Nearly two thirds of our visitors are from the United States. Rounding out the top five countries: Canada (6.5%), United Kingdom (6.3%), Australia (2.3%), and Germany (1.7%). We had one visitor from the Falkland Islands.

Of our American visitors, 20% are from California, followed by 9% from New York and 6% from Texas.

As far as cities, our two biggest (worldwide) are New York City and San Francisco. They are neck in neck: New York is leading slightly with just over 5% of our American readers, San Francisco is at 4.9%. Rounding out the top five cities: Los Angeles, Chicago, and London.

When it comes to technology, most of our readers are running Windows OS (58%), followed by Mac OS (27%) and iOS (9%). They’re mostly on Firefox (34%) and Chrome (30%) browsers, with Safari (15%) and Internet Explorer (12%) trailing a bit behind. Of our mobile users 27.5% are using iPhones and nearly half are running iOS devices of some kind.

So there you have it: our 2011 Laughing Squid readers in numbers and maps.

The 11th annual No Pants Subway Ride is set for January 8. Improv Everywhere started the event on the New York City Subway back in 2002—it has grown to be an international event (see the list of participating cities).

derDon1234 created a compilation featuring the most important events of the last 100 years (1911-1011) in 10 minutes.

via The Awesomer, BuzzFeed & MPViral.com

As Christmas nears NORAD is once again preparing to track Santa’s trip around the world. This year there are a wide variety of ways to follow along from Twitter to Google to an iPhone app.

Twitter has posted visualization showing how tweets mentioning 11:11 on 11-11-11 spread around the world.

This clip is a visualization of all the Tweets mentioning 11:11 on 11.11.11. Each “1” is a location that moves with the conversation on Twitter. Their scale varies depending on the volume of Tweets posted from the location they represent. You can see the main wave move from right to left, and then a second one that occurred at 11 p.m. around the world.

“7 Billion: How Did We Get So Big So Fast?” is a clever visualization of how the Earth’s population went from 300 million in the year 1000 to 7 billion as of yesterday (according to a UN estimate). The video is by Adam Cole and Maggie Starbard of NPR.

via Gizmodo

C.G.P. Grey explains the history and reasons behind Daylight Saving Time.

Rude Hand Gestures of the World by Romana Lefevre is a photographic guide to the many ways of using hand gestures to offend people in different parts of the world (see a selection of the book’s hand gestures and their meanings over at The Atlantic). The book’s photography is by Daniel Castro. It is published by Chronicle Books of San Francisco.

A hand gesture is arguably the most effective form of expression, whether you’re defaming a friend’s mother or telling a perfect stranger to get lost. Learn how to go beyond just flipping the bird with this illustrated guide to rude hand gestures all around the world, from asking for sex in the Middle East to calling someone crazy in Italy. Detailed photographs of hand models and subtle tips for proper usage make Rude Hand Gestures of the World the perfect companion for globe-trotters looking to offend.

via The Rumpus

photo from Czarna Gallery

Belgium’s BOZAR Centre For Fine Arts, Brussels recently hosted the exhibition The Power of Fantasy: Modern and Contemporary Art from Poland which included this remarkable piece by sculptor Olaf Brzeski, Dream – Spontaneous combustion (2008) courtesy of the Czarna Gallery of Warsaw in his native Poland. A resin sculpture of a column of rising black smoke is accompanied by the physically charred walls and ceiling of the gallery itself.

Here’s a short video on the exhibition, which closed on September 18th; there’s a lot of great work.

Divided throughout the 19th century, occupied during the Second World War, and subsequently under the Soviet yoke for decades, Poland became a democracy in 1989. In this wounded country, victim of a succession of oppressive regimes, there developed a flourishing culture that gave expression, down the centuries, to a spirit of resistance to any order imposed from outside. Via the absurd and the fantastic, Polish artists reacted to the chaos of the real world with art imbued with a spirit of resistance, not in order to flee reality, but with a view to reconstructing it. The exhibition will show the work of internationally renowned contemporary artists, including Miroslaw Balka, Monika Sosnowska, and Wilhem Sasnal. Their works will be juxtaposed with seminal Polish works of art from the 19th and 20th centuries. Seeing these works side by side brings home just how deeply rooted the exploration of the fantastic and the irrational is in Polish art.

This longer “making of” video for the exhibit has some great footage including the instalation of Brzeski’s “Spotaneous Combustion” piece (at 10 minutes into the video).

More on the exhibition from the Polish site Art & Psyche.

C.G.P. Grey takes a look at the world’s continents.

via C.G.P. Grey

“Reinvent the Toilet” by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation is, as the video frankly puts it, all about poop. More specifically: the sanitation crisis caused by the 2.6 billion people who don’t have access to safe and reliable toilets. The video is a call for the next generation of toilet, one that would not require water and expensive infrastructure and would generate fertilizer, fuel, and even fresh water.

via FlowingData

Former San Francisco, now NYC-based theater troupe Banana Bag & Bodice have made Olde English Newe again, with a very modern interpretation of the epic poem Beowulf as a staged “SongPlay” complete with 7-piece onstage band. Next month they bring it all back home, taking their award-winning adaptation Beowulf – A Thousand Years of Baggage across the pond to Eurpoe for performances at the Kilkenny Arts Festival and the Edinburgh Fringe Festival. It’s a big leap for a small theater company, but the show’s success has gotten ever more epic (heh.) each year since it was first performed.

With a fundraiser ongoing at Indie-Go-Go, they are well on their way. But before they get in front of Irish and Scotch audiences, they also have benefit nights planned this weekend in San Francisco (7/22) and New York City (7/23).

Poster by R. Black

You can see the full NYC lineup online for the show at the Abrons Arts Center: HOT SCANDINAVIAN NIGHTS! A Beowulf Benefit in NYC. There will also be a one-night-only performance in Brooklyn on August, 2nd.

BEOWULF – A Thousand Years of Baggage debuted in 2008 in Berkeley for which it won best new show in the Bay Area that year. It’s an original show with no connection to that recent movie version. Turns out there have been a LOT of adaptations of Beowulf in the more than a millennium since it was written–it is well established in the public domain.

Here’s an excerpt from the show, featuring the epic battle between Beowulf and Grendel, epically:

Photo from Deform Industries

There’s not a lot of background on this piece, but fortunately the video below shows nice details of how it was made. It seems to be called Repost Repose, and it’s featured on the site of Filipino street artist Deform.

Apparently this piece is in Dubai where earlier this year there was an art show called Street Art Without Borders which featured more than a dozen international street artists. It seems a pretty good bet that this is a piece by Deform that he did while in town for that show. But who knows for sure.

Here’s a bit more on the street art scene in Dubai and images of other Dubai street art. One of the most prominent local street artists, Sya One, has a blog.

via Think Faest

Eric Fischer created See Something or Say Something, an amazing series of map images showing geotagged Flickr photos and Twitter tweets from around the world.

Red dots are locations of Flickr pictures. Blue dots are locations of Twitter tweets. White dots are locations that have been posted to both.

images via Eric Fischer

April 9, 2011, is Obscura Day, a worldwide celebration of the exploration of curious and unknown places. Expeditions and tours are scheduled in 86 cities around the world. Obscura Day is the work of the Atlas Obscura, “a compendium of the world’s wonders, curiosities, and esoterica.”

With International Pillow Fight Day 2011 scheduled for April 2, dozen of cities around the world–from Adelaide to Zürich–brace for the feathery onslaught. The United Nations continues to condemn pillow conflict.

photo by Scott Beale

See Also:
- Volunteers Helped Clean Up San Francisco Pillow Fight To Aid Charity
- A PSA For The St. Valentines Day Massacre (a.k.a. the San Francisco Pillow Fight)
- San Francisco Might Try to Shut Down Pillow Fight & Other Events
- Pillow Fight San Francisco 2008 Photos & Video

With the earth’s population expected to exceed 7 billion this year, National Geographic set out to describe the “world’s most typical person” in the video “7 Billion: Are You Typical?” The video is part of National Geographic’s year-long series on the world population.

submitted by Steve Lau

graphic via National Geographic

photo via New York Times

The winners of the 68th annual Pictures of the Year International have been announced, and they are seriously impressive. The list of awards can be found at the Missouri School of Journalism. Enjoy.

What is now Pictures of the Year International began in 1944 as the 50-Print Exhibition, sponsored by the School of Journalism “to provide an opportunity for photographers of the nation to meet in open competition.” When magazine photographers were invited to the party in 1948, the contest was renamed News Pictures of the Year. From 1957 to 2001, the contest was run jointly by the university and the National Press Photographers Association as Pictures of the Year. After the departure of the association, the contest was renamed Pictures of the Year International. This was the 68th competition.

The New York Times is featuring some of the first-place winners, which range from “on the spot” in war-torn Bangkok, to the “Global Vision Award” for a picture of a Bengal tiger in the Kaziranga National Park in India. From a first-place “Portrait” of Aung San Suu Kyi, to a first-place “Feature story” of people living near the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone.

photo by Adrees Latif

Adrees Latif of Reuters won the ICP Infinity Award for Photojournalism for his coverage of 2010 flooding in Pakistan.

Time.is is a handy website that shows you the exact time in any city around the world. The display can be customized to show time in various formats, you can use it to show the time differences between locations and you can also save your favorite cities for easy access.

via Coudal Partners

Hipster Tunisia liked freedom before it was cool.

via reddit

In January Survival International released the first ever aerial footage of an uncontacted Amazonian tribe. The film (and a series of astonishing aerial photographs) are part of a human rights campaign by Survival and other NGOs to protect uncontacted tribes in Peru and Brazil who are increasingly threatened by encroachment from illegal loggers. Survival’s director Stephen Corry puts the situation in stark terms:

The illegal loggers will destroy this tribe. It’s vital that the Peruvian government stop them before time runs out. The people in these photos are self-evidently healthy and thriving. What they need from us is their territory protected, so that they can make their own choices about their future.

photo via Gleison Miranda/FUNAI/Survival International

See Also:
- 300 Acres – A Webroots Effort To Save The Amazon Rainforest

National Geographic Magazine has launched “7 Billion”, a special 7 part series that examines the challenges and solutions we face as the world exceeds a population of 7 billion in 2011.

With the worldwide population expected to exceed seven billion in 2011, National Geographic magazine offers a 7-part series examining specific challenges and solutions to the issues we face. The magazine introduces the series with its January cover story “7 Billion,” offering a broad overview of demographic trends that got us to today and will impact us all tomorrow. The first in-depth story will appear in the March issue, focusing on humans’ impact on the planet’s geology. Other stories will follow throughout 2011.

I found this tune a few years back and it’s pretty amazing. Norbi is apparently a Polish rapper, and, while I don’t speak Polish, I think “Choinka Norbiego” translates to “Norbi’s Christmas Tree”… or something. Enjoy! Happy Holidays to all!

Tiny Urban Kitchen made a series of tiny pizza flags representing countries they have visited.

[via Craft]

Jake takes us around the world in 24 accents that show up in a series of imaginary phone conversations.

via Boing Boing