Tom James @ 26-05-2009
Something wonderful, not especially relevant to science fiction, but pretty and cool:
As to what the image depicts, it was constructed by sorting roughly 800,000 scientific papers into 776 different scientific paradigms (shown as red and blue circular nodes) based on how often the papers were cited together by authors of other papers.
Links (curved lines) were made between the paradigms that shared common members, then treated as rubber bands, holding similar paradigms closer to one another when a physical simulation forced them all apart: thus the layout derives directly from the data. Larger paradigms have more papers. Labels list common words unique to each paradigm.
It tickles my sensawunda node that we can now visualise our understanding of the physical universe in this way. Look at the map in close-up here.
You can see the great flowering coagulations of health, medicine, cell biology, and biochemistry. And brain research in the midst of a three-way tug-of-war between computer science, social science, and the study of the central nervous system (which is winning).
I wonder what this map will look like in a hundred years?
[image from Information Esthetics][via Eric Drexler]
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Tom James @ 04-01-2009
From What’s Next Trend Maps we have a trend map for 2009. In the words of the creator:
I’ve been tearing interesting articles out of newspapers and magazines for over twenty years. And for over twenty years I’ve regularly lost them or put them somewhere I can’t find them. So eventually I had an idea. Why not re-write these articles to highlight the key points and connections and then archive them online where they would be easy to find? Better still, why not create a website so that other people could find them too?
Also check out the key innovations timeline. Or read the book.
[via Charles Stross][image from cambodia4kidsorg on flickr]
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Paul Raven @ 20-11-2008
The ICC’s Live Piracy Map does exactly what its name suggests – it collates reports of modern piracy (the ocean-going sort, not kids using peer-to-peer networks), and plots them out as a Google Maps layer:
What’s interesting to me (as someone who works in maritime history) is how some of the hotspots are comparatively new, but others are almost as old as ocean-going commerce itself – a reminder that geography remains unconquered by technological progress, at least as far as supply chains of physical goods are concerned. [story and screenshot via the indispensable BLDGBLOG]
It also suggests that Sven’s armed cruise ship story wasn’t quite as implausible as some seemed to feel…
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Tom James @ 05-06-2008
Magnetic fields are weird, something that’s invisible in and of itself, but nevertheless acts on the other objects. By way of visualising magnetic fields, some boffins from Semiconductor working at NASA Space Laboratory as “artists in residence” – Ruth Jarman and Joe Gerhardt – have created this incredible movie depicting magnetic fields:
There isn’t much explanation as to what this is – how abstract is the representation? From Semiconductor Films:
In Magnetic Movie, Semiconductor have taken the magnificent scientific visualisations of the sun and solar winds conducted at the Space Sciences Laboratory and Semiconducted them. Ruth Jarman and Joe Gerhardt of Semiconductor were artists-in-residence at SSL. Combining their in-house lab culture experience with formidable artistic instincts in sound, animation and programming, they have created a magnetic magnum opus in nuce, a tour de force of a massive invisible force brought down to human scale, and a “very most beautiful thing.”
Well it sure is pretty, but it would be nice if there were some details as to how the effect was created. It reminds me of the “fields” of the drones from Iain M Bank’s billiant Culture series, which use coloured “fields” to convey emotion and also as manipulators.
[story via technovelgy][video from caleaflo]
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