The “Marchetti Wall”, A Glider Made Of Soap, and Using Plants As Batteries

This week’s “Linkfest” arrives, with the finest reading material findable on the web

The week has begun. You survived Monday.

So reward yourself with this collection of absorbing reading material — the best I could find for you …

1) 📺 Dramas sink, talk-shows soar: Dataviz of how TV genres have shifted over time

IMDB catalogues the genres of all TV shows since 1945, and Nathan Yau crawled it to produce this fascinating dataviz: The rise and fall of TV genres.

That chart above gives the big view, but it’s worth clicking through to Yau’s full page where he presents all the results in small sub-charts — because they really tell a story about American culture.

Some of the trends are ones you’d expect: Westerns were huge in the early days of TV, but basically vanished in the 1980s. Reality TV is a very small genre until around 2000, when it explodes.

But two trends were more subtle and interesting. Drama shows started off big, but slowly and gradually trended downwards — while talk shows went in the opposite direction: More and more and more and more of them.