Amazon used their book sales data to color a map red and blue.

Our 2012 Election Heat Map colors each state according to the percentage of red and blue book purchases, based on shipping address, that have been made on Amazon.com during the past 30 days. We take the top-selling political books on Amazon.com and categorize them as “red,” “blue,” or neutral. We classify books as red or blue if they have a political leaning made evident in book promotion material and/or customer classification, such as tags. We compute percentages, updated daily, for each state and the US by comparing the 250 best-selling blue books during the time period against the 250 best-selling red books during the same time period, including new book launches.

The country is practically colored all red, so there’s not a ton to glean from the map. Although I wonder what it’d look like at the county or city level. They should do that. I also wonder what other trends can come from Amazon sales data. They should do that, too.

Water Light Graffiti is an installation by Antonin Fourneau that lets you use water and light as your painting medium.

The “Water Light Graffiti” is a surface made of thousands of LED illuminated by the contact of water. You can use a paintbrush, a water atomizer, your fingers or anything damp to sketch a brightness message or just to draw. Water Light Graffiti is a wall for ephemeral messages in the urban space without deterioration. A wall to communicate and share magically in the city.

Pretty awesome how the wall illuminates when a couple of buckets of water are thrown at it.

[via Co.Design]

Using DNA as a storage device, Harvard researchers managed to store one million gigabits of data per cubic millimeter.

Biology’s databank, DNA has long tantalized researchers with its potential as a storage medium: fantastically dense, stable, energy efficient and proven to work over a timespan of some 3.5 billion years. While not the first project to demonstrate the potential of DNA storage, Church’s team married next-generation sequencing technology with a novel strategy to encode 1,000 times the largest amount of data previously stored in DNA.

So does this qualify as big data or super tiny data?

[via @jakeporway]

For the past ten years, researchers have been tagging hump back whales in the Gulf of Maine with a temporary tracking device called a D-tag. Whereas old tech only recorded location at the surface, the D-tag records depth and orientation allowing researchers to record feeding and diving patterns, which turns out to be pretty unique for each whale.

Scientists hope to use the data to shift fishing and boating policies in the area. Kelly Slivka for the New York Times reports. Be sure to watch the video with the scientists pointing at their computer screens.

James Cheshire, a geography lecturer at the University College London, mapped common surnames in London.

This map shows the 15 most frequent surnames in each Middle Super Output Area (MSOA) across Greater London. The colours represent the origin of the surname (not necessarily the person) derived from UCL’s Onomap Classification tool. The surnames have also been scaled by their total frequency in each MSOA.

A slider lets you browse through the most common down to the 15th most common, revealing clusters of cultural majorities, down to minorities.

We’ve seen a lot of network charts for Twitter, Facebook, and real people. Screw that. I want to see social networks for movie characters. That’s where Movie Galaxies comes in.

Movies are important artefacts, bringing together vision and zeitgeist of our society. Embodying dreams, trends and other perspectives, they are a cultural vanishing point for millions of people in the world, that is worth to be explored. Just think about how your personal life and worldwide network with their single sub-clusters and side-stories are structurally represented in motion pictures. You might be surprised. We have a hunch that the “holy grail” of good movies is far more about social network structures than budget, cast and theme.

With movie scripts as the data source, Movie Galaxies quickly shows main characters, the extent to which they interact, and hints at a movie’s timeline. For example, in the first Lord of the Rings movie, the central plot was tied to a lot of characters, whereas in Forrest Gump, everything was tied to one character.

There are metrics, such as density and clustering, associated with each network, which could be made less technical sounding, but it’s fun to browse and search your favorite movies. I clicked around for a good half hour.