Positional Distortion

via Edw Lynch at Laughing Squid:

The Rental Car Rally is a chaotic costumed roadtrip, more a mobile Halloween than a road race (see a video promo for the race series). The next rally will be from Los Angeles to Las Vegas, starting on June 24th. New Orleans and New York City will be targeted for future rallies this year.

Sign me up for New Orleans!

via YouTube user aConcernedHuman:

Japanese artist Isao Hashimoto has created a beautiful, undeniably scary time-lapse map of the 2053 nuclear explosions which have taken place between 1945 and 1998, beginning with the Manhattan Project’s “Trinity” test near Los Alamos and concluding with Pakistan’s nuclear tests in May of 1998. This leaves out North Korea’s two alleged nuclear tests in this past decade (the legitimacy of both of which is not 100% clear).

Each nation gets a blip and a flashing dot on the map whenever they detonate a nuclear weapon, with a running tally kept on the top and bottom bars of the screen. Hashimoto, who began the project in 2003, says that he created it with the goal of showing “the fear and folly of nuclear weapons.” It starts really slow — if you want to see real action, skip ahead to 1962 or so — but the buildup becomes overwhelming.

The good news: no (recorded) nukes have gone off since 1998. The bad news: 2,048 went off between 1945 and 1998.