Maps

I was at a thrift store the other day, looking at an old globe, trying to figure out when it was made by the countries that existed on it.

It seemed like a good skill to have, so I researched a little more, and found this list a like minded gentleman had put together!

May 1990: North and South Yemen merge

October 1990: There is only one Germany

December 1991: Soviet Union breaks up

During 1992: Yugoslavia breaks up

January 1993: Czechoslovakia dissolves

April 1994: White rule over and racial homelands are dissolved in South Africa

May 1997: Zaire becomes the Democratic Republic of the Congo

July 2000: Yemen's current border with Saudi Arabia officially agreed upon

May 2002: East Timor becomes independent

June 2006: Montenegro separates from Serbia

February 2008: Kosovo becomes independent (not universally recognized)

http://www.geographictravels.com/2009/06/how-to-tell-when-map-went-out-of-date.html

Fantastic!

Google Ngrams!

Google has a very fun tool out, working through a dataset of all the words from the books they have scanned.

http://ngrams.googlelabs.com/

It's great fun to check on different spellings! (I still prefer connexion, who cares if it pretty much died out in 1860)

And you can search for multiple things. I think this graph says something about the type of books that are out there. 'You' is just like a smoothed out curve of 'I', and 'me' is a slightly smoother 'you', but the proportions stay pretty consistent.

Check it out for yourself, very fun.