Thanks for the compliment! The larger graph is basically built by extracting all relationships of certain types (e.g. parent/child, teacher/student, cause/effect) from Wikidata, along with the earliest known date for the items (e.g. date of birth, time of invention/discovery). The layout started as a 3D force-directed layout, but I turned one axis into the timeline. For the visualization, I used (forked) https://github.com/anvaka/pm (which did get some deserved attention here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40817852 ) and the related ngraph.offline.layout repo.
Trying to answer your final question: there are a lot of things that I should probably improve here, but I've also wondered if this kind of giant graph visualization just doesn't really work for most people.
Speaking of Burke, I believe his book The Pinball Effect has notations in the margins directing the reader to other pages that mention the same node in the graph (whether that's exactly how he thought of it or not). It seems like an interesting attempt to express this non-linear structure in the form of a book.
3c here as well. The doctors were surprised that it had spread to my bones, and it didn’t show up on the CT scans that they were using for surveillance.
People have spent some time entering programming languages, their publication/release dates, and their relationships (e.g. "influenced by", "based on") in Wikipedia and Wikidata. I like the latter, because it makes it easier to keep track of specific claims and their references. If people did more work on that, those relationships could be used to generate larger diagrams/histories like this and keep them up to date.
There's a strong implication that Sesame Credit and the Social Credit System idea follow the example of FICO scores. Has anybody in the Chinese government explicitly stated this?
Everytown is funded by wealthy people like Michael Bloomberg and Warren Buffett. If there aren't enough other donors to give them the resources that the NRA has, it might be that there aren't enough people who support their agenda enough to donate. They are not "the little guy".
This article seems to be missing something important: the postal service is still subsidized by the federal government, even if there isn't a direct transfer of taxpayer money.
The mail I receive through USPS is ~90% unwanted (maybe more, if you go by weight), despite my ongoing efforts to "go paperless" and opt out of marketing mail. If I could stop this constant flow of junk, I would gladly pay UPS/FedEx twice as much money to deliver the small amount of mail that I actually care about.
Impairment should be the focus, rather than the amount of any substance in anybody's bloodstream. Why not a general test of perception and reaction time?
It's an informative answer in terms of what current policy is, but "it may be" is not a good justification for legal restriction on what people can do with government inventions.
"The NFA proved very effective at reducing (eliminating, actually) murders committed with automatic weapons on the registry"
That might be a bit too optimistic about the NFA. The NFA likely did reduce the possession and use of machine guns, but one reason for that is that people could just buy semi-automatics instead without dealing with the NFA-related headache, which suited most people just fine. Also, a lot of the crimes committed with NFA-regulated weapons prior to passage of the NFA were related to Prohibition, weren't they?
I found the color palette used in the visualization to be unnecessarily confusing. Dark to light blue, then light to dark earth tones, with the key roughly even with the bottom of the column.
Trying to answer your final question: there are a lot of things that I should probably improve here, but I've also wondered if this kind of giant graph visualization just doesn't really work for most people.