This blog is now rarely updated, but remains as an archive of bits and pieces I've collected from around the internet. To see what's caught my eye more recently, find me on twitter.
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:
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:
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:
Watch this video (if you're not a fan of spiders, I'd skip past this one). For the first minute it's an oddly absorbing and eerie clip of a spider immobilising an ant, but make sure you keep watching till the end. It's worth it:
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Complicated physicsy stuff is generally too much for my biology-orientated brain, so this animated comic on dark matter is great. They highlight how little we actually know about the fundamentals of our universe
"We have no idea! we're only now, by looking at the details, realising what the questions we should be asking are. There's a huge amount of exploration left to do."
Isaac Asimov's three rules of robotics - a man ahead of his time. I want to feature the second part of this interview, but can't find it on Youtube. Go watch it HERE (it's only a minute long!)
"It seems to me that as robots become continually more advanced that people will not try to keep it entirely a matter of metal and electrons, that there will be cases in which attempts will be made to make use of the very great flexibility and minituarisibility of organic living tissue. At the same time we will have human beings who will make more and more use of artificial organs of metal and plastic. We may have a society in which robots will drift away from total metal toward the organic. And human beings will drift away from the total organic toward the metal and plastic. And that somewhere in the middle, they may eventually meet."
That's from 1965 - I love predictions of the future from the past. When you look at BrainGate & the TED talk I posted in the last entry on this blog, you can see that maybe we are going in that direction. Interesting stuff:
And finally in a science-heavy post, this TED talk is well worth a watch. It's concerning the direction of evolution in contemporary humans. Are we now entering a stage of human-driving evolution? Great stuff here, and also notice how elegant, simple and beautiful his visual aids are. A great talk with the perfect slides to accompany it:
The scale of some things are completely impossible to fully understand. CLICK HERE for Nikon's "Universcale". This sort of thing exists in many forms, but this one is very slick.
Similar, but better, is this. CLICK HERE and play with the solar system. Solar System Scope. Wicked.
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As Infographics continue to be the supercoolest thing around, Visual.ly is launching, and this is a very pretty video all about it. The smooth animation and typography make me happy:
Very much related, this page here has a lovely collection of visualisations.
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Space Quotations is a great assortment of quotations from people looking on earth from space
It suddenly struck me that that tiny pea, pretty and blue, was the Earth. I put up my thumb and shut one eye, and my thumb blotted out the planet Earth. I didn't feel like a giant. I felt very, very small.
— Neil Armstrong
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Action for happiness is a new, interesting, and beautifully designed initiative. I love the idea of using science and our developing understanding to help the most important thing - people's happiness. And these posters are lovely. Simple, obvious advice, but things that everyone would benefit from considering a bit more:
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I can't get over how incredible BrainGate is. The Observer this weekend had a feature on this new technology that's allowing totally paralysed people to move objects with their mind via a chip in their brain. Science fiction becomes science fact, and this is going to make lives infinitely better. Amazing stuff, read more HERE - you won't regret it.
Reminds me of this TED talk - slightly less impressive, but still amazing (perhaps the fact that this is comparatively unimpressive is evidence of how incredible these developments are:
"Beware of long and preposterous words. Beware of jargon. If you are a science writer this is doubly important. If you are a science writer, you occasionally have to bandy words that no ordinary human ever uses, like phenotype, mitochondrion, cosmic inflation, Gaussian distribution and isostasy. So you really don't want to be effulgent or felicitous as well. You could just try being bright and happy."
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Got 9 minutes to spare? You couldn't spend it any better than watching this. Seemingly damming of humans for much of the video, Carl Sagan ends with fantastic optimism and foresight. So absorbing:
That's all for now. I mean to post all of these as I find them in a more constant stream, with proper thoughts on each item, but with exams approaching I haven't really got time, so they all come out in occasional vomit-like bursts. I trust my loyal readers will forgive me...
Degrade species and biology to statistical elements
Quote numerous papers for self-evident statements
I love this - directly addressing so many science journals' refusal to embrace engaging writing, opting to instead favour bland and depressingly functional literature. There's no need for cutting edge science, which should be the most exciting and engaging thing around, to be dull. (via Lone Gunman)
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You know those incredible Hubble images you see all the time? Well, here's how they're actually made:
Turns out it's not quite as simple as just a camera with a super long zoom.
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A very nice video about the value of biodiversity:
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I've updated my website with a little bit of new work:
Like this illustration for an article about Pixar:
Some cool things from Wired. First, these city posters are just wickedawesome:
Go check out the rest.
Also, in this month's edition, they give advice on how to discover new species. My dreams of discovering a new species of tiger and calling it the SuperAnt live on.
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Blue Peter gets a little bit sneered at these days, but its been enthusiastically encouraging young people for so long, and I like this story:
A boy called Anthony, from London (NW11... that's where I live) wrote to Blue Peter asking for help in his attempts to "make people or animals alive". He is now a record-breaking tissue engineer, and says of Blue Peter's reply:
If [Biddy Baxter's] letter had shown any hint of ridicule or disbelief I might perhaps never have trained to become a medical scientist or been driven to achieve the impossible dream, and really make a difference to a human being's life. I remember being thrilled at the time to have been taken seriously. Actually, even nowadays I am thrilled when people take my ideas seriously.
This may seem very strange, but I think I no how to make people or animals alive. Why Im teling you is because I cant get the things I need.
A list of what I need.
1. Diagram of how evreything works. [inside youre body.]
2. Model of a heart split in half. [both halvs.]
3. The sort of sering they yous for cleaning ears. [Tsering must be very very clean.]
4. Tools for cutting people open.
5. Tools for stiches.
6. Fiberglass box, 8 foot tall, 3 foot width.
[DIAGRAM]
7. Picture of a man showing all the arteries.
Sorry but in number 6 in the list the box needs lid. If you do get them on 1st March I can pay £10, £11, £12, £13 or £14.
Send your answer to me,
Love from Anthony,
London, NW11
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Dear Anthony,
Thank you very much for your letter. It was nice to hear from you again after such a long time and we are sorry we have been delayed replying.
We are receiving over 4,000 letters every week and are having difficulty answering them as quickly as we would like.
We were interested to hear that you think you know how to make living people - and your list of necessary items intrigued us!
We are sorry we can't help you at all, but we wondered if you had thought of talking to your family doctor - he might be glad to help you with some diagrams and other information.
We are sending you a photograph of the "Blue Peter" team - it has been signed specially for you.
With best wishes from Valerie, John, Peter, Lesley and all of us on the programme.
Yours sincerely
B (Biddy Baxter)
Editor
Blue Peter
I hope they are still taking the time to reply to letters as personally as this - just look what difference it can make.
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In completely unrelated news, what a great use of facebook this is:
The Smithsonian had too many fish to classify, so crowdsourced it, and got 5,000 samples identified in 24 hours.
They created a photo album of the catalog of the specimens they had collected on Facebook, and asked their fellow colleagues for help. Of course, these weren’t any kind of friends. “The majority of people commenting held a PhD in ichthyology or a related field, and hailed from a great diversity of countries including the United States, Canada, France, Switzerland, Colombia, Peru, Venezuela, Guyana and Brazil,”
Clever.
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Finally, technology like this is incredible:
I can't wait till I can order my very own Iron Man suit.
First, today on the Guardian website a great interactive visualisation of the Middle East protests popped up. It's easy (well, I find it easy) to get lost with the sequence of events that lead to the explosion of activity, and this is so clear, and so easy to use. I like it. Click on the image to go check it out.
Next, the increasingly furious debate over the ethics of the various "Help Japan" posters is fascinating. Look at these:
Are they helping to raise awareness, and designers using their skills to do what they can for a good cause? Or are they indulgent, self-promotional and innapropriate? These posters (and many others like them) have raised thousands of pounds to help the relief, but some people feel uncomfortable, and suggest that they imply that people should need a reward (a poster) to encourage them to donate. Different opinions are all over the place (1 and 2, for example. The comments in the articles are equally, if not more, interesting than the articles themselves). One major, and reasonable, complaint is that these posters (/t-shirts etc) are raising awareness for something that isn't lacking attention (at the moment - perhaps the best role of these pieces is in overcoming the drop in attention that is inevitable of the news cycle), and are as self-promotional as charitable. I think the important thing here is that every single designer selling work for this cause is raising vital money, and I have no hesitation in assuming that their motives are entirely admirable. The best argument I've seen on this is here(via @brainpicker) - the point is, everyone wants to help, everyone feels helpless, and people really are just doing what comes naturally. Completely good intentions should be appreciated as such, I think. That said, it might best best, perhaps, if the designers refrain from putting their logos/websites at the bottom, no matter how small, and instead have a call to action (eg donation phone lines etc). Anyway, interesting ethical stuff.
On a lighter note, this video makes me feel that my doodles in my biology lectures were inadequate. Skip to about 2 minutes in for the great stuff:
100 posts and still stuttering on. Here's all the stuff I've stumbled across in the last month. There's absolutely loads here, and I realise that nobody would ever be able to wade through this whole post. Either I'm wasting too much time on the internet, I'm very easily pleased, or I have an insatiable curiosity. I'll let you decide which:
SCIENCE(ish) etc.
I can't embed it, but click here to go check out the really nice slideshow of microscopic images. Science/art. Scart.
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Carl Sagan has one of the best voices I've ever heard, and he seems to have some great things to say with it. This mash-up of his voice-over and some images from the egyptian protests is completely absorbing. I'll be seeking out his work/tv shows as soon as I can (probably when I don't have a degree to do):
"a lonely whale with vocal problems whose love song supposedly chases lady whales away."
On the one hand, this is the sort of humanising of nature that I'm not awlays a huge fan of, but on the other hand it's the kind of great (/so sad) story that can engage and excite people who might normally not have much interest. Interesting story either way.
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I love this story:
State censorship won't keep North Koreans from learning about the civil resistance in North Africa and the Middle East. Thousands of helium balloons will be soon released over the Korean border with information about the uprisings that toppled the Tunisian and Egyptian governments.
"From a very early age, perhaps the age of five or six, I knew that when I grew up I should be a writer"
That makes me wonder if the very best people at anything are just built that way and achieve greatness through an internal drive and ambition. Maybe not, but an interesting thought. The essay makes for good reading anyway - well worth it if you have a minute.
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In a similar vein, watch an interview with Isaac Aasimov (this is part 2 - CLICK HERE for all the other bits) Really nice ideas about learning and computers etc, and interesting to see how he imagines the internet and computer access will drive people to control their own learning, and hence develop a true passion and enjoyment for learning.
"Once we have computer outlets in every home, each of them hooked up to enormous libraries where anyone can ask any question and be given answers, be given reference materials, be something you’re interested in knowing, from an early age, however silly it might seem to someone else… that’s what YOU are interested in, and you can ask, and you can find out, and you can do it in your own home, at your own speed, in your own direction, in your own time… Then, everyone would enjoy learning."
The main problem in what he says is that he imagines that everyone has the same capacity for loving learning that he does, but maybe not everyone does. He is right, though, that there's an enjoyment that everyone gets from learning in at least some respects, and people like the power and comfort that knowledge gives them - that's often underestimated when we consider modern education. He makes tons of interesting points, and it's great to hear a such great hopefulness and energy. He talks fantastically and says loads of things that still apply today. Also go and watch part 3 - you get a bit more about his personal approach to life, and it's really entertaining:
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Beautiful video raising a potentially big issue:
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If you have more time than me, I suspect there's a universe of great stuff in the Lone Gunman's Year In Review.
ART, DESIGN + MISCELLANY etc.
Hilarious (and nicely photographed) American streets named after English places, badly:
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Click on the image below and go through the slideshow of "Pictures of the Year":
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Fire insurance maps from 1880-1920. Sounds horrendously dull, but check out the covers. Bloody brilliant:
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Finally, remember the London Olympic logo that everyone loves so much? Apparently it's not just ugly, but actually offensive. Iran threatening to boycott the olympics due to the racist logo that reads "zion". Read more here. Classic.
Phew. See my "best of" post for the usual sources - particular note that many of these came from Brain Pickings/Curiosity Counts; Coudal Partners; Animade; New Scientist; etcetcetc.
The latest Feltron Report is out and is, as always, lovely. This one looks at the whole life of his late father, so takes on a slightly different meaning.
Also, this talk he gave about his previous projects is quite itneresting:
