A lot of energy is produced when a moving vehicle slows or stops. Usually that energy is wasted — dissipated as heat in the vehicle's brake drums. Hybrid vehicles capture this energy by converting it to electricity for storage in a battery and later re-use for propulsion. GE, which makes hybrid locomotive engines, produced this video to illustrate the forces at play. Hat tip: Flowingdata....

09 January, 2011

Our old friend Hans Rosling, the Swedish public health statistician whose Gapminder software brings demographic trends vividly to life (previous menions here and here), is back with a new BBC video tracking the health and wealth of nations over two centuries: If you'd like to drill down into the data and watch a particular country's progress or compare two or three countries, the Gapminder file on which this video is based will let you do that. You can also download the software to your own desktop. Amazing stuff, and should give pause to those who are certain the world is going to...

19 December, 2010

That's what Atlantic tech blogger Alexis Madrigal calls Google's Books Ngram Viewer. Google has scanned about 10 percent of all the books ever published. Enter any word or phrase into the search box, and the viewer returns a graph of its frequency of appearance in books published over the last two centuries. Note that the searches are case sensitive, and you can compare the relative frequencies of up to four five different words or phrases, separating them by commas in the search box. Say, "Nova Scotia" and "Ontario," for example: Try it yourself, and please send me any interesting pairings you come up with. Madrigal's...

16 December, 2010

According to this crowd-sourced interactive graphic from priceofweed.com, Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, and PEI have the best retail reefer rates on the continent: This is a screenshot. Click here to view the interactive chart, then click on any dollar sign to get data on that state or province. Detailed Nova Scotia price reports here. (Click any of the Police reporters might want to bookmark this chart for ready reference next time the boys in blue claim the half dozen, half-grown plants they seized in Upper West Boot have a street value of 47 gazillion dollars. Hattip: Floatingsheep.com....

15 December, 2010

Quebec designer Kamel Makhloufi has pixelated the Iraq War body count: blue pixels for U.S. soldiers; green for Iraqi; grey for enemy, and orange for civilians. The image on the left sorts by nationality; on the right by time....

08 November, 2010

Where do refugees come from? Where do they go? Which countries produce the most refugees? Which countries take the most in? Christian Behrens, a German designer who studied at Concordia, answers those questions visually with a series of interactive infographics that grew out of a Potsdam University of Applied Sciences class project on mapping global tendencies. Based on the annual Refugee Report of the UN High Commission for Human Rights, the graphic lets us look at refugee flows from several different perspectives. Which country took in the most refugees in 2008? The US? Nope. Canada? Not even close. Pakistan tops the list, at...

18 October, 2010

Benoît Mandelbrot, 85, the iconoclastic mathematician who coined the term fractal and helped inject the digital revolution with creative artistry, died last Thursday at his home in Cambridge, Madssachusetts. Here, in a TED talk, he talks about his work: ...

18 October, 2010

Most of us know, intellectually, that standard Mercator projection maps grossly distort the relative sizes of countries. In particular, the world maps we most often use exaggerate the size of first world, northern-hemisphere countries like Canada, the USA, and the nations of Europe, while under-representing the size of third-world countries clustered around the equator. But do we grasp this distortion in any visceral sense? Quite the contrary: Each time we look at a distorting world map, we are subliminally reinforced in the prejudice that we're big, and they're small. GUI-designer Kai Krause strikes a blow against what he calls immappancy with this...

14 October, 2010

In light of tHe the Deepwater Horizon blowout, the GOOD company has produced an infographic:  Click here for a larger image. Hat tip:JLDB...

17 June, 2010
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