June 30, 2009, 1:00 pm
How Tall is the Green Monster?
by Henry Woodbury
Flip Flop Fly Ball is Craig Robinson’s collection of “baseball infographics”:
Essentially, this site is what I’d have been doing when I was 12 years old had the Internet and Photoshop been available to me in the eighties.
What stands out for me from this collection is Robinson’s ability to ask good questions — intriguing or amusing or both.
In some of the work, the question is more the point than the answer. What if baseball players literally stole bases? For more complex questions Robinson often produces just a well-drawn pie or bar chart. But occasionally, Robinson combines question, data, and visual idea into a smart visual explanation that goes beyond that.
For example, the left field wall in Fenway Park is 37 feet and two inches tall. And how tall is that?
June 29, 2009, 2:08 pm
Sunny Days Over 3D Cities
by Henry Woodbury
The Chinese firm Edushi (”E-city”) has created 3D models of over 40 Chinese cities, including Hong Kong:
Google Map-like pan, zoom, and search features make it easy to explore these candy landscapes, until one reaches the edge of the model and the world either fades or flattens — as in the screen capture of Guangzhou below.
Oddly, the Edushi artists generally point North 45 degrees off vertical (counterclockwise). This means that the 3D maps don’t align with 2D or satellite views.
(via PopSci.com)
June 15, 2009, 12:17 pm
Erudition Analytics
by Henry Woodbury
There’s more to data mining than click-through rates and advertising revenues. This Zachary Seward article at the Nieman Journalism Lab (via Althouse) explains how the New York Times examines user behavior as it relates to their style. Using a Web analytics report of words most often looked-up by Times readers, deputy news editor Philip Corbett sent out the memo to reporters and columnists:
Our choice of words should be thoughtful and precise, and we should never talk down to readers. But how often should even a Times reader come across a word like hagiography or antediluvian or peripatetic, especially before breakfast?
…
Remember, too, that striking and very specific words can become wan and devalued through overuse. Consider apotheosis, which we’ve somehow managed to use 18 times so far this year. It literally means “deification, transformation into a divinity.” An extended meaning is “a glorified ideal.” But in some of our uses it seems to suggest little more than “a pretty good example.” Most recently, we’ve said critics view the Clinton health-care plan as “the apotheosis of liberal, out-of-control bureaucracy-building,” and we’ve described cut-off shorts as “that apotheosis of laissez-faire wear.”
So what do we say if someone really is transformed into a god?
June 2, 2009, 3:30 pm
Some Ideas about Elegance
by Henry Woodbury
Guy Kawasaki interviews Matthew E. May on the concept of elegance. May, author of In Pursuit of Elegance: Why the Best Ideas Have Something Missing, speaks of elegance as a business concept, rather than specifically as a design concept.
May’s essential insight is that elegance is only achieved when a thing is powerful as well as simple. I’m not enamored with a lot of his examples (Sodoku, charging hippos), as he seems to dwell on the simple. The following example is more provocative:
Chess masters understand the nature of complexity—that it is part of the game, and it’s why they play it. The challenge and thrill lies in the endless search for ways to manage and exploit those complexities. Make it SEEM blazingly simple. That’s elegance. Complexity isn’t the enemy to a chessmaster—without it they’d be playing checkers.
June 2, 2009, 1:08 pm
The Break of the Curve
by Henry Woodbury
Here is a very cool optical illusion — with an equally interesting (to me) real-world example.
May 19, 2009, 11:16 am
Twitter as Public Art
by Lisa Agustin
Check out “Visible Tweets”, a visualization of Twitter intended for public spaces or, as creator Cameron Adams puts it, “a Twitter visualizer for rock concerts.” Simply enter whose tweets you’d like to see, and choose one of three animation styles to see the tweets letter by letter, rotating as they are linked to each other, or as a tag cloud that morphs from one tweet into the next. Adams’ allusion to rock concerts stems from his assertion that Twitter is normally about the chatter that takes a back seat to the main event (but doesn’t have to):
Twitter gives a voice to an audience who for many years have played a subservient role to those who were officially there to speak. But who says they have less to say?
May 18, 2009, 8:53 pm
Logo Fun
by Henry Woodbury
Designer Sean Farrell offers a gallery of logos that incorporate a visual pun or hidden image. Here’s an example:
Pakuy is a packaging company.
May 18, 2009, 12:21 pm
This is Not a Painting
by Henry Woodbury
Take a look at the Art of Science 2009 Gallery for some stunning images generated by researchers in a wide variety of scientific disciplines.
The image above is an unusual example in that it starts with an artistic representation. Researchers loaded a bitmap of the Mona Lisa into the memory of a test computer, then examined it after power interruptions of increasing lengths.
The title “The Persistence of Memory” is both literally descriptive of the experiment and a clever reference to Salvator Dali’s most famous painting.
May 12, 2009, 2:47 pm
Enhanced ipHandbook Web Site Launched
by Lisa Agustin
Dynamic Diagrams is pleased to announce the re-launch of the ipHandbook of Best Practices web site. Developed for practitioners of intellectual property management, the site first launched in 2007 with a comprehensive printed Handbook and Executive Guide serving as core content. Now, thanks to a new collaboration with the Concept Foundation and funding by the Rockefeller Foundation, the site has expanded to include multimedia content and tools that collectively result in a more dynamic experience. New offerings include:
- A growing collection of online video presentations, including several prepared specifically for the ipHandbook site
- Distance learning courses, including one prepared by and for the ipHandbook community in collaboration with UNIDO’s e-Biosafety Training Programme
- Integration of a Twitter feed for timely updates
- Integrated Google translation on each page
- Advanced search functionality
Over the next six months, additional features will be released, including networking functionality, discussion boards, and a feature for posting comments and uploading original content to the site. These enhancements will not only grow the site as an online resource, but also encourage the creation of a global virtual community of IP and innovation managers, policymakers, scientists, and R&D leaders.
May 11, 2009, 8:39 am
War Games with Firewall
by Henry Woodbury
The U.S. Defense Department graduates about 80 students from its cyberwar schools. Here is a very cool article about how they are tested:
…the young man in battle fatigues barked at his comrades: “They are flooding the e-mail server. Block it. I’ll take the heat for it.”
These are the war games at West Point, at least last month, when a team of cadets spent four days struggling around the clock to establish a computer network and keep it operating while hackers from the National Security Agency in Maryland tried to infiltrate it with methods that an enemy might use.
My grandfather served in World War I running telegraph lines from balloon observation posts. Today he would be writing code.