I’ve just come across this infographic on the eternally-fantastic good.is webzine.

I’ve pasted it above to give you an idea, but I highly recommend you click through to the interactive version.

The purpose of all the little people standing in their serried ranks like that is to demonstrate visually the number of Americans who took part in volunteer work last year. Some of the individual trends are rather piquant, such as the most popular voluntary activity among 45 – 54 year olds being that of a religious nature, and the fact that in every age group, women consistenly  out-volunteer men.

But overall, this is a happy story. In 2009, while in the grip of a recession, around a quarter of Americans of all ages chose to give up their time for free to do something for others. I hope it wasn’t just because some of them were unemployed.

I’ve just stumbled across this amazing phenomenon on Flickr. Take a look at this image:

by Jason E. Powell

I was pretty struck by the simplicity of the idea: take an old photo, hold it up so it is contiguous with the location as it is now, and snap. Afterwards, you can make all kinds of grandiose statements about change and progress and stuff, but I think the beauty of it is that it needs no real explanation. Compare and contrast and marvel.

Turns out, there is a whole community devoted to doing this on Flickr (I love the internet). They call it ‘Looking into the Past’. Some of the images are real, some are created with software, but they are all arresting.

This one’s my personal favourite, although I would highly recommend you browse the whole gallery.

by Jason E. Powell

She’s walking a rabbit, for goodness’ sake.

A few simple facts. When a relationship ends, you feel sad. People deal with this in a variety of ways. They get drunk, they cry, they get depressed… And some people write obituaries for the deceased relationship.

Kathleen Horan, a reporter at WNYC News, has set up Relationship Obituaries, a site which allows anyone to register and post a public obituary for a relationship that has passed on. In the ‘about’ section of the site, Horan explains that she first had the idea when she broke off a relationship around the same time that her father died. She rather graphically describes the emotional turmoil of the time as being like ‘guts mashed on the pavement after a car crash’, but found that the process of writing her father’s obituary helped her to gain a sense of perspective that she lacked about the end of her relationship. So she did the logical thing and wrote one for that too.

Which led her to set up the website, offering a space for this strange adopted ritual to the world. Bizarre as it may sound, it’s well worth a peruse: some of them are funny, some tragic, and some just downright odd.

There’s also a book, published by HarperCollins last month, which is described on their website as a ‘voyeuristic romp through the unexplored underbelly of love and life’. Not for me, but some of you might fancy it. This video was made to promote the book. Let’s just say you’ve got to have a lot of guts to ask a stranger about their ex’s ’signature smell’ without cracking up:

And before you get on with your day, have a look at this video – it opens with her asking a dead, squished pigeon on the road “if you could have a funeral for love what would it be?” Priceless.

Take a look at the ‘most read’ articles at TimesOnline (it’s the white box over on the right of the page).

Topping the list is this article, about the identity of ‘The Stig’ from Top Gear.

Below that, is this – surely the most important and interesting thing happening right now in the world?

And yet, there are more people (or Times-readers, rather – there’s a difference) who want to read about Top Gear than the Inauguration.

Baffling. But it does provide a new perspective…

UPDATE: Now Michelle Obama’s dress is the most important thing to Times-readers. That’s more like it.