Grumble about the graphics choices: dark-grey-on-black-with-other-dark-colors is a terrible color scheme, that renders the borders nearly invisible.
There's a reason print maps have a standard set of colors, with very light blue for oceans, white for land backgrounds, and a variety of dark colors for features. The "modern white-on-black web aesthetic" only really works for text- and figure-heavy pages, where you must then use very light colors (white, yellow, light orange, light green) for features/lines.
Cool visuals, as with everything like this where the creator probably just churned open datasets through LLMs there are many inaccuracies particularly around borders.
An interesting effort though, and at least this one has a decent page about sourcing.
Yes, definitely. Claude and other models might produce minor differences in design outputs, but overall they apply similar principles. This has been harped on in many threads over the past several months.
I completely disagree. It does a really good job of showing the relative sizes of political entities throughout history and how those things impact the total amount of conflict. I might suggest that perhaps your politics is impacting how you view this data because perhaps it doesn't align with your ideology. It would be useful to overlay total population sizes only this data as well. That would bring out the historical trends much more accurately. And it is ignoring these political and technology trends that leads to the most wrong things humanities professors will try to claim. Perhaps that's why you don't like it. It disproves graphically a lot of ideological viewpoints.
PS Pinker talks a lot about these types of trends. Maybe look him up for better explanations.
FF just crashed immediately. Twice. Which kinda surprised me in a good way, because usually when it struggles for memory it just hangs there for a couple of minutes until it gets killed by the OS. Cannot remember it being killed that easily by another website.
I guess the (war?) elephant in the room is that written history as something that attempts to record a somewht balanced, comprehensive account of an event is a modern, western, anomaly.
There are a lot of very old written histories recording various battles. For example, the Spring and Autumn Annals have a somewhat detailed account of the Battle of Chengpu and its aftermath: https://ctext.org/chun-qiu-zuo-zhuan/xi-gong#comm18160 This map actually briefly flashes a red dot at 632 BC, but since it's not part of any named war, you could easily miss it.
The areas where you see fewer wars don't necessarily lack written historical records, it might just be that nobody bothered to translate those records into a machine-readable format yet. (I'd guess this map is based on Wikidata.)
China is the one exception actually. India, Africa and the New World civilizations didn't really like focusing on the past and didn't record it. Europe and China did. In China that's probably about the strength of the bureaucracy. In Europe its probably more about kings establishing legitimacy.
Wikipedia has a known bias of having mostly the historical events present that western world has written down. This map seems almost balanced, how come it used a better or at least perhaps fairer datasource?
Sigh, because certain civilizations wrote things down more than others. Also, some environments don't lend themselves to preserving things, others are. These will naturally create biases because if you are studying somewhere wet, almost nothing not made of stone will survive, even and especially things that are written upon. In the desert, things will be preserved for centuries, including things made of clay, leather or paper.
Interestingly, this website reliably crashes my firefox on linux while consuming 55GB of memory.
Claude's TLDR of what's causing the problem (may or may not be accurate): "That animation loop is almost certainly leaking memory: each time-step it draws new border geometry (GeoJSON/vector shapes) but doesn't free the old frames, so RAM climbs without bound. When you interact — especially auto-playing the timeline — the tab grows until it swallows all 62 GB of RAM + swap and the kernel kills it."
I recently figured that Spain went on a war for 700 years, just to carry on in the Arauco war for another 300 years, thus, literally being at war for 1000 years.
Very interesting and watchable. Do you differentiate between wars and "conflicts"? There's so many of the latter and everyone seems to avoid the term "war".
> Also, the 19th century was far more conflict-prone than I thought.
Let me guess, you're American? For the US, once Northern America was settled, the US established and the conflicts with Natives and the Brits resolved, all you had was the Civil War...
But here in Europe, up until 1945, it was constant warfare. And that not just the large wars between entire countries that some czars or emperors drew up, there were also countless unnamed skirmishes and dealings between all the countless fiefdoms.
>For the US, once Northern America was settled, the US established and the conflicts with Natives and the Brits resolved, all you had was the Civil War...
Out of that list, the utter majority is some sort of fights involving Native Americans or some island "expeditions" not involving Northern American territory.
>once Northern America was settled, the US established and the conflicts with Natives and the Brits resolved, all you had was the Civil War
As that list shows, that's not how things happened. There were major wars with the Native Americans all throughout the 19th century.
If for some reason you only want to include wars with Europeans and European colonies (I have no idea why you would though), the Mexican-American war, and the Spanish-American war are the big ones you missed. The War of 1812 was also another big war after the US had previously resolved our conflict with the British.
There were tons of other smaller skirmishes in North America. The Patriot War, the Aroostook War, the Reform War, the Cortina Troubles, the Utah War etc.
>once Northern America was settled
You can't even begin to say "once North America was settled" until the end of the 19th century.
This is VERY wrong. Almost all estimates go for at least 3x higher Russian casualties than
Ukrainian. Russia has been attacking for 4+ years just throwing bodies at the problem with Ukrainians defending with technology. Where do these estimates even come from? Makes me question the validity of the information on this site
That is the Western media narrative anyway. The casualty rate for the current mode of offensive warfare with small infantry teams infiltrating under cover of darkness (e.g. Ukraine for the latter part of the 2023 counteroffensive, Russia in its more recent offensive in the Donbas) has been extremely high on both sides. But I'm pretty sure Russia had a favorable kill ratio during their 2022 summer offensive in the Donbas where they just pummeled fortifications with standoff weapons like the Buratino, and many of Ukraine's most experienced troops died in that offensive.
Anyway, the Western stereotype of "Russian human wave attacks" is mostly wrong. Even when Russia is just throwing bodies into the fray (like the convict troops in Bakhmut), those can't really be described as "human wave" tactics (again, they're small infantry teams infiltrating at night). And Ukraine has thrown lots of hastily mobilized cannon fodder at the front as well: look for videos of protesting TDF soldiers and their relatives on Telegram if you don't believe me.
Numbers range from 323 k to 2 mio. total war deaths since 2022.
Hugh leap.
But the numbers for Ukraine and russian federation seem to be swapped: Ukraine does not even have 600 k soldiers, so probably in 10-20 or so years cannot have these many loses without front collapse.
You said human waves, not the person you are replying to. Russian did throw bodies at the problem and has shown callous disregard for the welfare of its soldiers.
I feel like you're not really replying to the comment above.
Impressive that people still try to pretend there's any grand strategy here when it's easy to watch 100+ new Russians (mostly old dudes, not in a team, not at night) get FPV'd every single day now. Tell us about the 'Kyiv feint' next
It is not human waves, but they have been on the attack for quite some time now relying on small infantry units while obtaining very little ground. What does that tell you about what's happening to those infantry?
What are you talking about? Mediazone already has 230k confirmed! russian deaths with names. Current confirmed rate of ~30k/month casualities for Russia couldn't be sustainable for much smaller population of Ukraine if they were trading 1:1 or even worse
In the modern warfare with drones that made "killzone" to be 30-40kms from the frontline, with current russian tactics of infiltration by small groups and inability of them running medivac groups, the ratio of wounded vs dead in casualities are nowhere near to what it was in previous wars. Don't have the exact number but some estimates were 1:1 wounded:dead ratio on Russian side
With Western media narrative and both sides it's clear he is completely lost in propaganda. Every single method of analyzing the numbers points to well about 1 million casualties to be most realistic guess.
Even the Russian MOD own numbers for recruitment and numbers stationed in Ukraine shows that there is at least ~1.1 million personal missing.
Again, you are confusing causalities (wounded and dead) with KIA (just the dead). That's why you are getting such different numbers. Its a pretty easy mistake to make and there are lots of media reports that make the same mistakes.
PS Also, some numbers count civilians and others just count military. And usually civilian dead > military dead in most wars.
There are some very important wars missing. For example, I see nothing about Spain's Civil War (1936-1939)
Grumble about the graphics choices: dark-grey-on-black-with-other-dark-colors is a terrible color scheme, that renders the borders nearly invisible.
There's a reason print maps have a standard set of colors, with very light blue for oceans, white for land backgrounds, and a variety of dark colors for features. The "modern white-on-black web aesthetic" only really works for text- and figure-heavy pages, where you must then use very light colors (white, yellow, light orange, light green) for features/lines.
Cool visuals, as with everything like this where the creator probably just churned open datasets through LLMs there are many inaccuracies particularly around borders.
An interesting effort though, and at least this one has a decent page about sourcing.
I swear I've seen this exact UI in several other submissions recently. Is it the default produced by Claude if you don't specify anything?
Yes, definitely. Claude and other models might produce minor differences in design outputs, but overall they apply similar principles. This has been harped on in many threads over the past several months.
cool visuals but the result is totally random
I completely disagree. It does a really good job of showing the relative sizes of political entities throughout history and how those things impact the total amount of conflict. I might suggest that perhaps your politics is impacting how you view this data because perhaps it doesn't align with your ideology. It would be useful to overlay total population sizes only this data as well. That would bring out the historical trends much more accurately. And it is ignoring these political and technology trends that leads to the most wrong things humanities professors will try to claim. Perhaps that's why you don't like it. It disproves graphically a lot of ideological viewpoints.
PS Pinker talks a lot about these types of trends. Maybe look him up for better explanations.
FF just crashed immediately. Twice. Which kinda surprised me in a good way, because usually when it struggles for memory it just hangs there for a couple of minutes until it gets killed by the OS. Cannot remember it being killed that easily by another website.
I loaded this in a new tab on FireFox and continued to scroll HN. I was so confused on why my computer froze.
I guess the (war?) elephant in the room is that written history as something that attempts to record a somewht balanced, comprehensive account of an event is a modern, western, anomaly.
There are a lot of very old written histories recording various battles. For example, the Spring and Autumn Annals have a somewhat detailed account of the Battle of Chengpu and its aftermath: https://ctext.org/chun-qiu-zuo-zhuan/xi-gong#comm18160 This map actually briefly flashes a red dot at 632 BC, but since it's not part of any named war, you could easily miss it.
The areas where you see fewer wars don't necessarily lack written historical records, it might just be that nobody bothered to translate those records into a machine-readable format yet. (I'd guess this map is based on Wikidata.)
China is the one exception actually. India, Africa and the New World civilizations didn't really like focusing on the past and didn't record it. Europe and China did. In China that's probably about the strength of the bureaucracy. In Europe its probably more about kings establishing legitimacy.
Wikipedia has a known bias of having mostly the historical events present that western world has written down. This map seems almost balanced, how come it used a better or at least perhaps fairer datasource?
Sigh, because certain civilizations wrote things down more than others. Also, some environments don't lend themselves to preserving things, others are. These will naturally create biases because if you are studying somewhere wet, almost nothing not made of stone will survive, even and especially things that are written upon. In the desert, things will be preserved for centuries, including things made of clay, leather or paper.
Interestingly, this website reliably crashes my firefox on linux while consuming 55GB of memory.
Claude's TLDR of what's causing the problem (may or may not be accurate): "That animation loop is almost certainly leaking memory: each time-step it draws new border geometry (GeoJSON/vector shapes) but doesn't free the old frames, so RAM climbs without bound. When you interact — especially auto-playing the timeline — the tab grows until it swallows all 62 GB of RAM + swap and the kernel kills it."
I can confirm, my firefox on linux crashes immediately as well.
Curiously, the website works just fine in chrome on android.
Blink monopoly strikes again, I guess.
No issues here on Linux, using Firefox 140.12.0esr under Slackware and Plasma 6.7.2 / Wayland
No issues on FF on Linux here. No crashes or memory leaks as far as I can see.
This page crashed my browser too. Opened the comments to see this, guess it's not a me issue.
Crashes my Firefox on Android too
It missed the Toledo War:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toledo_War
But to be fair, this is really cool.
That moment when you go from stop 7 to stop 8 in Exhibit, from Grand Duchy of Moscow to Russian Empire...
I recently figured that Spain went on a war for 700 years, just to carry on in the Arauco war for another 300 years, thus, literally being at war for 1000 years.
Wow this is really neat. I just did a really fast refresher on the history of (conflict in) Europe by scrolling through!
*every = some of them
Very interesting and watchable. Do you differentiate between wars and "conflicts"? There's so many of the latter and everyone seems to avoid the term "war".
This is a fascinating resource. Wow. Thanks to the OP for posting this.
Amazing! I just wish there was a way to eliminate the text boxes.
There are a couple of war peaks, wonder what the correlation is (why war went down)
Mercator police: please do not use projection that makes Greenland 14x bigger than reality and e.g. Russia 2x. See here https://www.visualcapitalist.com/mercator-map-true-size-of-c...
Robinson Projection would be much more accurate.
The irony of this link not providing any static visual alternative to projection
Maybe that's why Trump wants to take Greenland, and Canada, and looks up to Russia.
Imagine foreign policy being distorted by the Mercator projection.
This is really neat. Also, the 19th century was far more conflict-prone than I thought.
I played the timeline from 1800-1900
the explosion of dots from the civil war is really something!
> Also, the 19th century was far more conflict-prone than I thought.
Let me guess, you're American? For the US, once Northern America was settled, the US established and the conflicts with Natives and the Brits resolved, all you had was the Civil War...
But here in Europe, up until 1945, it was constant warfare. And that not just the large wars between entire countries that some czars or emperors drew up, there were also countless unnamed skirmishes and dealings between all the countless fiefdoms.
>For the US, once Northern America was settled, the US established and the conflicts with Natives and the Brits resolved, all you had was the Civil War...
No part of that statement is accurate.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_wars_involving_the_Uni...
Out of that list, the utter majority is some sort of fights involving Native Americans or some island "expeditions" not involving Northern American territory.
>once Northern America was settled, the US established and the conflicts with Natives and the Brits resolved, all you had was the Civil War
As that list shows, that's not how things happened. There were major wars with the Native Americans all throughout the 19th century.
If for some reason you only want to include wars with Europeans and European colonies (I have no idea why you would though), the Mexican-American war, and the Spanish-American war are the big ones you missed. The War of 1812 was also another big war after the US had previously resolved our conflict with the British.
There were tons of other smaller skirmishes in North America. The Patriot War, the Aroostook War, the Reform War, the Cortina Troubles, the Utah War etc.
>once Northern America was settled
You can't even begin to say "once North America was settled" until the end of the 19th century.
I love this. Did you make it? Why?
This is cool.
War is a racket.
Why it matters.
About Russo Ukrainian war 2022:
> Estimates: 600,000+ Ukrainian military deaths; 100,000+ Russian deaths; 30,000-40,000 civilian deaths.
This is VERY wrong. Almost all estimates go for at least 3x higher Russian casualties than Ukrainian. Russia has been attacking for 4+ years just throwing bodies at the problem with Ukrainians defending with technology. Where do these estimates even come from? Makes me question the validity of the information on this site
That is the Western media narrative anyway. The casualty rate for the current mode of offensive warfare with small infantry teams infiltrating under cover of darkness (e.g. Ukraine for the latter part of the 2023 counteroffensive, Russia in its more recent offensive in the Donbas) has been extremely high on both sides. But I'm pretty sure Russia had a favorable kill ratio during their 2022 summer offensive in the Donbas where they just pummeled fortifications with standoff weapons like the Buratino, and many of Ukraine's most experienced troops died in that offensive.
Anyway, the Western stereotype of "Russian human wave attacks" is mostly wrong. Even when Russia is just throwing bodies into the fray (like the convict troops in Bakhmut), those can't really be described as "human wave" tactics (again, they're small infantry teams infiltrating at night). And Ukraine has thrown lots of hastily mobilized cannon fodder at the front as well: look for videos of protesting TDF soldiers and their relatives on Telegram if you don't believe me.
Numbers range from 323 k to 2 mio. total war deaths since 2022. Hugh leap.
But the numbers for Ukraine and russian federation seem to be swapped: Ukraine does not even have 600 k soldiers, so probably in 10-20 or so years cannot have these many loses without front collapse.
You are counting wounded (as in missing limbs). The map is only counting deaths.
You said human waves, not the person you are replying to. Russian did throw bodies at the problem and has shown callous disregard for the welfare of its soldiers.
I feel like you're not really replying to the comment above.
Impressive that people still try to pretend there's any grand strategy here when it's easy to watch 100+ new Russians (mostly old dudes, not in a team, not at night) get FPV'd every single day now. Tell us about the 'Kyiv feint' next
It is not human waves, but they have been on the attack for quite some time now relying on small infantry units while obtaining very little ground. What does that tell you about what's happening to those infantry?
What are you talking about? Mediazone already has 230k confirmed! russian deaths with names. Current confirmed rate of ~30k/month casualities for Russia couldn't be sustainable for much smaller population of Ukraine if they were trading 1:1 or even worse
Casualties do not mean deaths. A wounded soldier can return to combat later.
I can't find numbers or more information about this because Google has stopped returning results that match my queries.
In the modern warfare with drones that made "killzone" to be 30-40kms from the frontline, with current russian tactics of infiltration by small groups and inability of them running medivac groups, the ratio of wounded vs dead in casualities are nowhere near to what it was in previous wars. Don't have the exact number but some estimates were 1:1 wounded:dead ratio on Russian side
Should try to use alternative searches. Can recommend Kagi
With Western media narrative and both sides it's clear he is completely lost in propaganda. Every single method of analyzing the numbers points to well about 1 million casualties to be most realistic guess.
Even the Russian MOD own numbers for recruitment and numbers stationed in Ukraine shows that there is at least ~1.1 million personal missing.
Again, you are confusing causalities (wounded and dead) with KIA (just the dead). That's why you are getting such different numbers. Its a pretty easy mistake to make and there are lots of media reports that make the same mistakes.
PS Also, some numbers count civilians and others just count military. And usually civilian dead > military dead in most wars.