Welcome! This blog started in January 2008 as a history of science blog that related to my bookstore, but within the first two months the content spilled over into all sorts of unexpected areas, and I’ve happily not tried to steer a clear course since then. The categories bar makes sense of the mass of the posts, I think. At this point there are some 2730 posts (plus another 1200 Quick Posts) that run about 2 million words and illustrated by 7000 images. This blog has been referenced or has been re-posted in The New York Times, The Times, Scientific American, Le Point, Slate France, Le Monde, Le Figarro, The Economist, The Wall Street Journal, Boing-Boing, Jezebel, Wired, Bloomberg, Discovery News, The Guardian, the Huffington Post and many other places, and has been viewed more than 4 million times.
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- American History: Western Exploration & Native Americans (120)
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- Art (108)
- Art History (684)
- Astronomy (324)
- Atlas of Dead Ideas (72)
- Atomic and Nuclear weapons (362)
- Aviation & flight (294)
- Bad Ideas (1,008)
- Beautiful books (62)
- Biology (24)
- Blank and Empty Things; A History of (726)
- Books–Great Cover Art (114)
- Books–title pages, beautiful (70)
- Books: Great & Lost in the Dust (24)
- Books: Title Pages, Unusual (30)
- Boredom, History of (22)
- Brevity and Complexity (102)
- Calculating (118)
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- Daily Dose from Dr. Odd (168)
- Economics (16)
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- Exploration (6)
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- Fear, History of (42)
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- Future, History of the (624)
- German Design (28)
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- History (4)
- History of Dots (144)
- History of Goodbye (122)
- History of Holes (67)
- History of Lines (166)
- History of Memory (64)
- History of Nothing (94)
- History of the Future (690)
- How Fast Stuff Is. (6)
- Iconography (160)
- Imaginary and Impossible, Museum of the (28)
- Impossible Books (70)
- Industrial & Technological art (342)
- Information, Quantitative Display of (1,236)
- Inventions (132)
- Lines, History of (72)
- Literature (4)
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- Maps, Cartography, History of Mapmaking (500)
- Maps/Diagrams of Imagination & Ideas (348)
- mathematics, logic (220)
- Medicine, History of (180)
- Memory, Historry of (24)
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- Mistakes, The Importance of (14)
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- What is It? (28)
- Women, History of (196)
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- You Are There (12)
- Zoomology (50)