournament. And maybe some color-coding to indicate probabilities would be useful here. Now excuse me while I go place some educated bets. (One million on Colorado.)

Celebrating their 100th birthday, Oreo depicts moments in history with the ever popular cookie of nostalgia and milk dunking. This one showing the first step on the moon is the best. Prohibition comes in a close second. [via]

From Gizmodo, this shows battery size in the new iPad versus that of the iPad 2. The battery in the former is 70 percent bigger than that of the latter. Something’s not right here.

[Thanks, David]

At first I thought this map, by David Yanofsky for Bloomberg, was your standard county-level choropleth map of demographics. Select a self-described heritage from the first drop down and you see where all the people are by count. That’s only kind of interesting, but you often just end up highlighting big cities.

However, select a heritage from the second drop down menu to compare against the first and you get a relative scale. The above for example shows those of Chinese and Indian heritage. It’s a simple calculation that makes a big difference in usefulness.

Aaron Parecki, co-creator of location platform Geoloqi, has collected his location every few seconds for over three years. He put his data on a map.

Approximately one GPS point was recorded every 2-6 seconds when I was moving, and these images represent about 2.5 million total GPS points. Collectively, they represent a data portrait of my life: everywhere I’ve been and the places I’ve been most frequently. The map is colored by year, so you can see how my footprint changes over the years, depending on where I live.

We’ve seen projects like this a few times before (Hey, Andy, where’s your 2011 map?), but the longevity still surprises me, in a good way. (I think I’ve got this quantified self thing for the masses figured out. Don’t even bother mentioning tracking, self-improvement, or the gadgets. Just show them stuff like this and attach some sentimental value, and there you go.)

[via infosthetics]

The Iliad is an epic poem by Homer with a lot of characters and story lines going on at once. I vaguely remember reading bits and pieces in high school and getting totally lost. Santiago Ortiz explores these relationships in his latest work, which draws on the connections i.e. character sentence co-occurrences.
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Jay Jacobs has some fun with roulette simulations and explores the odds of winning for different bets. Above shows a simulation of 250 spins 20,000 times. Or to put it differently, it’s like simulating the play of 20,000 people, who each took 250 spins and always bet on a single number.

I’m not sure why it doesn’t start to get red until you’re $500 in the hole, but bottom line: the longer you play, the higher probability you will lose all your money. That was my main takeaway from Probability 101 in undergrad. The rest is a blur.