Nicolas Garcia Belmonte, author of the JavaScript InfoVis Toolkit, mapped 72 hours of weather data from 1,200 stations across the country.

Gathering the data from the National Weather Service was pretty interesting, I didn’t know USA had so many weather stations! The visualization shows wind direction encoded in line angles, wind speed encoded in line lengths and disk radius, and temperature encoded in hue.

Press play, and watch it glow. You can also easily switch between symbols: discs with lines, lines only, or filled circles.

[Nicolas Garcia Belmonte via @janwillemtulp]

Maps have been around for a long time, but you might not know it looking online. It can be hard to find them. Old Maps Online, a project by The Great Britain Historical GIS Project and Klokan Technologies GmbH, Switzerland, is a catalog of just that.

You can browse and search old maps via the map interface by panning and zooming, along with a search bar and a slider for time. Search results then update in the right sidebar, which provides thumbnails and links to the full-size maps.

If only an overlay like Historypin could be incorporated. That’d be something.

[Old Maps Online via @jatorre]

“Target doesn’t just know when you’re buying sheets. They know what you’re doing in between them.”

[Comedy Central via @alexlundry]

When Nicholas Felton headed over to Facebook last year, I thought we’d seen the last of what’s become an annual tradition, but it seems to be alive and well and still looking sexy. Felton, best known for his personal annual reports, is out with a 2010/2011 report that quantifies his life for the past two years.

The previous one was a tribute to his late father, so this year he had double the data. Most of the data is presented chronologically, but there is one panel on the next to last page that shows a comparison between the two years, which I found most interesting. More trips in 2011 to the parking garage, gas station, and the liquor store.

[Feltron]

Sometimes power dunks don’t get much credit, because it’s hard to see on television how hard the ball was thrown down. The MIT Media Lab created a net to fix that, and we’ll get to see it in action this Saturday during the Sprite Slam Dunk Contest.

MIT Media Lab used conductive thread to generate a reading for the force of every slam thrown down. The fabric, as flexible as the nylon in conventional basketball nets, has long been valued for its ability to transmit electrical signals in products ranging from winter gloves to high-tech carpets. By spinning the thread through a regular basketball net and connecting it to a computer chip, mounted behind the backboard, that renders the force in a graphical output, MIT and Turner have at long last found a way to instantaneously transmit the force of a dunk from the rim to your television screen.

The past two years have been lackluster, so I wasn’t planning on watching this year, but this new dimension could add some intrigue.

[Wired via @bbhlabs]