Riding the New Silk Road
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
There were three major reasons why it faded.
The first was the final fall of Constantinople in 1453, ending the last remnant of the original Roman Empire. This made trade with Europe harder.
The second was the development, initially by the Portuguese but followed by others, of direct sea routes to India, and then China, which bypassed the much more expensive land routes.
The third was the opening up of the Americas as potential sources of commodities.
The result was a long-term economic and military decline of areas like the Middle East. The extent of which was not realized by the West until Napoleon conquered Egypt.
It put in motion the long-term decline of the Venetian Republic, as well, which made most of its money trading with the middle east. Interestingly enough, this also led the Venetians to focus a bit more on their land conquests in northern Italy, so there are some areas that received more attention at that point: swamps drained, villas built, and so on, which made sense, with trade drying up. My wife comes from a town that really came into being in the 1600's, which, for Italy, is fairly late, all things considered. Prior to that the area was a malarial swamp that was not of much interest to people.
On top of all that, the agitation of the Christian West to the Islamic East put Venice in a very tough situation -- one that engendered hatred from both sides and filed down the richness of that international trade they had labored centuries to build.
So, yes, the proximate causes were the Ottomans and other problems, but a significant portion of the root cause can be attributed to 1) the discovery of the new world, and 2) new sea routes around Africa to the spice islands and Asia.
At least that's what I've gleaned from what I've read. Naturally, human affairs are often quite complex, and so there are a lot of different things that contribute.
There were a number of massive naval engagements, including the Battle of Lepanto(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Lepanto_(1571)) which was one of the single largest naval battles ever fought.
Much of the riches that Spain gleaned from the Americas was funneled in to building and maintaining a massive fleet to fight the Ottomans with.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smuggling_of_silkworm_eggs_into...
Silver was the item that the chinese intensively desired for monetary reasons as multiple experiments with paper money failed due to runaway inflation and they lacked precious metals of their own. Almost 40% of the silver mined in the late 16th century ended up in china.
Columbus sailed in 1492. The development of the Spanish colonies proceeded fairly quickly. The first Spanish city in the New World was founded in 1500, the first on the mainland in 1510, and by the 1530s a respectable empire had been carved out and colonized. By mid-century the New World was mining more silver than the old world.
It is hard to overstate how late English colonization began. Perhaps one of the most striking examples which brings it home is that when the Pilgrims landed in 1620 they were able to communicate with the natives thanks to meeting a native, Squanto, who already knew English on account of having lived in England. The mythology that they found a virgin land, untouched by white men, couldn't be farther from the truth!
That influx of wealth totally changed the balance of power in Eurasia.
People these days don't realise how poor Europe was prior to the 1500s. For example, it's commonly thought that one of the main reasons the Mongols didn't push further into Europe was simply because there was nothing there that was worth raiding.
Even the "rich" cities in Europe (Venice, Vienna, Paris) compared very unfavourably to comparatively minor trading centers in central Asia. For example, Paris was probably the largest European city in 1250 (population probably < 200,000) and it was about quarter the size of Merv when the Mongols killed all its inhabitants in 1221[1].
A truly rich city like Baghdad (prior to the Mongol sack in 1258) was in an entirely different league.
http://skepticlawyer.com.au/2013/04/29/selenium-silk-spices-...
Can you expand on that (or recommend further reading/links/videos/books?). Especially the "the extend of which was not realized by the west"? Were people in western europe suprised when napolean conquered egypt?
I recently completed a trip to Budapest; both me and my friend were having cameras, and while she, as usual, made hundreds of photos I decided to try something different - I shoot 2 - 5 second videos instead. It's interesting how it can capture the atmosphere of the place qualitatively better than a plain photo would.
One thing you quickly realize is that filming tourist attractions isn't all that fun, as they're mostly stationary[0]. It's much better to refocus on filming the mundane, everyday life of the city - it's something you can capture much better with a movie and sound than with still images. Rewatching the videos make you actually feel back at the place.
Anyway, I was looking for a way to present those movies as a kind of animated photos; now reverse-engineering this website might give me some helpful hints (especially RE libraries used) :).
[0] - except fountains. Fountains feel so much more impressive on short videos than on photos.
You can also stitch multiple shots into a single one: http://blog.htc.com/2013/05/your-sequence-shots-with-htc-zoe...
Do you know if the HTC One Google Edition does this, or only regular HTC One?
http://www.bizjournals.com/newyork/news/2013/07/12/new-york-...
That's how written news should be done.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/interactive/2013/may/26/fire...
I thought it was very well done.
The website suggests otherwise. It was difficult to read it on my phone (iPhone 5). I couldn't pinch - I had to scroll and the images, when tapped, would appear to take over the screen. Honestly, I was expecting them to say "Download our app!" to top it off.
Edit: I just had a look on my desktop. Very impressive and the image-focusing thing makes sense now.
http://graphics8.nytimes.com/newsgraphics/2013/07/21/silk-ro...
In addition, d3's scales are used to set up the variable-rate scrolling (see kazak.interaction.scroll function).
http://graphics8.nytimes.com/newsgraphics/2013/07/21/silk-ro...
The file size is 874k. If it were an animated gif of similar quality, the file size would be massive.
I have to give them kudos on the JS implementation, it's really smooth.
To speed things up, you'd need to convince the former soviet republics that going to standard gauge is a good investment for increasing trade in and through their countries. Additionally, you'd need to convince various nations to sign trackage rights and operation rights agreements so you don't need to change locomotives at every border. After all that, then you can start worrying about customs agreements, which would not be that significant of a delay compared to all the other logistics of transporting things over long stretches of rail. It's just time consuming almost by definition.
The scrolling is horribly lagging, and the gifs/videos are all black:
But it'd be nice to be able to say, "Yes, this version in chrome is what I want it to look like," and you get back scores that determine how "close" the other versions are to the version you selected as your reference (0-100%?).
Seems like one could achieve this with some sort of pixel diff algorithm.
I tend to agree with your main point, especially when the bells and whistles are pointless frippery that don't actually do anything. In this case the use actually adds value to the page. I've spent a while on various websites learning more about the Silk Road history, and about the current geo-political stuff.
It's a pity the media experience isn't consistent across browsers.
Did this not happen to anyone else?
See for example http://www.tema.ru/travel/dubna.2009/ near the bottom of page.
Question - how such a valuable shipments protected against someone, who will try to disconnect few cars, crack open 'em and steal all these laptops on trucks?
First, local populace isn't used to enterpreneural crime with complex schemes. They can surely steal a few devices out of unsealed container, but huge planned robberies involving material goods is not something I've heard of.
Imagine you disconnected a few cars, they stand on one-track rails in the middle of steppe with no roads or buildings to be seen anywhere. What do you do with them? And even if you figure out how to make them disappear, what's your recipe for getting laptops (that are swiftly losing resale value) out of the country? By rail? :)
If course you can try leveraging corrupt Kazakh government, but this time it won't work because you just kicked their puppy, the country's future.
Time will come for wild train robberies if the traffic is indeed to reach millions of containers annually, but right now it's like trying to steal Mona Lisa during the open hours.
And guards, I bet they protect the train from stupid random incidents (camels, drunk tractor drivers, etc).
"In the US, 67% of mobile internet users surveyed by Decision Fuel and On Device Research in November 2012 said they mostly or only used mobile, as opposed to the desktop, to go online and surf the web."
Read more at http://www.emarketer.com/Article/How-Do-Internet-Users-Divvy...
If your goal is to connect with people, then ignoring the mobile experience for the sake of optimizing the web experience may be to miss the mark...
Furthermore, I get the impression that their definition of "mostly or only" means more than 50%, which is not the most helpful. It'd be more helpful to do a category-based breakdown for that, which will probably see desktop usage being higher than mobile for news/media.
And in any case, if people are only going to spend 5% on news in general while on mobile, then I would most definitely not optimize my site for them unless it were incredibly simple to do so. The 5% is then further split across many venues, and, as the source says, it includes in-app usage. That even further fractions the amount of time spent. With that much fractioning of the time, the chance that a user will even see this piece is pretty low.
I guess I just don't follow your logic.
Ignore mobile if you like. But good luck with that. Mobile users will find an experience that is optimized for them.