More than a million people have used Stephen Wolfram's Personal Analytics for Facebook, a web app that generates a fascinating visual report of your Facebook profile: age, gender, relationship status, and location of your FB friends; the number of your friends' friends and the number of their friends in common with you; your friends' most common first and last names; your most 'liked' post; your FB use by day of the week and time of day; and a word cloud of your posts (like mine, at right). Wolfram, best known as inventor of the computer program Mathematica and the search engine...

27 April, 2013

If the earth were only 100 pixels wide (instead of 12,756 kms.), what would the distance to Mars look like? Two British designers, Jesse Williams and David Paliwoda, have devised a neat interactive animation to show you the answer, along with how far it is to a GPS satellite and the moon. . Don't stop here. Click on the image (or here) to see the animation for yourself. Hint:  Even at an impossible 3x the speed of light, it's a long way off. ("And we put a piece of equipment on it," my friend Jeff P. observed in wonderment.) H/T:  Flowing Data  ...

08 April, 2013

Last week, I posted a photo of Contrarian's home turf that Chris Hadfield, 35th Commander of the International Space Station, had taken from 370 kilometres overhead. An avid photographer, Hadfield has produced scores of images depicting locations all over the earth, including at least 10 of Nova Scotia sites.* You may already know what I managed to miss: that geographer David MacLean and his students at the College of Geographic Sciences in Lawrencetown, NS, have created a database of Hadfield's images (and some by fellow astronaut Thomas H. Marshburn) that you can access through a wonderful, interactive map. MacLean has been kind enough to let...

07 April, 2013

100? 500? 1,000? The correct answer is much higher: more than 22 fatal shootings per day in the first 98 days since the horrific elementary school massacre. Huffpo has an interactive chart: (Please don't just look at the graphic. Click on the link and then on "next.") Astounding....

29 March, 2013

How often has the US attacked targets in Pakistan with unmanned drones, and how many of those killed have been children, civilians, putative insurgents, or "high-value" military targets? The Bureau of Investigative Journalism has prepared an interactive graphic to help answer these questions, which you can try for yourself by clicking the screenshot below.   Definitely worth a look. The bureau summarizes the results: The justification for using drones to take out enemy targets is appealing because it removes the risk of losing American military, it's much cheaper than deploying soldiers, it's politically much easier to maneuver (i.e. flying a drone within Pakistan vs....

27 March, 2013

Last Friday, in one of its periodic displays of  nerdy humor, Google displaced its usual search page logo with an animated gif celebrating Earth's non-collision with Asteroid 2012 DA14, a 50-meter-wide rock that passed within 28,000 meters of our planet—closer than a geostationary communications satellite. Trouble is, another, much smaller meteor chose the same day to collide with Earth, exploding over the Siberian town of Chelyabinsk Oblast with the force of a half megaton nuclear weapon, and injuring 1,500 people below, mostly from flying glass. Google quickly yanked the animation. "Out of respect for those injured in the extraordinary meteor shower in...

18 February, 2013

If you're anything like me, your conception of the human heart comes from text book line drawings and plastic models in doctors' offices. To create a more useful, virtual model, the Barcelona Supercomputing Center used 10,000 parallel processors. The beating heart turns out to be a phenomenally complex electromechanical apparatus—wondrous, and almost spooky, to behold. The center recently released a video simulation, although based on a rabbit's heart rather than a human's. From Emily Underwood via Alexis Madrigal. Journal articles: http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/cnm.1494/full http://www.bsc.es/computer-applications/alya-red-cc  ...

03 January, 2013

"Nine of the 10 warmest years since 1880 have occurred since the year 2000," reports NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies. The first years of the new millennium experienced "sustained higher temperatures than in any decade during the 20th century." Goddard, which monitors global surface temperatures, compiled the findings into an animation showing global temperature trends since 1885.     The animated map charts differences from the average temperature recorded during a baseline period of 1951-1980. Dark Red zones are two degrees Celsius warmer than the baseline; dark blue are two degrees colder. You can download a copy of the animation here. The average incremental...

31 December, 2012

Any idea what this is: Or this? How about this? It's an interactive map (sadly not embeddable), produced by the Bombsight Project, showing every documented bomb strike in the London blitz between October 7, 1940, and June 6, 1941. The project is a joint effort by the University of Portsmouth, the UK National Archhives, and a charity called JISC. On the actual map (but not the screenshots above), viewers can zoom in on a particular dot, then right click for the details: Now let's see the map for Dresden....

10 December, 2012
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