The color of the sky changes through the day and into the night and there are subtle differences every day with clouds, pollution, etc. Mike Bodge use this idea in N SKY C, a project with a simple concept. Take a picture with a webcam of the New York City sky every five minutes, take the average color, and post it to the site. N SKY C is the result. Roll over grids to see the picture that was taken.
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Terrance Chang shows us flight patterns at San Francisco International Airport using long-exposure photography so that over time, you can see where airplanes take off from and land.
It's true. Anything that moves at night and emits light is bound to be interesting via long-duration shutter speed (e.g. a Roomba, fireflies, and WiFi networks).
Catch the full set of photos here, which are also available as prints.
Gold star if you can think of other interesting paths or phenomena that'd look amazing via long-exposure.
Love 'em or hate 'em, tag clouds, or the more recent incarnation, Wordles, are everywhere (especially in slide presentations). Well, Wordle wasn't enough. I mean, you can't even make shapes with it. Gees. That's where Tagxedo comes in. It works pretty much just like Wordle, except you have one more option. You can select from a variety of shapes to arrange your words into. Score.
The Very Large Telescope (VLT) in an array of four telescopes operated by European Southern Observatory, and together the array "can achieve an angular resolution of around 1 milliarcsecond, meaning it could distinguish the gap between the headlights of a car located on the Moon." I don't know much about telescopes or lenses, but I think that's good. Watch the array at work, exploring galaxies far, far away and boldly going where no man has gone before in this breath-taking time-lapse.
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As we all know, the iPad has changed how many people interact with online content as well as provided interaction designers with a new vehicle to mess around in. Your hands aren't glued to mouse and keyboard anymore. They're all over the place, depending on what application you're using or game you're playing. George Kokkinidis, of Design Language News, has a brief look at these differences through his fingerprints:
My method involved cleaning the iPad’s surface with a microfiber cloth, using an app for a short amount of time, then turning the screen off. Next, I photographed the iPad, positioning a light source and some black matte board to limit distracting reflections. I then brought the photographs into Adobe Illustrator, and created vectors of the iPad and the fingerprints to emphasize the data.
The method is so simple but super effective. I'm sure just about everyone recognizes that pattern on the bottom left.
[Design Language News via Waxy]
Nancy Duarte of Duarte Design has a look at Martin Luther King, Jr.'s "I Have a Dream Speech" and why it was so good:
MLK’s “I Have a Dream” speech is not only literarily brilliant, its structure follows the presentation form perfectly, by traversing back and forth between what is and what could be, and ending by describing what the new bliss of equality looks like. In addition, MLK carefully chooses phrases and metaphors that resonate deeply with his audience.
The transcript is placed on a timeline that follows the "presentation form" and color coded by use of metaphor, repetition, and political and scripture references.
[Video Link via Waxy]
Because you can never get enough videos to remind you how tiny you are compared to the rest of the world. Catch the video below. And a good MLK day to you.
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When you slow down your car, energy dissipates into the air as heat. What if your car could instead make use of that energy? Your car could run that much more efficiently and get more miles per gallon. GE explains such a system called dynamic braking (video below).
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CNNMoney audiolizes the stock market in 2010 with the Dow Piano. Each day's closing level determines the pitch played, and trading volume determines how loudly a note is played. Welcome to Dow Jones the musical.
[CNNMoney | Thanks, Dominique]
Booking flights became so much easier when it all shifted online, but it hasn't changed in years. You put in your preferred dates and times and you get a long list of options. Oftentimes those listings can be a pain as you browse through all of your options. Oh the burden of choice. Hipmunk tries to make flight search easier with a visual interface.
As usual, you enter your origin and destination but instead of plain HTML tables, you get something like the above, and you can sort the options from least to greatest amount of agony. Rectangle lengths represent flight times and are color-coded by airline. Flights with the same take off and arrival times, but priced higher are hidden to help you narrow down quicker.
Hipmunk is still in the early stages, but a quick search shows a lot of promise.
President Obama will be answering questions live at a youth town hall today at 4pm EST, with livestreaming on MTV, BET, and CMT. He'll be taking questions from the audience and possibly from Twitter. If you want to keep track of the conversation, the folks at Stamen have got your back with their visual Twitter tracker:
The visualization is online here, and builds on work that was previously battle-tested at the 2010 Video Music Awards. The idea is that you post messages to twitter with the #ask hashtag, followed by the issue you're interested in asking the President about. If it's a good one, he may answer it on the air.
Like the VMA visualization, topics are tracked and ordered by popularity. But instead of showing celebrities, this one shows issues that people on Twitter care about. A bar chart on the bottom left shows trends over time.
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The mockup examples are more cool factor than useful in this augmented reality book by Mark Lukas, but I'm sure an extra dimension could be of use somehow. I'm just not quite sure how yet. Watch the demo below.
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Too many slots. Too many buttons. Spanish bank BBVA and design consultancy IDEO rethink the ATM:
ATMs were first introduced over 40 years ago and since then many features have been incrementally added to the machines, in order to fulfill the dream of a truly “automated teller”. Modern ATMs offer a wide range of banking transactions; nevertheless the actual interaction has remained largely untouched.
Fewer slots. Fewer buttons. More privacy and personalization.
[via]
Physicist Kristian Cvecek hangs out in the forest sometimes to take these beautiful pictures of firefly trails, using slow shutter speeds on his camera. Even better than the long exposure shot of a Roomba. [via]
The tennis US Open is in full swing, and since you're at work, you probably need a way to keep up with all of the matches. In a collaboration between the US Open and IBM, this real-time display shows you what's going on during any given match.
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Last month we saw sorting algorithms visualized in rainbow technicolor. Now, by Rudy Andrut, here they are auralized.
This particular audibilization is just one of many ways to generate sound from running sorting algorithms. Here on every comparison of two numbers (elements) I play (mixing) sin waves with frequencies modulated by values of these numbers. There are quite a few parameters that may drastically change resulting sound - I just chose parameteres that imo felt best.
It sounds like someone is playing on old Atari game. Warning: may cause seizures. Watch it in action in the video below.
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Nmap visualizes site popularity as scaled icons. Favicons, that is. They're that little icon that shows in your address bar or when you bookmark a site in your browser. If you're reading this on FlowingData, you should see a little red icon next to the URL. The larger the icon, the more popular the site is, based on Alexa traffic data. In whole, the image is a giant 37,440 by 37,440 pixels image. Google is 11,936 x 11,936 pixels. Facebook is 6,736 × 6,736 pixels. Yahoo is 6,544 × 6,544 pixels.
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Shakespeare literature is confusing. That's not even an opinion. It's a fact. Stephan Thiel, for his B.A. thesis at the University of Applied Sciences Potsdam, takes a wack at understanding Shakespeare through a series of visualizations.
As a result, and based on data from the WordHoard project of the Northwestern University, an application of computational tools was explored in order to extract and visualize the information found within the text and to reveal its underlying narrative algorithm. The five approaches presented here are the first step towards a dicussion of this potentionally new form of reading in an attempt to regain interest in the literary and cultural heritage of Shakespeare’s works among a general audience.
The above is a sample from an exploration of the most frequently used words for each character. The major characters' speeches are highlighted in yellow.
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Carl Richards, a financial planner and a regular on The New York Times' Bucks blog, uses graphs and diagrams to explain personal finance. And as you know, sketches are always twice as charming when they are on the back of a napkin. Together, the collection provides sound financial advice, so that you don't end up poor and bankrupt, chasing the next Google or investing in entertainment.
[via Chart Porn]
This flowchart from Watermark Design helps you decide if you need a new logo. Oddly enough all paths lead to Watermark's logo design services. That is unless you think designers have no concept of reality and scream when someone tells you art is important to business, and you happen to be an international spy. Hm, interesting. [via]
Data PointsFlowingData explores how designers, statisticians, and computer scientists are using data to understand ourselves better — mainly through data visualization.
As for me, I'm Nathan Yau, and I have a PhD in statistics, with a background in eating.
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