The New York Times has posted eight interactive satellite images of tsunami-ravaged cities in Japan. By moving the blue slider in the center of the image left and right, you can transition back and forth between the before and after images. (You can't do that on the screenshot shown here, only by going to the NYT site.) H/T: Richard Stephenson...

14 March, 2011

WeatherSpark, still in beta testing, seems to have everything: Past, present, and future Canadian data with customizable interactive fields for sun, clouds, precipitation, temperature, barometric pressure, wind speed, and wind direction. Here's a screenshot, but click through to the real McCoy. Very nice! H/T Nathan Yeo....

14 March, 2011

Steve Nikkel's interactive map will tell you: As will his free iPhone app. Note that, in Nova Scotia, Telus uses Bell towers, and Rogers has frightfully poor coverage outside Metro. (This map could come in handy if you're trying to grow organic garlic.) H/T: Steve Manley...

09 March, 2011

I've never been to Rome and never seen the Sistine Chapel. If you're in the same boat, check out this interactive, 360-degree, wrap-around representation of the chapel interior produced for the Vatican last year by Villanova University. Pretty neat. (The image below is just a screenshot. Click here for the full 3D effect.) H/T: Roland McCaffrey...

02 March, 2011

German defence minister Karl-Theodor zu Guttenberg, known in tabloid headlines as Baron Cut-and-Paste, resigned Tuesday following revelations that parts of his doctoral thesis had been cribbed without acknowledgement from the work of other writers. It wasn't justa few lines, either. Gregor Aisch, who runs a German data visualization website, has produced a graphical depiction of zu Guttenberg’s borrowings. [Larger version here.] Dark red lines represent complete or masked plagiarism, while the lighter red depict other categories of plagiarism. Longer bars correspond to normal text, while smaller bars represent material in footnotes. Altogether brazen. For the data underlying his image, Aisch drew on another...

02 March, 2011

The NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center Scientific Visualization Studio has released a very cool animation showing the Earth's water cycle over 25 days, based on real data. (Click on the image below to view the animation). NASA explains: Water regulates climate, predominately storing heat during the day and releasing it at night. Water in the ocean and atmosphere carries heat from the tropics to the poles. The process by which water moves around the earth, from the ocean to the atmosphere to the land and back to the ocean, is called the water cycle....

21 February, 2011

If your supercomputer is going on jeopardy, how do you give it an interesting voice and an appealing face? That's the problem that confronted the Automata Studio and technology artist Joshua Davis, hired by IMB to give Watson personality. If you can't see this video, try here. H/T: Nathan Yau....

15 February, 2011

If someone asks you that on a first date, they could be asking a proxy question. OK Cupid, the dating site that uses its database to research the sociology of romance, has been considering the best questions to ask on a first date if your real goal is to find out something altogether different: Among all our casual topics, whether someone likes the taste of beer is the single best predictor of if he or she has sex on the first date. H/T: Nathan Yau...

10 February, 2011

Google's ability to produce its Street View images still leaves me gobsmacked. Now see what the land survey industry has been up to in the digital technology department: Using a portable, eye-safe, laser scanner, and traveling at posted speeds, this vehicle collects data and imagery with survey grade accuracy: Yes, they need a better video, but still...

19 January, 2011

The frequency with which certain terms appear in Google search queries foreshadows reports of actual 'flu activity from agencies like the Centres for Disease Control by about two weeks. Google tracks the frequency of 'flu-linked search terms and maps the results by region. The current map for Canada shows low frequency in the west and east, moderate in Saskatchewan and Manitoba, and high in Ontario and Quebec. This is a screenshot. The actual map is interactive, so you can click on a province and see the search trends there over time. Check out the explanatory video. H/T: Steve Manley, 'flu sufferer....

13 January, 2011
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