Data, Visualization, and Art
Editor s Note: For maximum understandability, please first read this article s contextual prerequisite: Where The Buffalo Roamed. To me, as a kid, McDonald s was a monolith: immutable and, barring an act of God, indestructible. After St. Peter let you pass through the Pearly Gates, he d bop down to the local Micky Dee s, mow through the super-sized [...]
The elevator pitch :I m selling all rights to Proximatic, my fast geospatial search system. Proximatic is: Fast: Remarkably high performance for many types of searches. Accurate: Models the earth as an ellipsoid to minimize error. Flexible: Supports a broad range of queries, from simple to complex. Easy to use: Index and search [...]
Here! exclaimed Jebediah as he nosed his schooner onto a fan of fertile loam. Come sundown, a makeshift corral encircled his livestock, and by Sabbath eve, the crown of a crude barn rose above the neighboring hummock. Next spring, a steady procession of ships yielded a healthy crop of farmhouses. Wagon wheels burned a double [...]
Transmissions from a new project on the data frontier: 2013-04-29 23:11Z: Three days wandering landscape of one-billion-plus geolocated Tweets. Overstimulated. Devising computer-aided system to generate density fields. Will calm noise, help to answer important questions: How does global conversation vary over time and space? Windiest place spot with most characters per Tweet in [...]
Last year, according to the U.S. Census Bureau, the world s population topped seven billion, and now stands at approximately 7,077,490,000 as of noon Eastern, April 8, 2013. Now, google 7 billion or all people and you ll see some pretty things, like Fathom s Dencity and bmander s North American DotMap, bobbing in an otherwise emotionless sea of [...]
Now, for your amusement, a pure HTML5+Javascript interpretation of computer science classic The Game of Life: afterLoad(function(){start();}); Why? Well Sixty-some years ago, the first computer operators punched binary machine code into paper tape. Programming was hard. Soon, machine code begat assembly language, assembly language begat ALGOL, ALGOL begat CPL, then BCPL, B, C, and finally, [...]
Hurricane Sandy stripped the political haze from one of climate change s core truths: when the oceans rise, they ll submerge land, inundate homes, and destroy lives. How high will the seas swell? And how fast? No one knows for certain. Science blasted us to the moon and built the Internet, so I put my faith in [...]
Upon first sight of Brent Yorgey s brilliant Factorization Diagrams, I knew that I should take his lovely little dots and make them dance. Our first tango would be inspired by the digital clock, with a separate diagram for each of hours, minutes, and seconds. For example, we d portray 4:34:27 am like so: One night, plans [...]
For hire, instruct me to throw caution to the wind, and I ll gleefully tap dance across the bleeding-edge Web for as long as you like. Here, on this site, however, color me conservative. Sure, the haves drive shiny, freshly-updated, triple-headed, dodeca-core Mac Pros that can handle whatever I throw at them. But I also get [...]
Editor s Note: This article is a recycled concept from several years ago, updated with a new rendering scheme that made it worth sharing again. A while back, I created two fanciful maps of a hypothetical, earth-penetrating, inverse-squared burger force, as broadcast by the 36,000-plus domestic restaurant locations of the eight largest U.S. fast food chains. [...]