For the last 12 years, Carter Emmart has been coordinating the efforts of scientists, artists and programmers to build a complete 3D visualization of our known universe. He demos this stunning tour and explains how it's being shared with facilities around the world. (Recorded at TED2010, February 2010 in Long Beach, CA. Duration: 6:57)
Watch Cater Emmart's talk on TED.com, where you can download it, rate it, comment on it and find other talks and performances from our archive of 700+ TEDTalks.
Indeed, this set of maps produced by Doug Mccune (more here) using publicly available data released by the San Francisco government on its DataSF website is breathtakingly beautiful. Thanks to Rudy R for bringing this to our attention.
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Hate to spoil the fun but it has to be said that if we apply the Trifecta checkup, these maps fail at the first question: what is the practical issue being addressed?
As Doug noticed, there is a ridge along Mission Street that appears on pretty much every map regardless of the type of crime. The features on various maps are rather consistent as well -- and I can assure you that those features are consistent with population density.
Alas, if you live in San Francisco and care about crime there, Mission Street is not news. We don't need a sophisticated map to tell us that insight. Same with where prostitution is.
What if you are interested in crime in your local neighborhood? Not these maps either because in creating the relief, Doug must make approximations; the higher the peak, the more collateral activity is created around the peak to avoid discontinuities in the surface. This destroys the local details.
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Still, they are gorgeous to look at, and as Doug alluded to in his disclaimer, we just need to remove our junkcharts glasses to appreciate them.
Here’s what Stormtroopers do when they have some free time. Check out Stéfan’s photostream on Flickr for more photos. Thank you Slaven for the link!
Woa, awesome project, from way back in 1997. Making shoes to make everyone level. What are the social behaviors now…
“Berlin-based artist Hans Hemmert (famous for his work with balloons) threw a party where guests wore shoe-extenders to make them all the same height of 2 meters. Aside from bringing the partygoers all to a common eye level (and eliminating the awkward postures of party talk between the tall and the short), the gathering is lent an infographic nature by the shoes: all made from blue foam, the person’s real height is read in the visual uniformity of the sole instead of at the head—like a walking bar graph.
This (completely underpublished) project, entitled “Level,†is from 1997, produced for the Personal Absurdities show at the Galerie Gebauer Berlin. Finding it now, in 2010, I can’t help but read it as a design event, getting directly at the basic qualities that shape our interactions with others—what does it mean when we all share one height?
Hans Hemmert is part of the art collective Inges Idee. Check out their site for more amazing projects in public space.â€
"This is a baby generating data in a neonatal ward", according to the latest commercial by IBM. It did remind me that I will need to interpret the visualization of my newborn daughter as soon as I come home today. Now, if we only could synchronize our time-varying trends at night and have less outliers, all would be well...
"The team built custom code that translates spreadsheets of raw numerical data -- derived, in the case of 'Data Baby', from a newborn's respiratory, heart rate, blood pressure, EKG, oxygen saturation, and temperature readings -- into motion paths that move and evolve design elements organically across image sequences. In the spot, patterns gently float up in-frame, seemingly from the surface of a newborn baby resting in a neonatal ward. Ethereal CG life patterns, fractal-like shapes and other visual expressions flow upwards to form a stylized mobile that is captured as a reflection in the baby's eye. These beautiful design elements warmly envelop the baby, delivering an authentic visual representation of the myriad pieces of data made available to doctors with the help of IBM technology." More detailed information at Motion Theory and Pitch Engine.
This, and a few more commercials in the same line of reasoning, are available below. Be sure not to miss the funny behind-the-screens documentary (.mov) of the Data Baby commercial.
Via Motionographer and Fast Company.
Thnkx Peter!
It's Batman. With a lightsaber. Fighting a shark. Don't ask why this is happening. It just is. This tableau is pure id. I want this image to flash before my eyelids before I fall asleep each night. [via Nerdcore]
Offworlder pilots who had no intention of returning to the planet took bets on who could buzz the local freight and commuter blimps without getting ticketed. The trick was to clear the gravity well before the authorities arrived.
Nobody ever talked about the times when an unlucky pilot came in too close.
Concept artist M.C. Barrett says:
I am a nerd artist. I work at ArenaNet, drawing monsters and castles and such for people to do magic to and make them into a game called Guild Wars.
You can see the Guild Wars influence in these images, but they are awesome on their own.
See more of Barrett's work on his blog.
(Thanks for the tip, Thomas Scholes!)
Baby dromaeosaur. Cute little guy.
I love this image of cities carved into the ground rather than rising above it.
Robotic evil princess?
Ruins
Shipwreck
The slug giraffe is going to kick dinoshark's puny ass.
Cartoonist Graham Annable recently commemorated the last season of Lost with "Foggy Memories of Lost," a series of cartoons depicting some of the show's most memorable scenes. Never before has Sayid beating the crap out of Ben looked so adorable.
[Super Punch via Graham Annable's Flickr]
As a kid, I thought the cartoon world could mix with the real one—like in Who Framed Roger Rabbit. I don't think I was entirely wrong. Just look at this odd metal sculpture.
Created by a guy named Neil Dawson, this sculpture is called Horizons and one of the neatest optical illusions I've seen today. Not to mention that it's proof of my cartoon invasion theory. [The Grip]
