Sustainable Design Lab at MIT and MoDe Studio estimated the potential hotspots for electric photovoltaics in Cambridge, Massachusetts and mapped it.

“High PV Potential Area” is the footprint, in square feet, of the portions of a roof that, by considering both the real surface projection to its actual slope and this surface’s annual irradiation, yield a “good” to “excellent” result. These values are based on MIT’s calculations and are shown as orange and yellow dots on the viewer, respectively.

If all the door-to-door salesmen trying to sell me solar panels showed me something like this for where I live, I’d be a lot more receptive.

Number of likes and shares for a Facebook post are just simple aggregates that give you an idea of how popular that post was, but they don’t tell you anything about how that post got so popular. For Facebook Stories, Stamen Design explored how a single post can spread through the network, via three viral photos shared by George Takei.

Each visualization is made up of a series of branches, starting from George. As each branch grows, re-shares split off onto their own arcs. Sometimes, these re-shares spawn a new generation of re-shares, and sometimes they explode in short-lived bursts of activity. The two different colors show gender, and each successive generation becomes lighter as time goes by. And the curves are just for snazz.

So you see a beautiful burst in the beginning, as the photo is shared by people who follow Takei, and then the photo spreads within smaller groups of friends. The above is from the animation that shows how a graphic for famous failures spread.

From the October 10 Boston Metro. Oops. [via]

There are an estimated 20,000 to 25,000 polar bears in the world, and the population is expected to decline by 30 percent over the next three generations. Periscopic, in collaboration with the Polar Bear Specialist Group, highlighted the changing populations in this interactive.

The data can be viewed by subpopulation, by nation, and by ecoregions. In the first two views, you can click on geographic regions to see more details about the area, which includes a text overview and time series for more troubling numbers on polar bears killed by humans and pollution. Finally, when you click on a time series or the pollutant levels, you can see the data at a higher granularity.

So there are a few ways to examine the data and different angles to explore. You’ll want spend some time with this one.

I’m not sure where this is originally from, but I found it on an intro to geology course page. What happens when midnight comes around again?

As you’ve probably heard, Apple and Samsung have been in a bit of a kerfuffle over the past few months. We own that patent for that thing. No, we have this patent for that. The state of technology patents is all over the place. The New York Times takes a closer look. Also, don’t miss the video and side-by-side comparisons.