Welcome

Welcome to my blog. I am using it to post infographics, lists, maps, and other content I created. In the past I have created the followi...

Welcome

Welcome to my blog. I am using it to post infographics, lists, maps, and other content I created.

In the past I have created the following:
  • Alternative History maps
  • World maps of the present
  • Family trees on various topics such as languages or religions
  • Family Trees of operating systems and other software
  • Comparison tables
The topics of my graphics include the humanities (lingustics, history, politics etc.) and also, as a completely unrelated area, software and technology.

Some of my graphics have been posted on the web already (e.g. AlternateHistory.com, 4chan, Wikipedia), while some others leave my harddisk for the very first time.

I have collected some of my graphics (but not all) in this folder, which may appear more accessible than this blog:

COLLECTION OF MY RECENT CREATIONS (Dropbox)


Table of Contents:

Topic 1: Software

Topic 2: Identities

Topic 3: Alternative History Maps


Other stuff

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Comparison of Web Browsers (last update April 2021)


This comparison compares the most popular cross-platform (desktop and mobile) browsers and their features. Until 2016, there were the "Big 5" browsers (Firefox, IE/Edge, Chrome, Opera, and Safari), but since then the market has become more fragmented with new browsers such as Brave and Vivaldi becoming more popular. I have decided to limit my test to these 7 browsers as they are both available on PCs and on phones (unlike for example Pale Moon, which stopped developing its mobile version), and also have decided against including "regional" browsers such as Yandex Browser (Russia), Naver Whale (Korea) or the Chinese browsers (Baidu, 360, Sogou, QQ, ...).

The result of the comparison is less clear than last time. In terms of pure features, Vivaldi, Opera and Firefox are at the top of list, followed by Edge and Brave, with Chrome and Safari being the most "bare-bones" and least customizable browsers. Ironically, the "worst" browsers have the highest market shares, thanks to their being preinstalled on iOS and Android.






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Browser Engines: Many failed, few remains (last update: April 2021)


The loss of browser diversity since the rise of Chromium has been greatly lamented. Below you can find a graph that shows the historical and present browser engines (not browsers, but the HTML rendering engines), as well as from when to when they were developed. For the bigger engines, the market share is indicated by a coloured shape (see legend). 


We're now well into the "fourth era of dominance". NCSA Mosaic dominated at the beginning (first dominance), but it was dethroned by Netscape which briefly held the majority of the market share (second dominance), both of which then were overtaken by Internet Explorer (originally using the engine from Spyglass Mosaic, and later Trident) (third dominance), which then was weakened first by Firefox (Gecko engine) but finally dethroned by Chromium (Blink engine) (fourth dominance). In terms of active and relevant engines there's now only Blink (Chrome, Edge, Opera, Vivaldi, Brave, Samsung Internet, UC Browser and many more), WebKit (Safari and all iOS browsers), and Gecko (Firefox and its forks).

But see for yourself:



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Operating Systems: An (Almost) Complete Timeline and Family Tree (last update: April 2021)


In this post you'll find a family tree and timeline of operating systems. I have tried to include all operating systems, no matter how old or obscure. Of course, a complete list is virtually impossible, as there is no way to catalogue all the tiny hobby and embedded systems that may exist somewhere.

Please also note that I only included a few selected Linux/BSD/Solaris distributions (it is arguable whether these should count as an OS on their own or not).

Currently, the family tree includes between 800 and 900 different operating systems.





Download (searchable SVG) (0.7 MB) (recommended!) (via Dropbox)

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Comparison of Linux and Unix Desktop Environments (last update April 2021)



The below table shows a comparison of the main 15 desktop environments available for Linux and Unix.

There are the Big 2 - KDE and GNOME - as well as some smaller ones and lots of forks and variants of the big ones.

Especially since the controversial initial release of GNOME 3, there have been lots of variants and forks: Unity, Mate, Cinnamon, as well as Solus's Budgie, and elementaryOS's Pantheon (the latter two are not forks strictly speaking, however they use some core parts of the Gnome stack, e.g. Mutter as window manager or Gnome apps). Unity has been dropped by Canonical and is now developed by the UBports community, renamed to Lorimi, although the last stable version of Unity, Unity 7, is still available, e.g. in the Ubuntu Unity distribution.

KDE only had one notable fork, Trinity, which is based on KDE 3.

Other notable desktop environments include LXQt (a merger of LXDE and Razor-qt), Deepin Desktop, Lumina, and Enlightenment and its fork Moksha.
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Standard Desktop Environments for Linux and Unix (timeline 1990-2020)


The picture below shows the standard/default desktop environments used by the most popular Linux distributions and Unix systems, from 1990 to 2020.



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Old version

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Identities in a Globalized World: Introduction


Scroll to the bottom for a summary
last update: December 2015

Before globalization began, most people would grow up in homogenous societies and mostly meet people of their own kind. Meeting someone "different" could mean meeting a Protestant when oneself was Catholic, and the only people of other cultures the average Englishman ever met probably was an Irishman and a Frenchman (how exotic!).

Now, in a globalized world, we are being confronted with people of other identities all the time: through migrations, through international business and expat work, through travelling, through the Internet and other media. Globalization also means that people try to find an identity for themselves and to self-categorize themselves in a diverse world.

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World Map of Religions


The last map referring to my essay on identities is this map of religions.

Two notes: First, some of the religions (Alawism, Alevism, Druze faith etc.) are often classified as sub-groups of Islam, but sometimes classified as older gnostic religions dissimulating as Islam. Dr. Michael Izady, whose great maps I used for the Middle East, argues for the classification as pre-Islamic religions who need to dissimulate as Muslims to avoid persecution.

Second, in Asia, it is often impossible to map the religions as it is usual for people to follow two or more religions (such as folk Shinto and Buddhism in Japan or Confucianism, Taoism, and Chinese folk religion in China). Therefore, some religions "share" a colour. China is based on this recent map. In North Korea, the largest religion seems to be Korean folk religion, closely followed by Cheondoism (a syncretic religion based on Korean religion and Confucianism). In South Korea, I included all provinces with Christianity as largest religion as Protestant. In all of these provinces, Protestantism was larger than Catholicism, however, in some of these Buddhism was larger than Protestantism alone.

Generally, the level of detail varies. For some countries, only province-level information or only rough estimates are available. For other countries, religion data is available down to every village.



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If you find this interesting you may also like this family tree of religions.

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World Map of Civilizations


Following the essay about identities and the timeline of civilizations, this world map shows the civilizations of the world today. The classification is largely based on Huntington's "Clash of Civilizations" (e.g. a separation of Western, Orthodox and Latin American civilization and a separation of Chinese and Japanese civilization). I added a few more distinctions, such as the separation of the "Buddhist civilization" into a Tibeto-Mongolian and an Indochinese one or the separation of the "Islamic civilization" into a Sunnitic-Arabian one an a Shiitic-Persian one (which is relevant in today's conflicts in the Middle East).

The colour of the inner border of a country indicates the alignment of the government (e.g. the Chinese government trying to dominate the Muslim Uyghur and the Buddhist Tibetan cultures within its borders or parts of the West European governments promoting Islam as an equally influencial culture as classical Western culture).


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World Map of Languages


This language map is another appendix to my earlier essay and the family tree of languages. It doesn't show single languages however (that would be impossible, as there are 6000-7000 languages, and just mapping official language would be to simplified), but language families or language phyla instead. The colours imply a possible relation on a lower level, called macrofamilies. However, these are highly speculative.

As the map shows, Indo-European languages are spoken in large parts of our planet. Other important language families include the Niger-Congo, Sino-Tibetan, Afroasiatic, and Austronesian languages. The largest degree of diversity is found in New Guinea, where linguists have found a large number of isolated languages or small language families, as well as the Trans-New Guinea phylum with an astounding number of different languages as well.


Download/Fullsize (external link)


If you find this interesting you may also like this family tree of languages, which also includes some extinct language families.


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World Map of Races


Following this essay and (approximately) this classification of races, I have created a world map of human races today. There are hardly any such maps to be found today (most were created in the age of imperialism in the 19th and early 20th century).

Three notes: First, the distinction between the lighter and darker Caucasians is not easy to make. There are gradual shifts from Scandinavia to the Arab peninsula and it is impossible to draw a clear border. For this map, I have included all regions as Xantochroi where there is a prevalence of light eyes of at least 10% of the population. I know this is not scientific at all, but if you want to argue about who is white or not, please read this post first.
Second, there is a recent theory that there was a first wave of settlement in the Americas even before the current Native Americans. These "Paleoamericans" were probably related to the larger Australoid race and are often identified with the Fuegian natives. However, this is not an established theory yet.
Third, I have made a distinction between the Pygmies of Africa and other Black peoples. There is no convincing genetic evidence that they are something completely different (although there seems to have been an early separation), but it might make sense when considering that race is a social construct anyway (as in: it's impossible to make scientifically sound racial categories).
So, as always regarding race, please take this map with a grain of salt - although I believe it is superior to all the other maps you might find on the Internet, which are often more than 100 years old.



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World Map of Ideologies


I recently posted an essay about the importance of identities for politics and conflicts in our globalized world. One of the five identities was ideology. People subscribe to various ideologies and not all of them are represented in the government. Another problem is that the opinions of individuals are not somehow measurable and often don't fit into any classical ideological terms.

This map therefore shows the official state ideology. For democracies, this often is (classical!) liberalism (as in, freedom of speech and other ideas of classical liberalism are guaranteed in the constitution) or other moderate ideologies (conservatism, social democracy).



Download/Fullsize
Download/Fullsize (external link)

Ideologies in this map:

  • Islamism
  • Traditionalism
  • Third Position (e.g. Baathism, Juche, Fascism, National Socialism)
  • Communism
  • Socialism
  • Centrism - authoritarian and democratic
  • Liberalism
  • Anarchism (just Antarctica and Bir Tawil)
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Family Tree of Religions


Again following my earlier essay, this post includes a historical family tree of religions. Religions can be classified in a number of different ways, including geography (Middle Eastern, Iranian, Indian, Chinese, ...) or fundamental concepts (Abrahamic, Dharmic, Taoic, ...). This mindmap shows from which other believes the religions were split or on which they were originally based.

There is of course a lot of speculation for some of them, especially syncretic or ethnic religions, so there might be some errors. The "{...}" categories are just categories (instead of an original religion from which the other ones derived), and the arrows show influences between religions (e.g. Zoroastrianism influencing early Judaism).

Religions marked with (t) ar extinct. Those marked with ! are the major religions. The 12 classical religions are formatted in bold.


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Family Tree of Languages


This post, as another appendix to the identities essay, shows the languages and language families of the world and their possible family tree (meaning, how the language might have historically separated assuming only one original human language in prehistoric times from which all contemporary languages ultimately derive).

Please note that only the outmost level of the mindmap shows generally accepted or at least probable language relations or families. Two languages separated by a comma are languages that could be related, but this relationship is not established yet, while two languages joined with a hyphen are an accepted mini-family.

The distinction of the 3 fundamental branches "Austral, Boreal, Khoisan" was taken from British linguist Roger Blench.


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Europe of Regions: 2016 Brexit update


This map shows the "Europe of Regions" that is one proposed future of the EU. It assumes a possible Federal Republic of Europe that has abolished the old national borders and introduced regions, in accordance with the principle of subsidiarity.

The picture also shows the (co-)official languages and capitals of each region, the overseas possessions of Europe, and implies a voting system of proportional representation and well as some kind of right-wing revolution leading to remigration of foreigners into their home countries and designated international cities. There is also an implied steering towards Russia, and tenser relations to the US and especially Turkey.


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International Phonetic Alphabet: The Most Comprehensive Table on the Internet


The IPA is an alphabet that is used to write down the pronunciation of any language. Needless to say, there are hundreds of possible sounds if you are really diligent in classifying them. This table is the most comprehensive one available on the Internet, as it shows you all possible sounds that can be represented by the IPA, using both official and inofficial characters as well as diacritics.


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(I'm sorry for some graphical glitches that happened while converting it into a picture file.)
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Share of White People in Large Cities in White Countries





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Please note that some countries (e.g. US, UK, South Africa) have racial/ethnic census data, while most counries don't and some (France) even forbid collecting such data. These numbers are all just estimates, which is also why I decided not to put the percentage labels into the graph.

Please also note that for the US, I used the number of non-Hispanic whites. This is roughly comparable with "people of European descent", however it excludes Hispanic whites and includes the Middle East and North Africa. If Hispanics are included, some cities such as Miami or Los Angeles would have higher percentages of 'European-Americans'.

All the cities included were founded by Europeans/whites and have had a European/white majority. Even in Constantinople (which was conquered by the Muslims in 1453 and renamed to Istanbul in 1930), a third of the population was Greek until the genocide in 1919-23.
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Political Parties of Germany: Present and Past


Update: since the 2017 general election, here is an updated table of the German parties as well as the historical results since 1871. 




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