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This animation distils hundreds of years of culture into just five minutes. A team of historians and scientists wanted to map cultural mobility, so they tracked the births and deaths of notable individuals like David, King of Israel, and Leonardo da Vinci, from 600 BC to the present day. Using them as a proxy for skills and ideas, their map reveals intellectual hotspots and tracks how empires rise and crumble The information comes from Freebase, a Google-owned database of well-known people and places, and other catalogues of notable individuals. The visualization was created by Maximilian Schich (University of Texas at Dallas) and Mauro Martino (IBM).

"If we can be culturally conditioned to imagine that the "fallen" somehow "sacrificed" themselves for an end loftier than just the battlefield - be it empire or freedom or a new federation - then the prosaic ugliness of war death and survivor torment becomes ever more remote from the politicians who are ultimately responsible for it."

"Chronas is a history project linking Wikipedia and Wikidata with a chronological and cartographical view."