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July 7, 2011
 

Connected States of America

Interesting visualization coming out of the Senseable work at the MIT Media Lab. Teams there have re-envisioned how the US states would look if we drew state lines based on our interaction behaviors. Here's a quick video of what we look like through that lens.

Georgia and Alabama (and Chattanooga, TN) are BFFs apparently.

Filed under  //   MIT   Media Lab   infoviz   visualization  

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August 20, 2010
 

Visualizing the $12 trillion U.S. deficit

The BBC has launched an interactive visualization site called BBC Dimensions. It provides overlays of historical and scientific information onto a postal code.Careful with that link as it'll cost you at least 10 minutes of your life.

Anyway, the BBC Dimension site got me thinking about another large number we hear a lot about these days: the U.S. budget deficit. Right now, it's hovering around $12 trillion dollars. When we hear that figure we typically hear things like,"If that were a stack of $1 bills it would stretch all the way to Alpha Centauri" or whatever. But that's still abstract because I can't picture how far Alpha Centauri is.

So I thought, I wish someone would put that into perspective with small units, something I can relate to. Then I figured I'd just try. 

 So here goes:

Ants
Ants are about 1/10th of an inch long and about 1/20th of an inch wide. Converted to cm^2, that's about .25cm by .125cm or .03125cm^2. Multiply that by 12,000,000,000,000 and convert to km^2 and you have an area 37.5 square kilometers or 14.5 square miles of ants stacked leg to leg. Here's what a sea of 12 trillion ants would look like in Washington, DC:
Ants
Mice
So ants aren't super impressive although that would be a mighty ant mound. Let's go with the common field mouse (10cm long x 4cm wide ~ 40cm^2). Times 12 trillion. That's about 48,000 square kilometers or about 18,500 square miles. Basically that's mice carpeting the entire, sprawling Atlanta metro area:
Mice
House cats
Since I don't have a neat API to help me with these overlays (hint hint), let's finish with cats. (40cm long not counting tails x 15cm wide ~600cm^2). Times 12 trillion = 720,000km^2 or about 275,000 square miles. Now this is pretty impressive. Parked over the East coast, this looks like:
Cats1
Centered over Kentucky, you see it stretches from Atlanta to Chicago and well out over the Midwest:
Cats2
Finally, for the West Coast. Yes, that is an entire state of Nevada full of cats, plus a healthy chunk of California.
Cats3

That's a lot of debt.

 

Filed under  //   BBC Dimensions   U.S. deficit   debt   info-viz   visualization  

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April 18, 2010
 

Living cities

Watching this video (and others like it), you can't help but see similarities to the vascular systems of the living.

 
Under the seeming disorder of the old city, wherever the old city is working successfully, is a marvelous order for maintaining the safety of the streets and the freedom of the city. It is a complex order. Its essence is intricacy of sidewalk use, bringing with it a constant succession of eyes. This order is all composed of movement and change, and although it is life, not art, we may fancifully call it the art form of the city and liken it to the dance — not to a simple-minded precision dance with everyone kicking up at the same time, twirling in unison and bowing off en masse, but to an intricate ballet in which the individual dancers and ensembles all have distinctive parts which miraculously reinforce each other and compose an orderly whole. The ballet of the good city sidewalk never repeats itself from place to place, and in any once place is always replete with new improvisations.

-Jane Jacobs
The Death and Life of Great American Cities 

Filed under  //   GPS   Lisbon   info-viz   visualization  

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