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Ben Willers visualizes minute details of his day to day life. He has created information graphics of everything from his nutritional intake to his bank account activity. The chart above is a record of Willers’ television watching over a four week period using a visual style based on an oscilloscope and includes the programs he watched as well as his attention level while watching them. Willers uses his imagination to produce visually pleasing documents of his activities.
Musical Buoy in Search Towards a New Shore (Dedicated to Melvin Maddocks)
Wood, data, reed | 2009
TED Global Fellow Nathalie Meibach’s sculptures are a little complicated. On the surface they look like pumped-up versions of those wooden bead mazes for children. But Miebach’s work begins by translating weather data from cities into musical scores, which she then uses to build vibrant, whimsical sculptures. She enlists musicians for collaboration in bringing the musical scores to life, which accompany the sculptures on display. You can listen to and download the track on Meibach’s site, where you’ll also find a nice gallery of her work.
via Brain Pickings
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To help us understand earthquakes after the big one in Japan, Smithsonian has republished an article about how scientists study earthquakes of the past to predict and prepare for future quakes. Past disasters left clues behind, like dead cedar trees in Washington state.
In one of the more remarkable feats of modern geoscience, researchers have pinpointed the date, hour and size of the cataclysm that killed these cedars. In Japan, officials had recorded an “orphan” tsunami—unconnected with any felt earthquake— with waves up to ten feet high along 600 miles of the Honshu coast at midnight, January 27, 1700. Several years ago, Japanese researchers, by estimating the tsunami’s speed, path and other properties, concluded that it was triggered by a magnitude 9 earthquake that warped the seafloor off the Washington coast at 9 p.m. Pacific Standard Time on January 26, 1700. To confirm it, U.S. researchers found a few old trees of known age that had survived the earthquake and compared their tree rings with the rings of the ghost forest cedars. The trees had indeed died just before the growing season of 1700.
Although earthquakes still cannot be predicted accurately, the body of data is growing that may lead to better forecasts. Link
(Image credit: Brian Smale)
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The New York Times has a series of interactive maps of the US with which you can study population distribution by race and ethnicity, income, housing (such as mortgage, home value, and rent), and by education. I found that the average household income in my county in 2009 was $21,195, which is 10% less than in the year 2000. The data comes from the US Census Bureau. Link -via Metafilter
What better way to start off a geek fight than to ask who is the greatest movie or TV robot/android? Curtis Silver of Geek Dad did just that by comparing Data from Star Trek, to just about every other android.
For example, just to add fuel to the raging Star Trek vs. Star Wars debate:
Data vs. C3PO
C3PO can understand and translate around six million different forms of communication. Mind you, he was designed and built by a young boy. While the Midi-chlorians might have been high in young Skywalker’s bloodstream, they didn’t help him build a droid with much of a backbone. Meanwhile, in a galaxy far far away Dr. Soong was busy creating a sentient android of his own with not only a backbone, but a badass positronic brain. It’s never made clear how many languages Data can speak, but one has to assume the number is just as high as C3PO. Advantage: Data
What do you think? Who’s the best robot/android that ever lived (well, in sci-fi anyhow)?
Artist Rob Vargas created this graphic using data from a study by the University of California at San Diego. Americans consume 3.6 zettabytes a day. A zettabyte is one billion trillion bytes. That’s a lot of LOLcats!
Link via Fast Company | Artist’s Website
NASA needs lots of help sorting through the hundreds of thousands of images they’ve collected from the surface of Mars. What do do? Make it into a game! Be A Martian combines the work of analyzing those images online with the competition of gaming. In this way, NASA hopes to enlist citizens to help with the huge project.
Nasa hopes the mix of real data and fun will also inspire the planetary scientists of tomorrow.
“We really need the next generation of explorers,” says Michelle Viotti, from the agency’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, which oversees Mars missions.
“And we’re also accomplishing something important for Nasa. There’s so much data coming back from Mars. Having a wider crowd look at the data, classify it and help understand its meaning is very important.”
Link to story. Link to game. -via Metafilter
Andy Woodruff noticed that Ohio has 88 counties, the same number as keys on a piano. So he went to work on a map application that assigns a note to each county. You can play a song on the map (a couple of songs are plotted out for you) or reassign the notes based on census data such as population, number of rental houses, or median age. You can even hear what a route from one place to another sounds like! Link to map. Link to the story behind it. -via the Presurfer
