#109

First, this is nice. All our trips to Mars, visualised. Particularly interesting is the change in countries involved, and the improving success rate. Click here for a larger version (or, while we're talking space & stuff, here's what to do if you bump into an alien.)

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Secondly, these visualisations are quite clever. If the world was just one hundred people...

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This video is weird geeky awesomeness. I don't understand it, but I like it:

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Google's Science Fair finalists have been released. I think this is great, and there are some really clever ideas in there. Love everything about it, really. Go check that shit out.

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I love great data visualisation and the trend of data journalism and design and general enthusiasm is fantastic, so I thought this talk would be great - Aaron Koblin: Artfully visualizing our humanity. There are some very pretty visualisations of flight traffic at the start, and it's worth watching just because this guy was involved in the incredibly good Arcade Fire thing, but in truth most of the projects he discusses are fairly pointless, and fail to make any truly interesting products or reveal anything. It may be impending exam dampening my enthusiasm, but this to me shows that getting lots of people involved in something that is cleverly designed and built is no guarantee of making anything truly worthwhile.


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On a much cheerier note, this isn't the very best or most exciting timelapse video in the world, but it's about London, and it made me smile:

You've Got to Love London from Alex Silver on Vimeo.
  

#107; Rings & Oil

What would it be like if the earth had rings like Saturn? This video starts slowly, but skip to 1:00 for some very cool imaginings of what the rings would look like from earth.

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This is a video about our use of oil and the Deepwater-Horizon oil spill. I'm mostly posting it because I love the animation. It's all slick and beautiful. Some of the stats are very nice, and although it gets increasingly preachy as the clip moves on, it makes some good points. Worth remembering that oil spills themselves don't tend to have anywhere near the long-term environmental impacts that they are perceived to - public hysteria surrounding spills is huge relative to the long term ecosystem effects that tend to be seen. Anyway, very nice animation:

Oil'd from Chris Harmon on Vimeo.