
Riding the New Silk Road - pak
http://www.nytimes.com/newsgraphics/2013/07/21/silk-road/
======
btilly
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.

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

~~~
adrusi
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.

~~~
btilly
Actually trade with China increased due to the ease of direct trade.

~~~
cpleppert
The real trade with china didn't begin until silver mining took off in the
1550s. Before that, spices and the trade with the 'indies'(India) were the
primary trading interests. Most maps didn't even get the eastern half of the
Indian ocean correct until the mid-1600s and from the east the pacific ocean
was a mystery for longer.

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.

------
haberman
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.

~~~
TeMPOraL
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
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...](http://blog.htc.com/2013/05/your-sequence-shots-with-htc-zoe/)

~~~
haberman
Wow, that's amazing and a superb idea. I always feel like the biggest weakness
of cell phone cameras is that its hard to control exactly when the photo
happens. With videos (from which you can pick a still) this would be way less
of an issue.

Do you know if the HTC One Google Edition does this, or only regular HTC One?

~~~
seabee
According to an HTC rep I spoke to last month, It's part of the HTC camera app
which isn't in stock Android.

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

~~~
easy_rider
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
Who is Marco Polo?

------
dclusin
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.

~~~
Cthulhu_
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.

~~~
potatolicious
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.

------
jowiar
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...](http://graphics8.nytimes.com/newsgraphics/2013/07/21/silk-
road/c7c8fdcb0190b05ef1c7d5efe8c5b6de20a96e52/data/slides.tsv)

In addition, d3's scales are used to set up the variable-rate scrolling (see
kazak.interaction.scroll function).

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

~~~
straight_talk_2
I believe they were RoR early adopters and one of their guys is a leading
contributor to ClojureScript.

~~~
creativityhurts
Not to mention CoffeeScript and Backbone.

~~~
Maxious
Not to mention d3.

------
cm2012
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
They're called
[http://www.reddit.com/r/cinemagraphs](http://www.reddit.com/r/cinemagraphs)

~~~
modfodder
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.

~~~
look_lookatme
I'm being served h264 encoded HTML5 video embeds:

[http://graphics8.nytimes.com/newsgraphics/2013/07/21/silk-
ro...](http://graphics8.nytimes.com/newsgraphics/2013/07/21/silk-
road/assets/media/loading_970.mp4)

The file size is 874k. If it were an animated gif of similar quality, the file
size would be massive.

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

~~~
easy_rider
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.

~~~
CamperBob2
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.

------
rlt3
The presentation for this was incredible.

~~~
ninjazee124
Agree! I had to peak at their JS source to see how it was done! Pretty
impressive.

------
pcl
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
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.

------
cocoflunchy
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/1gq4he)

[http://prntscr.com/1gq5b6](http://prntscr.com/1gq5b6)

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

~~~
D9u
It worked well on my 5 year old netbook. FreeBSD. Xombrero.

------
Ellipsis753
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
You're meant to read the text alongside its picture, and the text is viewable
when the picture is on screen.

~~~
Ellipsis753
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.

------
WasimBhai
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.

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

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

~~~
damian2000
Pretty old school, and the fact it still works after 20+ years says
something... they must have good maintenance engineers working there.

~~~
guard-of-terra
They have maintenance engineers who have no choice but to keep it working
because nobody is going to replace it :)

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

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

~~~
arjie
They have MP4 as well.

~~~
Fice
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.

------
guard-of-terra
I thought this route was financially impossible. Looks like I'm proven wrong.

------
pmorici
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
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.

------
NKCSS
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.

------
lnanek2
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.

------
cclogg
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.

------
hippich
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?

~~~
guard-of-terra
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).

------
ww520
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.

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

------
dirktheman
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!

------
D9u
This reminds me of the book "Danziger's Travels."

[http://www.nickdanziger.com/index/books/danzigers-
travels/](http://www.nickdanziger.com/index/books/danzigers-travels/)

------
runn1ng
...and I was expecting an article about buying drugs through BitCoins. Oh
well.

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

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

~~~
crgt
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."

Read more at [http://www.emarketer.com/Article/How-Do-Internet-Users-
Divvy...](http://www.emarketer.com/Article/How-Do-Internet-Users-Divvy-Up-
Their-Desktop-Mobile-Web-Time/1009841#z3DGsDCzJOCmS5PO.99)

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...

~~~
mynameisvlad
By your own source, news and media is only 5% (/4% as part of the table below
it) of mobile use. This would fall into that category.

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.

~~~
crgt
Right - so, the stats say that there are a lot of people using mobile devices
to surf the web, many of whom are using mobile almost exclusively. A fraction
of the time those users spend on the web is spent on news sites. Does the fact
that those mobile web users split their time across different destinations
really lead you to believe it's not worth optimizing for them?

~~~
mynameisvlad
First of all, the stats don't say that many of them are using mobile almost
exclusively. As I previously said, the way it is written leads me to believe
that "mostly" to them is "more than 50%". Almost exclusively implies a much
higher percentage of use.

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.

~~~
crgt
Huh - so 5% of mobile browsing time dedicated to news sites isn't worth
optimizing for - but the 4% of desktop web browsing time that is dedicated to
news sites (same link) leads you to believe you should optimize (only) the
desktop web experience?

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.

~~~
mynameisvlad
Except that, most of the time, there is no optimizing for the desktop. With
most web developers still creating desktop-first experiences, you only have to
consider whether or not it's worth it to create a mobile experience.

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

------
DaniFong
Amazing!

