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anonymous

More Than 3,000 Vintage Book Graphics Find a Home Online - 1 views

www.theatlantic.com/...241871

research visualization graphics old free vintage atlantic

shared by anonymous on 13 Jul 11 - No Cached
  • anonymous on 13 Jul 11
     
    Thanks to the tireless curators behind brilliant sites such as 50 Watts, BibliOdyssey, Paleofuture, and How to Be a Retronaut, to name just a few of the Internet's treasure troves, we now have collections of archival material that would have been unthinkable even a decade ago.
anonymous

Vortex motion: Viral video showing Sun's motion through galaxy is wrong. - 0 views

www.slate.com/...n_through_galaxy_is_wrong.html

shared by anonymous on 04 Mar 13 - Cached
  • However, there’s a problem with it: It’s wrong. And not just superficially; it’s deeply wrong, based on a very wrong premise. While there are some useful visualizations in it, I caution people to take it with a galaxy-sized grain of salt.
  • Normally I wouldn’t bother debunking stuff like this; wacky claims are made all the time and usually disappear on their own. But in this case I’m getting a lot of people telling me about it, so clearly it's popular—probably because it seems superficially right, and it has very nice graphics. I’m also seeing it spread around by people who do understand science, but missed the parts of it that are way off. With stuff like this, it always pays to dig a little deeper.
  • Heliocentrism is the idea that the Sun is the center of the solar system, and the planets orbit around it (there are also important details, like the planets orbit on ellipses, and these orbits are tilted with respect to one another).
  • ...17 more annotations...
  • Sadhu is claiming that heliocentrism is wrong, and that the motion of the planets around the Sun actually makes a vortex. What he actually means is a helix, not a vortex. They’re different in more than just name; they’re actually very different physical motions with different properties—you can get helical motion without the particles in it interacting, like in the solar system, but in a vortex the particles interact through drag and friction.
  • But let's not argue over semantics. Look at the video again: Sadhu shows the Sun leading the planets, ahead of them as it goes around the galaxy (he makes this even more obvious in a second video; see below). This is not just misleading, it’s completely wrong.
  • I’m not arguing some small detail here. The idea that the planets trail behind the Sun as it moves through the galaxy is fundamental to what Sadhu is saying about the helix—as I’ll explain below (in the section “Where Do All These Ideas Come From?”). But first, there’s a bit more to see.
  • Look carefully at his animation of heliocentric motion. He shows the direction of the Sun's motion around the galaxy as the same as the plane of the planets' orbits. But this is not the case. The solar system's plane is tipped with respect to the galaxy by about a 60° angle, like the way a car's windshield makes an angle with respect to the car's forward motion.
  • This is actually critical: In the helical model, he shows the planets as orbiting around the Sun perpendicular to the motion of the Sun around the galaxy; "face-on", if you like. This is wrong. Because the orbits of the planets are tipped by 60°, not 90°, they can sometimes be ahead and sometimes behind the Sun. That right there, and all by itself, shows this helical depiction is incorrect. In the real model, heliocentrism, you do get that sort of ahead-and-behind motion, exactly as we observe in the real sky.
  • If you are slightly above the disk you feel an overall pull down, toward the disk. Imagine the disk is just a huge slab of matter, and the Sun is above it. The gravity of the disk would make the Sun plunge down into it. Since stars are so far apart, the Sun would go right through the disk and out the bottom. But then the disk would be pulling it up, once again toward the disk. The Sun would slow, stop, and reverse course, plummeting into the disk once again. It gets about 200 or so light years from the midplane of the galactic disk every time its bobs; the disk is 1000 light years thick, though, so we always stay well inside it. But these oscillations would go on forever, the Sun moving up and down like a cork in the ocean.
  • Since the Sun is also orbiting the galaxy, the combined motion makes that lovely waving pattern, up-and-down as it goes around, like a horse on a carousel. So Sadhu has that part (more or less) right.
  • Mostly. But he then adds a third component, a twisting spiral around the Sun’s path he attributes to precession. That part is wrong, very wrong.
  • His video shows the Sun corkscrewing around the galaxy, sometimes closer to the galactic center and sometimes farther away over and over again. To go back to the carousel analogy, its like the horse is circling the center, moving up and down, and also left-to right. But that's not what the Sun really does. There is no left to right motion (toward and away from the galactic center multiple times per orbit). That corkscrew pattern Sadhu shows is wrong.
  • In that video and its notes Sadhu confuses coordinate systems, forces, and motions pretty often.
  • In his videos and on his page, Sadhu says that he learned all this from a man named Pallathadka Keshava Bhat.
  • Seriously, none of it makes any sense. Bhat claims heliocentrism is wrong, but then uses one fallacious idea after another to back this up. I could write pages debunking his claims, but I'll try to keep this short.
  • Also, we have multiple space probes that have visited other planets, many of them still in orbit. If heliocentrism were wrong in the way Bhat describes, then those probes never would have made it to those planets. The calculations used to send them there would've been wrong. We don't have to account for the Sun's motion around the galaxy at all when calculating these spacecraft paths, so Bhat cannot be correct.
  • The claim that the Sun is at the tip of the solar system with the planets trailing behind is also demonstrably wrong. The Sun does not really lead the solar system through the galaxy like the tip of a bullet as Bhat apparently claims (and as Sadhu’s videos show). The planets go around the Sun, and the whole shebang moves around the galaxy as a unit, tipped by that 60° angle. That means sometimes the planets are ahead of the Sun, and sometimes behind it along that galactic orbit.
  • given Sadhu's misapplication of the Earth's precession, I tried to read what Bhat had to say about it. But it's so garbled (and plain wrong; he claims the precession cycle is 225,000 years long, when it's actually 26,000 years) it's like trying to untie the Gordian knot. And there's much more.
  • And that's what Sadhu was basing his (lovely, if incorrect) videos on, mind you. I'll note that if you poke around Sadhu’s site, you’ll find links to all sorts of, um, odd conspiracy theories, from 9/11 Truthers to chemtrails to the ravings of David Icke (who claims—seriously— that reptilian aliens live under Denver airport and control the world), just to name a few. To me, that puts his other ideas into perspective.
  • It seems right, or looks cool, or appeals to some sense of how things should be. But how things should be and how they are don’t always overlap. The Universe is a pretty cool place, and works using a fairly well-regulated set of rules. We call those rules physics, they’re written in the language of math, and trying to understand all that is science.
  • anonymous on 04 Mar 13
     
    "I've been getting lots of tweets and email from folks linking to a slick-looking video, a computer animation showing the motion of the planets around the Sun as the Sun orbits around the Milky Way Galaxy. It's a very pretty video with compelling music and well-done graphics."
anonymous

Remember - 0 views

politicalirony.com/...remember

politics media

shared by anonymous on 19 Aug 10 - Cached
  • anonymous on 19 Aug 10
     
    A good graphic over at Political Irony. "Remember 9/11, Forget our Principles"
anonymous

Gulf Oil Spill : The Effects on Wildlife - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...20100428-spill-map.html

environmentalism longnow visualization

shared by anonymous on 14 Jul 10 - Cached
  • More Animals Are Dying, but the Causes Have Not Yet Been Determined More than 3,000 birds, sea turtles and dolphins have been found dead or debilitated in the gulf since the oil spill began. A majority of the dead were not visibly oiled, and officials have yet to determine why they died. But they have confirmed that many more animals are dying than during the same time period in previous years.
  • anonymous on 14 Jul 10
     
    An excellent interactive graphic of the Gulf Oil Spill's current effect on wildlife. By The New York Times on July 14, 2010.
anonymous

Consolidation of the Russian Sphere of Influence - 0 views

www1.stratfor.com/...Russia_Sphere_Influence.html

visualization

shared by anonymous on 08 Mar 10 - Cached
  • anonymous on 08 Mar 10
     
    This is an interactive graphic that portrays Russia's geopolitical desires. Rollover and click on each of the four buttons in the upper-left hand corner to learn more.
anonymous

The Technium: Bootstrapping the Industrial Age - 0 views

www.kk.org/...bootstrapping_t.php

shared by anonymous on 14 Jun 13 - Cached
  • In February 1942, R. Bradley,  a British Officer in the Royal artillery in World War II was captured and then held prisoner by Japanese in Singapore. Their camp was remote, supplies were almost non-existent, and they were treated roughly as POWs; when they rebelled they were locked in a confinement shed without food.
  • But they were tinkerers, too. Together with some other POWs in his camp, Bradley stole hand tools from the Japanese soldiers and from these bits and pieces he transformed scrap metal into a miniature lathe.
  • It was tiny enough to be kept a secret, big enough to be useful.
  • ...16 more annotations...
  • The lathe was a tool-making egg; it was used to manufacture more sophisticated items.
  • During the two years of their interment the lathe remade the tools -- like taps and dies -- which were first used to create it. A lather has those self-reproductive qualities.
  • Over years of tinkering, Gingery was able to bootstrap a full-bore machine shop from alley scraps. He made rough tools that made better tools, which then made tools good enough to make real stuff.
  • Gingery began with a simple backyard foundry. This was a small 5-gallon bucket packed with sand.
  • In its center was a coffee can of smoldering BBQ charcoal. Inside the can of charcoal was a small ceramic crucible into which he threw scrap aluminum – cans, etc. Gingery forced air into this crude furnace via a fan, burning the charcoal with enough heat to melt the aluminum. He poured the molten metal into a mold of wet sand carved out in the shape he wanted. When the cast was cool he had a workable metal holding plate, which became the heart of a homemade lathe. Other lathe parts were cast. He finished these rough parts with hand tools. His one “cheat” was adding a used electric motor – although it is not impossible to imagine a wind or water powered version.
  • When the rough lathe was up and running he used it to turn out the parts for a drill press. With the drill press and lathe operating he constantly reworked pieces of the lathe itself, replacing parts with improved versions. In this way, his tiny machine shop was an upcreation device, capable of generating higher a machine of precision than itself.
  • Gingery recapitulated the evolution of technology, the great pattern by which simple tools create more complex tools and so on infinitum. This expansion of upcreation power is the means by which an entire culture lifts itself out of mud by pulling up on its bootstraps.
  • Yet is it obvious this little demonstration is not pure. As a way to make your own machine tools, Gingerys’ plans are fine and dandy. He uses cast off washing machine motors and other junkyard scrap parts to grow a fairly robust machine shop. But as an example of relaunching a technological society in a kind of Robinson Crusoe maneuver – landing somewhere and starting civilization up -- it’s a cheat because in this latter game you don’t get to start with discarded aluminum cans, scavenged nuts and bolts, old electric motors and waste sheet metal.
  • To really navigate the minimum bootstrap path through the industrial web, you’d have to start with finding your own ore, mining and refining it with primitive tools, firing up bricks, rolling out sheet metal, developing screws and bolts by hand – all just to get you to the point where you’d have enough tools and materials to make the simple 5-gallon bucket foundry that Dave Gingery started with.
  • Select at random any one of the many thousands items within the reach of where you now sit. None of them could exist without many of the others around it. No technology is an island.
  • Let’s take a very sophisticated item: one web page. A web page relies on perhaps a hundred thousand other inventions, all needed for its birth and continued existence. There is no web page anywhere without the inventions of HTML code, without computer programming, without LEDs or cathode ray tubes, without solid state computer chips, without telephone lines, without long-distance signal repeaters, without electrical generators, without high-speed turbines, without stainless steel, iron smelters, and control of fire. None of these concrete inventions would exist without the elemental inventions of writing, of an alphabet, of hypertext links, of indexes, catalogs, archives, libraries and the scientific method itself. To recapitulate a web page you have to re-create all these other functions. You might as well remake modern society.
  • This is why restarting a sophisticated society after a devastating setback is so hard. Without all the adjacent items in a given ecological bundle, a single technology can have no effect
  • you need them all working to get one working
  • The conundrum of disaster relief is a testimony to this deep interdependency: one needs roads to bring petrol but petrol to clear roads, medicines to heal people, but healthy people to dispense medicines, communications to enable organization but organization to restore communications. We see the interdependent platform of technology primarily when it breaks down.
  • This is also the explanation of why we should not confuse a good clear view of the future with a short distance. We can see the perfect outlines of where technology is going, but we tend to overestimate how soon it will come. Usually the delay (in our eager eyes) is due to the invisible ecology of other needed technologies that aren’t ready yet.
    • anonymous
      anonymous on 14 Jun 13
       
      Classic example that's relatable to nerds: Virtual Reality. In the '90's, the graphics tech wasn't close to where it needed to be. Also, ram prices and other hardware limitations (speed) made implementing it in any serious way a joke. Now, of course, the Oculus Rift is a consumer good. We don't call stuff "VR" anymore (as a buzzword), we just know we can buy a cool attachment that makes everything 3D.
  • The invention will hang suspended in the future for many years, not coming any closer the now. Then when the ignored co-technologies are in place it will appear in our lives in a sudden, with much surprise and applause for its unexpected appearance.
  • anonymous on 14 Jun 13
     
    "A favorite fantasy game for engineers is to imagine how they might re-invent essential technology from scratch. If you were stranded on an island, or left behind after Armageddon, and you needed to make your own blade, say, or a book, maybe a pair of working radios, what would it take to forge iron, make paper, or create electricity?"
anonymous

Why Stratfor Tracks the Locations of U.S. Navy Capital Ships - 0 views

www.stratfor.com/...r-tracks-us-navy-capital-ships

shared by anonymous on 18 Apr 13 - Cached
  • Roughly 90 percent of trade worldwide happens by sea, so the global economy depends on safe maritime transport. Unimpeded access to the seas is also necessary for the defense of far-flung national interests.
  • The United States could not have fought in World War II or Afghanistan, for example, without the ability to quickly move forces, supplies and aircraft to distant corners of the globe. Thus, the movement of U.S. Navy ships can tell us a lot about America's foreign policy.
  • For example, take the U.S. execution of sanctions on Iran in recent years. In April 2012, the Navy positioned a second carrier battle group in the Strait of Hormuz, thus sending a message to Iran that the United States is ready to respond if aggressive action is taken to close the strait.
  • ...6 more annotations...
  • During the Israel-Gaza conflict in November, the Navy diverted an amphibious group to the eastern Mediterranean, making it available to evacuate U.S. citizens if needed.
  • The key is looking for the unexpected.
  • Each week, we have a pretty good idea of where the ships will be, based on geopolitical patterns, strategies and developments. But surprises -- and they do happen -- allow us to challenge and re-evaluate our positions.
  • This is a fundamental part of our methodology: constantly checking our net assessments against new intelligence to maintain the high degree of accuracy on which our readers and clients depend.
    • anonymous
      anonymous on 18 Apr 13
       
      Their methodology is high-level. I'm still not satisfied that I have an accurate picture. Moreover, I'm on the lookout for tools to help me critique their work. I realize that's almost *cute* given that I'm a layman, but I'm pretty sure I can leverage the internet to at LEAST ask some interesting questions.
  • The map contains only publicly available, open-source information. We're not publishing any secrets; we're compiling available information and applying it to an easy-to-use, actionable graphic for our analysts, subscribers and clients.
  • anonymous on 18 Apr 13
     
    "In Stratfor's weekly Naval Update Map, we track the approximate locations of U.S. fleet aircraft carriers and amphibious war ships. The map helps our analysts -- and customers -- decipher Washington's strategy and even predict looming conflicts."
anonymous

Five tools to extract "locked" data in PDFs - 0 views

knightcenter.utexas.edu/...tools-extract-locked-data-pdfs

shared by anonymous on 07 May 13 - Cached
  • Remember, no converter is perfect. This is because PDFs can hold scanned information (that requires another kind of conversion, like OCR), complex tables (with columns or rows spanned multiple cells) or without graphic lines, in short, distinct patterns that hinder the correct formatting of the converted file. 
  • According to the journalist, the best way to do this is to randomly check the converted data to see if it's different from the original. And don't be fooled, there will almost always be a need to clean up the data when using an automatic conversion, especially for tables.  
  • 1. Cometdocs
  • ...4 more annotations...
  • 2. Zamzar
  • 4. PDFtoText
  • 5. Tabula
  • 3. Nitro PDF to Excel
  • anonymous on 07 May 13
     
    "Extracting data from PDFs for open use is not a simple task, as ProPublica reporter Jeremy B. Merrill, one of the contributors to the "Dollars for Docs" project, can attest. The Knight Center for Journalism in the Americas asked programmers and specialists in data journalism, including the ex-editor of the Guardian Datablog, Simon Rogers, for their recommendations and identified some free tools to facilitate the conversation from PDFs to an open format, like CSV tables."
anonymous

Russia's Shifting Political Landscape, Part 1: An Overview of Political Changes - 6 views

stratfor.com/...t-1-overview-political-changes

shared by anonymous on 01 Feb 12 - Cached
  • When Putin came to power in 1999, he ruled a country that was in utter political disarray, economically broken and threatened by internal and external forces. He aggressively consolidated the country politically, economically and socially and quashed the security threats. The country rallied around him as Russia's "savior," a sentiment that in recent years evolved into a cult based on the belief that Putin is the sole heartbeat of the country.
  • The first shift in Russia's political landscape occurred because Putin's complex network of clans inside the Kremlin has utterly collapsed.
  • Anti-Kremlin sentiment stems from many issues. Years of relative stability have led to a sense of political, social and economic security, which has fostered a belief among some Russians that the country no longer needs a "savior" like Putin. Prolonged periods of high energy prices and a strengthening Russian economy have created a new growing middle class, something not really seen in Russia before. Furthermore, much of the generation now coming of age was not raised under the Soviet Union or during the chaotic years immediately following its collapse. An extremist brand of nationalism has also risen across the country, leading more Russians to have no interest in a balanced government. Putin's government did not anticipate these shifts in recent years, and that failure has fed into dissent from within United Russia and the further rise of anti-Kremlin sentiment.
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • This kind of adjustment has occurred cyclically throughout Russian history as the country has shifted between stability and chaos.
    • anonymous
      anonymous on 01 Feb 12
       
      See also: Dark horse and light horse concepts.
  • the longer Putin takes to resolve these crises, the weaker he will appear to the rest of the world.
  • Other countries, especially the United States, have taken advantage of the instability inside Russia and are attempting to exploit the image that Moscow is not as strong or powerful as it claims to be. As Russia continues to pressure Central Europe and Washington's interests in the region, Moscow cannot allow internal issues to erode its position.
    • anonymous
      anonymous on 07 Feb 12
       
      No, you are quite right. There is no threat (yet) to Russia's core. But since Russia has such indefensible geography, they extend their reach to create buffer zones. Even with the U.S./Islamic world diversion, the U.S. is still aggressively planting itself in Central Asia. Russia wants the U.S. and the rest of Europe to concede that *Eastern* Europe be considered their playground. With that recognized - the thinking goes - Russia will breathe easier.
    • anonymous
      anonymous on 07 Feb 12
       
      Oh yes, geography is still quite relevant. In order to fly planes over a place, you have to have supply lines and obey flight range constraints. One aspect of geography that is perennially overlooked is: rivers. Russia's one of the best examples. Look at the major river systems of the U.S. and Russia and two things become quite clear: 1) Russia has only one navigable river and it doesn't empty to the ocean, but rather a mostly landlocked sea. 2) America has a complex, navigable river system that meanders through the center of the land mass. We couldn't ask for better rivers. Using those rivers, as we do, we are able to save substantially on shipping costs. Russia, by contrast, has a sparsely populated interior precisely because there are no river systems that can be used in such a manner. Everything's imported over rail and truck. I need to find a graphic, but there's a great one which highlights why Russia wants to keep, say, Ukraine in its sphere of influence. Basically, you could position tons of short range missiles to threaten Moscow quite easily. I would pose that the only reason that we can't imagine that large-scale combat is a thing anymore (I share a bit of that in my gut) is simply because we have not lived through a conflict with anything near the scope of World War II. But just because it hasn't happened, doesn't mean it won't.
    • Erik Hanson
      Erik Hanson on 07 Feb 12
       
      I'm saying that were such a thing to happen, the only tactical elements of geography would be range and infrastructure. It's no longer important to hold the high ground or worry about "defensible positions" unless you're taking to bunkers.
    • anonymous
      anonymous on 07 Feb 12
       
      Ah. I got you. Yes. I'd agree with that. Russian planners' fear has to do with American troops stationed in a nation, not necessarily what hill they're on. :)
  • anonymous on 01 Feb 12
     
    Russia's political landscape has been relatively calm and consolidated for the past decade under former President and current Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin. However, recent months have seen instability rise sharply, with a purge in the government, a shift in parliamentary election results and large protests in the streets. None of these is new to Russia, but these and other factors are converging and creating changes in Russia's political landscape.
  • Erik Hanson on 06 Feb 12
     
    I know that Russia was threatened internally when Putin came to power, but I feel that the "external" threats were more threats on Russia's external claims. Am I missing something?
  • Erik Hanson on 07 Feb 12
     
    Is defensibility of terrain really that important anymore? It seems that beyond small-scale, local-level action, most geography is flown over or sailed around these days, and Russia has plenty of space between where they'd be able to pick up a threat and where that threat could actually do damage. Seriously. Are large-scale land (vs. marine/air) invasions even a thing anymore?
anonymous

Jam and Game Reviews - 0 views

www.psychologyofgames.com/...jam-and-game-reviews

gaming psychology criticalthinking

shared by anonymous on 20 Aug 10 - Cached
  • The list admittedly looks a bit sexist by today’s standards, but it illustrates the idea well.
  • Wilson and Schooler were curious about something. Some of their previous research had suggested than when asked to analyze their reasons for making decisions or ratings, people tend to screw things up. The theory goes that we are often aware of our preferences for products (or art, or whatever), but when asked to explain WHY, we often feel obligated to include the most salient (that is, apparent) and plausible explanations. Even if we would have otherwise ignored them.
  • Puny humans are pretty bad at combining an array of weighted factors so as to arrive at a rating or decision –it’s just not how our minds were designed. Jelly or game review guidelines that require us to over analyze our decisions or check them off against a standardized list of factors (graphics, sound, etc.) can exacerbate this limitation and lead us to consider what should be irrelevant information when making our ratings.
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • This is one reason why I prefer more organic, experience-based evaluations of games from message boards or podcasts rather than formal game reviews.
  • anonymous on 20 Aug 10
     
    "For every one of us, making decisions is part of hour daily human existence. Most of them are of little consequence -what to eat, what movie to see, what video game to buy- so we have developed an astonishing array of mental short-cuts to make these kinds of decisions comparatively quick, easy, and not too mentally taxing. We may eat what we have eaten and enjoyed in the past, and by and large we use simple decision rules such as "I like this genre" or "I like this developer" to choose movies or games." By Jamie Madigan at The Psychology of Video Games on August 18, 2010.
anonymous

Cartographies of Time: A History of the Timeline - 0 views

flowingdata.com/...time-a-history-of-the-timeline

visualization timeline

shared by anonymous on 19 Apr 10 - Cached
  • Cartographies of Time is the first comprehensive history of graphic representations of time in Europe and the United States from 1450 to the present. Authors Daniel Rosenberg and Anthony Grafton have crafted a lively history featuring fanciful characters and unexpected twists and turns. From medieval manuscripts to websites, Cartographies of Time features a wide variety of timelines that in their own unique ways—curving, crossing, branching—defy conventional thinking about the form.
  • anonymous on 19 Apr 10
     
    By Nathan at FlowingData on April 19, 2010.
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