UC San Diego student Cyrus Kiani animates 5,930 front pages from The Hawaiian Star, from 1893 to 1912. Pretty much everything on the page gets bigger — the columns, headers, and pictures — while the physical size of the page stays the same. Too bad it only goes up to 1912. It would’ve been fun to see the birth of the giant front page photo.

(I thought I saw something like this done for The New York Times front page or online homepage, but I can’t find it.)

Remember Bret Victor’s live coding talk from last month? He presented an example where he would edit code on one side, and the corresponding visual would automatically update on the other side. It was instant feedback that could help in learning code. Gabriel Florit implemented the idea with D3, and it’s called water. Edit on the right and the diagram updates on the left. Try clicking on a number and then holding down the Alt key (or option on the Mac) for slider goodness.

Also, check out Daniel Hooper’s interactive JavaScript editor, CodeBook. It’s the same idea but a slightly different implementation.

[via Waxy]

Big History is a field of study that crosses multiple disciplines such as biology, natural history, and economics to form a single timeline that starts at the beginning of time and ends in the present. It’s the history of everything, essentially. ChronoZoom, a collaboration between UC Berkeley, Moscow State University, and Microsoft Research, aims to visualize this seemingly endless timeline.

You can browse years on top, and rectangles in the main view represent different scopes such as the Cosmos and Earth and the Solar System. Click on one those rectangles, and ChronoZoom, as you might guess, zooms in on the corresponding window of time. Circles within the rectangles provide videos and explanations for significant events in history.

To get right into it though, move your mouse to the top right. There’s a thing that looks like a bar graph, which is actually navigation for the scopes. Click on Humanity and watch it go.

My many thanks to the sponsors. FlowingData wouldn’t be around without them. Check ’em out. They help you make sense of data.

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With NCAA March Madness in full swing, the basketball graphics are out in full force. This one by Angi Chau, shows the probabilities of teams winning each game, and eventually the championship, based on simulated bracket rankings. Done with D3, each node represents a game and teams are circled on the outside. Roll over a team, and get all the probabilities for that team going to the end or roll over a game to see the probability of teams winning that game. Sorry, Colorado. You have a 0% chance of winning it all. You, too, Vermont.

Hopefully, Chau keeps updating throughout the tournament. And maybe some color-coding to indicate probabilities would be useful here. Now excuse me while I go place some educated bets. (One million on Colorado.)

Celebrating their 100th birthday, Oreo depicts moments in history with the ever popular cookie of nostalgia and milk dunking. This one showing the first step on the moon is the best. Prohibition comes in a close second. [via]

From Gizmodo, this shows battery size in the new iPad versus that of the iPad 2. The battery in the former is 70 percent bigger than that of the latter. Something’s not right here.

[Thanks, David]

At first I thought this map, by David Yanofsky for Bloomberg, was your standard county-level choropleth map of demographics. Select a self-described heritage from the first drop down and you see where all the people are by count. That’s only kind of interesting, but you often just end up highlighting big cities.

However, select a heritage from the second drop down menu to compare against the first and you get a relative scale. The above for example shows those of Chinese and Indian heritage. It’s a simple calculation that makes a big difference in usefulness.

Aaron Parecki, co-creator of location platform Geoloqi, has collected his location every few seconds for over three years. He put his data on a map.

Approximately one GPS point was recorded every 2-6 seconds when I was moving, and these images represent about 2.5 million total GPS points. Collectively, they represent a data portrait of my life: everywhere I’ve been and the places I’ve been most frequently. The map is colored by year, so you can see how my footprint changes over the years, depending on where I live.

We’ve seen projects like this a few times before (Hey, Andy, where’s your 2011 map?), but the longevity still surprises me, in a good way. (I think I’ve got this quantified self thing for the masses figured out. Don’t even bother mentioning tracking, self-improvement, or the gadgets. Just show them stuff like this and attach some sentimental value, and there you go.)

[via infosthetics]

The Iliad is an epic poem by Homer with a lot of characters and story lines going on at once. I vaguely remember reading bits and pieces in high school and getting totally lost. Santiago Ortiz explores these relationships in his latest work, which draws on the connections i.e. character sentence co-occurrences.
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