Riding the New Silk Road

http://www.nytimes.com/newsgraphics/2013/07/21/silk-road/

by pak • 13 years ago

486 153 13 years ago

nytimes.com

rlt3• 13 years ago

The presentation for this was incredible.

kken• 13 years ago

I agree.

ninjazee124• 13 years ago

Agree! I had to peak at their JS source to see how it was done! Pretty impressive.

adamnemecek2• 13 years ago

This is the first time I've seen gif-like videos used in a news article.

farnsworth• 13 years ago

Another step closer to Harry Potter style living portraits in the news. Some day we'll be good enough at building a 3D scene from a video or a bunch of 2D pictures that we'll be able to animate the scene and the people in various random ways rather than just looping a video clip.

tomphoolery• 13 years ago

The Onion is gonna get really interesting once that's all developed.

easy_rider4• 13 years ago

I do feel it's a bit distracting from the content for me; not every picture is gif-like, and I found myself scrolling to animated ones. I'd like to know how 'average' people would like the content presentation, from a reader standpoint, not a hacker standpoint.

rogerchucker• 13 years ago

The gif made the experience even better for me.

CamperBob2• 13 years ago

I thought it was pretty tastefully done. It could certainly be abused as an effect, but overall I think this is what 'newspapers' are going to look like in the decades to come.

gerow• 13 years ago

Huh, for some reason the gifs don't play back Chromium for me (within Ubuntu, at least) but do work from Firefox.

adamnemecek2• 13 years ago

They are not actually gifs, they are html video tags.

xal• 13 years ago

Wow, the new york times is doing some incredible work. They are really moving the web forward.

straight_talk_22• 13 years ago

I believe they were RoR early adopters and one of their guys is a leading contributor to ClojureScript.

creativityhurts• 13 years ago

Not to mention CoffeeScript and Backbone.

josephpmay• 13 years ago

This may look great on the desktop, but its pretty horrible on mobile.

mynameisvlad4• 13 years ago

Maybe because it wasn't meant to be read from a mobile device? Not everything needs to be mobile.

crgt3• 13 years ago

Point taken, but...

"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."

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...

eCa• 13 years ago

It repeatedly crashes Safari on my phone.

easy_rider4• 13 years ago

This should not be viewed on mobile, but yes, a mobile alternative would be great.

shoyer• 13 years ago

It looks wonderful on my iPad (third gen).

aw3c23• 13 years ago

Mobile as in tiny screen or mobile as in smartphone/tablet? I could see this work nicely on a tablet.

zrail• 13 years ago

I want more! Why is it just one section!?

kiba• 13 years ago

Did anybody thought of the black market site "silk road" rather than the actual Silk Road before clicking on the link?

sehr• 13 years ago

To be fair though, it's been the only silk road in the news for the past few years.

easy_rider4• 13 years ago

I'd like to think I knew what the "real" Silk Road is, but I'm afraid that I would not answer this question correctly in quiz setting.

marcusramberg• 13 years ago

Who is Marco Polo?

drcode• 13 years ago

Good, maybe this "name clash" will prevent the illicit silk road from getting so much MSM attention (I say this because I think bitcoin has a lot to of very positivie things to offer and SR distracts from this.)

dwaltrip• 13 years ago

The War on Drugs is a misguided failure

lnanek22• 13 years ago

Haha, yes. This wasn't the new one at all. Badly titled article, although it did get me to read when I wouldn't have otherwise.

enzoriv• 13 years ago

I was thinking exactly this lol

cm20122• 13 years ago

Wow, I really wanted that to continue the path all the way to Europe. Really just a treat to use. The smoothness of the "gif-like" images just smashes typical video in my mind.

chime• 13 years ago

They're called http://www.reddit.com/r/cinemagraphs

cm20122• 13 years ago

Thanks for that

modfodder• 13 years ago

Actually, they're just really nice high quality animated gifs (someone below analyzing the source states that they are actually video, which is possible). A cinemagraph is a still photo that has one (or few) moving parts of the image, typically in a near seamless loop. A cinemagraph is a bit more involved to create than a gif, requiring at least some basic compositing.

chenster• 13 years ago

Wow, won't it be awesome if there's also background sound??

bibinou• 13 years ago

It's a video : http://graphics8.nytimes.com/newsgraphics/2013/07/21/silk-ro...

I have to give them kudos on the JS implementation, it's really smooth.

easy_rider4• 13 years ago

Loved it, and It's awesome that they are not afraid to go out of the box and even get this done right. I think the core of it's success is that as a user you are still in full control of the presentation with the scrollwheel in a natural vertical plane. And then to top it off the content itself is made more pleasant to look at, and the use of the map and smooth loaded video's just delivers an overall immersive experience.

cocoflunchy2• 13 years ago

It's great to try new formats, but the experience is completely broken on my now-slightly-aging Windows laptop. I wish web developer/designers would test their pages on regular hardware instead of 27" iMacs or rMPB...

The scrolling is horribly lagging, and the gifs/videos are all black:

http://prntscr.com/1gq4he

http://prntscr.com/1gq5b6

emilyst• 13 years ago

I have to wonder, which browser?

cocoflunchy2• 13 years ago

Chrome latest... Maybe something's wrong with my computer?

rsingel• 13 years ago

I watched on a 5 year old Mac in Chrome. Looked great to me.

D9u2• 13 years ago

It worked well on my 5 year old netbook. FreeBSD. Xombrero.

onethree• 13 years ago

i tried watching this on my work laptop which forces me to use IE8. i got a grey screen, without even any text

dclowd9901• 13 years ago

It'd be nice if there was a machineable way to test UI in varying browsers. Litmus.com gets close, but it's only for emails, and "all" it does is render the emails in like 40 different clients (which is actually amazing).

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.

MaxGabriel• 13 years ago

We're having the same problem at work with the same ad unit HTML/CSS shared across iOS and android phones and tablets. My laptop looks like an octopus with various devices tethered to the computer, there's not enough hardware to share, and it slows iteration as well.

socillion• 13 years ago

This isn't your problem, but HTTPS-Everywhere reproducibly breaks the page for me on Firefox with the default ruleset containing nytimes.com. Once disabled, the images load fine.

TazeTSchnitzel• 13 years ago

It always breaks nytimes.

agumonkey• 13 years ago

Ran almost smooth and without rendering glitches on a 2007 CoreDuo with intel IGP. Try to pop a live linux distro (e.g: Mint 15) on usb it might be pleasant.

DanBC• 13 years ago

The experience gracefully degraded (I had images, but they were all static, but everything else seemed to work) on my lousy stupid 3g dongle connection (which manages to break a disturbing amount of content) but some reconnections and it works now.

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.

NamTaf• 13 years ago

I'm confused. Some of the videos play in Chrome 28.0.1500.72 m (the gun turret bushes, the train driving, the control panel) but not all (the forklift container gauge change does not). Firefox 22.0 seems to play them all.

It's a pity the media experience isn't consistent across browsers.

yurifury• 13 years ago

I have the same problem on my slightly aging Windows laptop too, but I get the same thing on Youtube, so it's not just this page for me.

dclusin• 13 years ago

It seems to me like we're finally witnessing the birth of a 21st century news paper. The New York times has always been well regarded for it's journalism. Now we're starting to see what can be accomplished when a credible journalism outfit is complemented by equally credible digital designers.

RockyMcNuts• 13 years ago

The actually appointed a 'Snowfaller in Chief'

http://www.bizjournals.com/newyork/news/2013/07/12/new-york-...

sliverstorm• 13 years ago

Thank god. IMO the "Snow fall" article was the best thing I've seen come out of journalism in many years.

Cthulhu_3• 13 years ago

And yet, I can't see this being developed into something regular; I mean, artfully done as this is, eventually they're going to want to make money.

k-mcgrady• 13 years ago

They've created quite a few stories like this now. I don't have any links but I've seen several appear on HN.

potatolicious• 13 years ago

Why not? The NYT, through embracing digitization, has been able to maintain one of the largest subscriber bases in post-Internet newspapers. An increasing proportion of their revenue is coming from subscriptions instead of advertising - if they can develop the right tools, they can pump these out with relatively low cost.

devb• 13 years ago

The paywall is more restricted now than when it was first enacted. I won't pay for much online, but I recently signed up for the weekend papers + full online access because I thought the journalism is better than most of the crap found online.

volaski• 13 years ago

As Paul Graham says, "Do things that don't scale"

aw3c23• 13 years ago

This kind of presentation would work perfectly for magazines like National Geographic.

mhartl• 13 years ago

*its journalism

ancarda• 13 years ago

21st century news paper

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.

epsylon• 13 years ago

I wish I could read the article though. Can't get past the paywall.

Ellipsis7532• 13 years ago

I actually disliked this page design. The image and text always faded to black before it went off the top of the screen. I am in the habit of moving text to the top of the screen to read it. It kept vanishing as I did so meaning I'd have to move the text I wanted to read down to the middle of the screen.

Did this not happen to anyone else?

caretcaret• 13 years ago

You're meant to read the text alongside its picture, and the text is viewable when the picture is on screen.

Ellipsis7532• 13 years ago

That makes sense but it's just not how I read. I just kind of skim through while scrolling the whole time. I find this page really difficult to read which is kind of annoying. Still if it's good for 99% of people then fair enough. I do like the little lines linking to locations on the right.

ansimionescu• 13 years ago

I hate being forced into consuming content in a specific way, but this page was very well done.

jstanley• 13 years ago

I had a similar problem. My screen is too tall to be able to get the bottom picture to fade in properly.

btilly3• 13 years ago

Time to trot out trivia. As the article points out, the Silk Road faded in importance in the 1400s. But it doesn't say why.

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.

davidw2• 13 years ago

long-term economic and military decline of areas like the Middle East

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.

straight_talk_22• 13 years ago

Some of my grand-grand-...-parents moved from Venice to England around that time, together with many other families.

mmanfrin5• 13 years ago

The decline of Venice has less to do with the decline of the Middle East and more to do with the rise of the Ottomans -- whose conquest of Constantinople shuttered a 2-century long dominion of the Bospherous (and the substantial trade thereof) by Venice. Additionally, Mongol incursions at the north end of the Black Sea made the increasingly-expensive trade with the Ottomans very expensive.

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.

psn• 13 years ago

Can you recommend some books on the topic?

fnordfnordfnord• 13 years ago

John Green's Crash Course series of YouTube videos are somewhat related and entertaining. https://www.youtube.com/user/crashcourse

mmanfrin5• 13 years ago

Some related trivia: While it was called the Silk Road, silk was less of a major point of trade after the 6th century. Two Byzantine monks made the journey from Constantinople to China and back, purloining silk worms in the process. This led to a domination of the European Silk trade by Byzantium for the proceeding 8 centuries:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smuggling_of_silkworm_eggs_into...

iwwr• 13 years ago

Don't forget the fall of the Mongol empire, and then of the successor states. It was only really during the Mongol age that the land-based high-volume trade could exist along the routes of the Silk Road.

discardorama• 13 years ago

The Americas started rising in the 1600s. That would preclude them as a factor in the Silk Road's decline.

adrusi• 13 years ago

But they were discovered in the late 1400s, resulting in a change of interest. Nations invested in New World colonies with similar goals as their trade with China. It would follow that trade with China decreased as resources were directed elsewhere.

btilly3• 13 years ago

If you believe this, then you were probably educated in the USA.

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!

nl2• 13 years ago

The Spanish treasure fleets which striped South & Central America of much of its gold first started sailing in the early 1500s. Even in the 1490's (soon after Columbus) Spain was getting significant amounts of Gold & Silver from America.

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.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Merv

cpleppert2• 13 years ago

That is a nice triplet of reasons but all of them occur after the decline of the silk road in the mid-fourteenth century with the devastation of the black death that economically weakened Europe and directly contributed to the the fragmentation of the mongol empire.

jacques_chester• 13 years ago

This article makes a case that 3 products and one trace element are the major drivers of Eurasian history up until the modern era:

http://skepticlawyer.com.au/2013/04/29/selenium-silk-spices-...

rmc• 13 years ago

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.

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?

g8oz• 13 years ago

Are you sure the decline of the Middle East was a result of the Silk Road fading in importance? A better argument is that it was the other way around.

niico• 13 years ago

Wow, now thats taking journalism to a whole other level.

guard-of-terra4• 13 years ago

I thought this route was financially impossible. Looks like I'm proven wrong.

jowiar• 13 years ago

This is a pretty sweet/different use of D3. If you poke through the source, you end up with this file:

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).

hippich• 13 years ago

I see mentions of security, but from pictures it is just few men without any (visible) weapon most of the time. Even given these men, i believe on a so long distance, there are many desert places, where nobody is present.

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?

Cthulhu_3• 13 years ago

Well, with security forces, of course. I'm also pretty sure that, outside of required stops for customs offices, these trains will just keep on going. And third, that crime and hijacking isn't actually as big a risk or common happening as people may think.

guard-of-terra4• 13 years ago

Kazakh steppes are not your wild west and laptops are not gold bars.

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).

jamesdelaneyie• 13 years ago

That soviet train tracking system looks beautiful. Wouldn't mind that on the wall of my office.

damian2000• 13 years ago

Pretty old school, and the fact it still works after 20+ years says something... they must have good maintenance engineers working there.

guard-of-terra4• 13 years ago

They have maintenance engineers who have no choice but to keep it working because nobody is going to replace it :)

guard-of-terra4• 13 years ago

Pre-computer, pre-plastic industrial interfaces generally look beautiful. You can see actual graphic design that went in.

See for example http://www.tema.ru/travel/dubna.2009/ near the bottom of page.

haberman2• 13 years ago

Wow, the presentation of the photos really made an impression on me -- it's just like Harry Potter. It's amazing that even after almost 10 years of YouTube, having video presented to you in a slightly different way can give you a feeling that you're experiencing the future.

mmanfrin5• 13 years ago

It's strange to think that within a decade we will probably have electronics to a point where we'll read moving-picture stories like this on paper-like devices -- straight out of Harry Potter.

kabdib• 13 years ago

Are you being snarky? They were randomly greyed out and then just black for me.

madiator• 13 years ago

I guess you did not notice the animated GIFs? Edit: or may be those are videos?

brentm• 13 years ago

Agreed. I personally find very short high quality video with no sound to be more pleasurable to view than short videos with sound. The first few times I used Vine I had my phone on vibrate and thought it was so smart of them to not include sound. Of course Having sound is nice sometimes but when you're browsing a bunch of short videos I think the sound kind of ruins it. Not to mention it's harder to produce a quality 6 second video if you need to account for what the viewers are going to be hearing too.

TeMPOraL• 13 years ago

Bit off-topic, but related:

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.

bergie• 13 years ago

A friend showed me the HTC One recently. Apparently the camera shoots those mini-videos by default, and you can then pick a still from there.

You can also stitch multiple shots into a single one: http://blog.htc.com/2013/05/your-sequence-shots-with-htc-zoe...

arb99• 13 years ago

I think shorter videos are going to become a lot more popular soon. Gif 'videos' have gotten more popular recently (especially on tumblr) and things like vine's 6 second video clips are on the rise. Mobile speeds have caught up where its now possible to download/view videos and also upload a short 6 second video

barbs• 13 years ago

I totally agree. They're like advanced gifs. They really capture the atmosphere.

bluekite2000• 13 years ago

Here is a 6min video of the Vietnam reunification express, taken outside Quy Nhon right after Lunar New Year. The slow rhythm. The lush rice paddies. Old houses with people cooking and children playing. Simply magical!

D9u2• 13 years ago

This reminds me of the book "Danziger's Travels."

http://www.nickdanziger.com/index/books/danzigers-travels/

DaniFong• 13 years ago

Amazing!

Fice2• 13 years ago

Great use of HTML5 video! These clips are in WebM, what is shown in browsers that don't support it?

arjie• 13 years ago

They have MP4 as well.

Fice2• 13 years ago

Firefox DOM Inspector showed that each <video> tag has one src attribute pointing to webm file while I expected to see separate <source> subtags for webm and mp4. It turns out that the video tags and other content are inserted by JavaScript.

mitchty• 13 years ago

Exactly what you'd expect: http://graphics8.nytimes.com/newsgraphics/2013/07/21/silk-ro...

dmazin• 13 years ago

This is pretty much how the future of photojournalism was imagined. The only difference is that it's not on magical video paper, which isn't that far away anyway.

EGreg• 13 years ago

I thought they were writing an article on the Tor-hidden network that is home to tons of black market transactions

dirktheman• 13 years ago

I was suspecting a story, well, the other Silk Road. I was pleasantly surprised by both the journalistic value of the piece and the excellent presentation. I'm on an iPad, and the images and scrolling map worked flawlessly. Superb!

joshfraser• 13 years ago

I appreciated the keyboard shortcuts to jump through the pictures. Loved the attention to detail here.

cclogg• 13 years ago

It's interesting seeing all of the random things that North American companies do around the world that we (in general) have no idea about.

pmorici• 13 years ago

It's a nice design but the article seems like a puff piece to me. Is this really the future of newspapers? Nice graphics combined with a folksy story about transportation trends in the shipping industry?

moocowduckquack• 13 years ago

Well, a puff piece on an interesting detail of the transport industry combined with illustrations could have featured in a major newspaper at any point in the past hundred years, so is more of a continuation than anything else.

WasimBhai• 13 years ago

Pakistan and China are also planning a railway network between China's eastern provinces and sea port in Karachi. Coupled with the above, this can create rail routes between the Europe, east and the far east, i.e., India, Malaysia, Indonesia, Singapore. Amazing.

runn1ng• 13 years ago

...and I was expecting an article about buying drugs through BitCoins. Oh well.

lnanek22• 13 years ago

Good job NYTimes designing another high quality story site. This is what the coder community should have made instead of an exact clone of the last one that caused so much trouble.

pcl• 13 years ago

7000 miles in 18 days is 16 miles per hour on average. The article mentions that the trains move at 50mph, but doesn't say if that's the max speed. But regardless, even if we assume 40mph average, that's a lot of time sitting around not moving at all. I wonder where that time is spent, and how much more of it can be removed from the process. It's presumably largely customs checks, which seems like a straightforward problem to optimize.

Sanddancer• 13 years ago

The gauge breaks are probably a rather significant part of that. Having to offload the cargo, move it to a different set of tracks, load it back up, and then repeat at the other end of the broad gauge tracks adds up to a rather large amount of time. I imagine you could probably shave off at least a day or two if you didn't have to deal with that part of the issue. Furthermore, there are almost certainly a number of places where you'll have to decouple and recouple the cars to a new locomotive when you cross country borders for various nationalistic and tractive reasons. Finally, you have to factor in time spent during crew breaks, crew changes, fueling the train, etc.

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.

NKCSS• 13 years ago

Too bad the video's are very glitchy here on Chrome; black screens, having to scroll up and down various times before something loads; the snow article a while back was a lot better technically.

ww520• 13 years ago

OT: Nice article and nice pictures, but hijacking the up/down arrow keys is a really bad UI design. You don't know what are all the screen sizes out there and changing the behavior of the up/down arrow keys make viewing the pictures very frustrating on a smaller screen computers.

Riding the New Silk Road

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