I remember my early days of computing: There has been a lot of command line stuff going on (and QBASIC programming). Then came Windows 3.1 et al. on our home computer and Macs at school. Later, at university with Unix there has been more command line action again. Nevertheless, computing has clearly become more graphical … Continue reading The sketchbook holding the GUI design of early Macs
Some meta talk: When you start a blog, you soon realise how much comment spam is out there to try and sneak into your comment sections. Thankfully in the case of this blog, Akismet does a rather good job hunting these “comments” down. Some of those comments are rather obviously spam, trying to advertise some … Continue reading When a comment spamming script loses it
Wikistream shows you the sometimes immense activity that is going on backstage at Wikipedia. If the overall stream gets too fast to grasp anything (yes, that’s rather commonly the case!), you can filter what is shown to you by country and type of event. Pressing “P” pauses the stream of events. In these days where … Continue reading All the edits, deletions and insertions of Wikipedia in real time? – Voilà!
After the last post I have to report about a movie again already: Part of the Off Book series by PBS Arts, the short documentary gives a glimpse into computer generative art. Computer generative art in the words of Luke Dubois (starring in the documentary) is
[art] where you surrender control over some aspect what’s going down to some [computer] process.
Generative Art: Computers, Data, and Humanity portrays three artists and their work.
In Turning Data Into Music and Stories Luke Dubois tells how he turned casualties, missing and refugees of 8 years of war in Iraq into an 8 minute musical piece. Dubois says the reason for him to do that was, that the Iraq war is the first conflict of the U.S. where we have more data than information. I am not sure whether this is true from the information side (i.e. whether people were better informed about other wars), but modern gizmos and equipment certainly do produce heaps of data and thus maybe, in fact, make us know or feel less about what is going on.
I also found myself agreeing to Dubois saying:
This century is the century of data. That’s gonna be the defining thing.
I would add to that: and how we approach that heap of data. We amass such amounts of data that turning it into valuable, actionable information is getting harder and harder. In some fields, where data was hard or expensive to get, the situation has changed and we now seek for ways how to filter and intelligently assess incoming data streams. This is certainly true for many fields in Geography.
A sweet piece of art, wonderfully executed (and using Street View) – enjoy it in full screen: (Head over to Vimeo, if the embedded version doesn’t work for you. It often doesn’t for me.) The film was made by Tom Jenkins at The Theory film production company. (found via FlowingData) Continue reading Address Is Approximate
“Einigkeit und Recht und Frei-ei-heit…!” But before we get to that, as explained earlier, there are different levels in my ZIPScribble Maps: Level 1 ZIPScribble Map: Only the first digit of the postcode is compared. Thus, a discontinuity is detected, for example, between postal codes 8679 and 9000, but no discontinuity is detected between 8399 and 8400. … Continue reading ZIPScribble Map Germany
“Allons enfants de la patrie…!” But before we get to that, as explained earlier, there are different levels in my ZIPScribble Maps: Level 1 ZIPScribble Map: Only the first digit of the postcode is compared. Thus, a discontinuity is detected, for example, between postal codes 8679 and 9000, but no discontinuity is detected between 8399 and 8400. … Continue reading ZIPScribble Map France
Earlier I’ve blogged a two-parts tutorial on how to create ZIPScribble Maps using the Processing visualization framework. The map uses a background I made with TileMill and CC-BY-licensed postcode data from the Geonames gazetteer portal. (By the way, here’s an informative short TileMill tutorial by Pierre La Baume) As explained earlier, there are different levels … Continue reading ZIPScribble Map Italy
Today’s xkcd features a sociology of map projections. Hilarious! :) Mercator? You’re not really into maps. Take that, Google, Bing, Yahoo, Mapquest, …! PS if you’re not an xkcd regular: Don’t miss the mouseover caption. Continue reading What your map projection says about you
I’ve been looking for a quick and easy solution to scrape an HTML table into a usable format. Of course, there are numerous solutions to do that in some small Perl/PHP/Python programme, but I found another path especially elegant. It turns out, Google Docs has an importHTML() function in Spreadsheets: =importHTML(“http://www.parlamentswahlen-2011.ch/resultate-a-z.html”,”table”,1) scrapes the first (1) … Continue reading Scraping tabular data from the web
For once for a slightly different map: PopSci has a geo-centric map of the visible universe as it was acquired over time, from 1950 (top) to 2011 (bottom), precisely: Different object categories are coloured differently in the map. For example, the inner green ring above consists of minor planets, the blue dots are stars. In … Continue reading Map of the Universe
NPR has a nice video on their website with a playful visualization of how humanity grew to count 7 billion living people. Using more or less leaky glasses as a metaphor, the video visualizes the population growth which has been taking place in different regions of the world since AD 1000. Hitting the 7 billion … Continue reading Visualizing the growth to 7 billion
