Mapping the sudden move towards marriage equality between 1970 and 2012, in an animated GIF. Compare and contrast with a map of European laws about LGBT marriage, then wash down with a heart-warmer.

Vintage anatomical charts of the male and female body from 1942, as animated GIFs

The rise and fall of music delivery formats over the past 30 years, in an animated GIF.

Complement with the history of modern music in 100 riffs.

London’s explosive population change 1801-2011, in an animated GIF. Compare and contrast with a similar visualization in vintage infographics. 

For Edward Gorey’s 88th birthday today, his beloved alphabet of misadventures, The Gashlycrumb Tinies, adapted in animated GIFs.

More grimly whimsical Goreyana here. 

Adam Ferriss uses open-source code to rearrange pixels from old photographs into mesmerizing moving compositions.

We wax, we wane. It’s the dance of life. Every living thing is a pulse. We quicken, then we fade. There is a deep beauty in this, but deeper down, inside every plant, every leaf, inside every living thing (us included) sits a secret. … Everything alive will eventually die, we know that, but now we can read the pattern and see death coming.

Nature Has A Formula That Tells Us When It’s Time To Die – Robert Krulwich + animated GIFs, what’s not to love? A fascinating scientific case for the Japanese philosophy of wabi-sabi, an awareness Henry Miller articulated beautifully more than half a century ago.

Or, as Leslie Paul wrote in 1944, “All life is no more than a match struck in the dark and blown out again.”

A short history of the animated GIF in claymation. 

(↬ swissmiss)

jtotheizzoe:

One month of the Moon in 2013 (roughly January, to be exact) taken from NASA’s wonderful new video showing the phase of the Moon for the entire year. 

Complement with this gorgeous graphic moonlight calendar of 2013.

Anatomical flap-up illustrations from 1901, adapted as animated GIFs

Absolutely mesmerizing geometric GIFS by Mr. Div, a kind of postmodern version of Benjamin Betts’s 19th-century geometry of consciousness.

jtotheizzoe:

The human central processing unit, slice by slice.

Bless the animated GIF.

McLean’s Optical Illusions: The Desert – optical illusion disc which is spun displaying the illusion of motion of a ball with a wedge-shaped piece missing passing through a hoop and of a monkey swinging on branches of a tree and a zebra jumping through an opening between two trees in a circle at the outer edge of the disc.

Complement with The Disappearing Bicyclist.

Such gorgeous geometric food photos by Turkish artist Sakir Gokcebag.

The neuroscience of the classic dramatic arc coined by German playwright Gustav Freytag 150 years ago.