Beeriodic Table

Posted by d_walker – December 3, 2012

Although I have no idea what my favorite beer, Belgian White, has to do with Lithium, I thought my beer-loving friends might appreciate Mantis Design’s Periodic Table of Beer Styles. Modeled after Mendeleyev‘s Periodic Table familiar to chemistry students, the Beeriodic Table organizes beer styles by density (alcohol content) and color. Sadly, the Beeriodic Table is now out of print, but you can download the black-and-white version from Katy Decorah’s Beer!, a website constructed for a semester project (I hope she got an A+).

If you stumbled onto this site accidentally while looking for a useful periodic table, you might find Michael Dayah’s Dynamic Periodic Table or WebElements more useful.

Cheers to Dwayne for the tip,

-ddw

Visualizing the Wind

Posted by d_walker – November 19, 2012

Hurricane Sandy from Hint.fm
Hint.fm has created a novel animation of wind data for the United States from the NWS’s National Digital Forecast Database. The image at left is a snapshot from October 30, 2012, 4:59 pm EDT, clearly showing the eye of Hurricane Sandy shortly after she made landfall. The live animation of Hurricane Sandy’s windfield is far more interesting, with the white trails tracing the flow of the wind around the eye of the hurricane. In addition to this particular windfield, hint.fm provides the current wind map and an archive of selected wind maps.

The Hint.fm site is also worth browsing, showcasing the work of Fernanda Viégas and Martin Wattenberg, who lead Google’s “Big Picture” visualization research group in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Their work – including the wind map – is easily some of the most creative visualization of data you will find.

Thanks to Brighton for the tip!

-ddw

Google.org Maps Superstorm Sandy

Posted by d_walker – October 30, 2012


The Google Crisis Response Team at Google.org has created a Superstorm Sandy crisismap for New York City that not only summarizes disaster information it also provides a great example of a volunteer technical community assisting first responders, disaster relief workers, and the public in times of crisis. Google.org – the philanthropic arm of Google – created this multilayer map using the GoogleMaps API to aggregate ATOM data feeds of public alert messages from various agencies, links to public utilities, and shelter databases. More than a static display, the map allows users to select layers, includes links to additional data and metadata, and download kml files to add to their own maps. For example, I borrowed data from their larger scale Superstorm Sandy map to create a map supporting Red Cross operations in Baltimore.

-ddw

Sandy Comes to Town

Posted by d_walker – October 28, 2012

Estimated fraction of population experiencing power outages

A map of power outages as predicted by Guikema’s model based on the official National Hurricane Center track and intensity forecast from 18UTC (3 p.m. EDT) on Saturday, Oct. 27.


Johns Hopkins researcher Seth Guikema has used historical storm statistics to estimate that Hurricane Sandy will likely cause 10 million people to lose power, from Virginia Beach to New York City. Guikema’s model uses outage data from 11 hurricanes to estimate the fraction of customers who will lose power, based on expected gust wind speed, expected duration of strong winds greater than 20 meters per second, and population density.

The impacts of this so-called FrankenStorm are also likely to include record-breaking snow in the West Virginia mountains and a 6 to 11ft storm surge in New York Harbor. NOAA estimates that storm damages could be over $1 billion.

Good time to make a last-minute run for batteries and candles!

-ddw

Incredible: The Photopic Sky Survey

Posted by d_walker – October 17, 2012

Star field The Photopic Sky Survey is a highly detailed photographic map of the Earth’s sky created by Nick Risinger, who travelled around the globe to capture 37,440 exposures of the night sky and stitched them together into a single 5,000 megapixel photograph. You can download, scan, and zoom through this incredible image online courtesy of SkySurvey.org (click on the info “i” icon at bottom left of the display to reveal the annotations).

Even more amazing is the Sky Survey app ($2.99 for iPad/iPhone) based on Risinger’s map which orients the displayed star field to match your current latitude, longitude, time, and the iPad’s orientation. In essence, it turns your iOS device into a planisphere and it is nearly magical to use, as if your iOS device has opened a hole into the wall or ceiling – or floor – to reveal the stars:

Photographer and designer Nick Risinger recounts his year-long, 60,000 mile journey of creating the imagery behind the photopic map at Sky Survey.

Thanks to Max for the tip!

-ddw

Make Your Own Hurricane App

Posted by d_walker – October 11, 2012

The ready availability of data and model results on the Internet means that, with a little creativity, you can aggregate your own data and analyses into a useful tool. So, let’s say you can’t stand the ads in HurricaneSoftware.com’s iHurricane HD (free for iOS, Android, Windows Phone) and you can’t afford Kitty Code’s Hurricane. Well, ZDNet’s review of hurricane apps points out that you could emulate iPhoneEZApps’ Hurricane Tracker 3.6.1 ($1.99 for iOS) FOR FREE by simply opening the following URLs in the web browser of any PC, Mac, iOS or Android device:

That is, you can fake a decent hurricane tracking app using your phone/tablet’s browser to open the above links. You could do the same on your Mac or PC, with the added elegance of opening each link as a separate tab in web browser. And you can’t beat the price.

-ddw

Hurricane Apps

Posted by d_walker – October 8, 2012

If you live on the sea coast – or are a disaster junkie – you might be looking for an iPhone/iPad/Android app that tracks hurricanes. There are several highly rated apps available at the iTunes store, but Kitty Code’s Hurricane ($2.99 for iOS; $3.99 for HD/iPad) gets great reviews and the NYTimes’ GadgetWise put the lightweight version, Hurricane Express ($0.99 for iOS), at the top of its list of hurricane tracking apps. Another possibility is EZ Apps’ Hurricane Tracker ($2.99 for iOS), which TIME’s Techland rated as their favorite. Stormpulse has reportedly developed a native iOS client for their acclaimed site but it appears to only be accessible to those who purchased their license.

Hurricane by American Red Cross (free for iOS, Android) is a tracker app that lets you monitor conditions in your area, coaches you in preparing your family and home, and helps you notify others that you are safe. TIME’s review notes that it’s a light on meteorological data, but this app is designed for public safety, not analysis:

The American Red Cross’ Hurricane app works for Android, but your other choices for Android devices are limited to STKI Concepts’ Hurricane Hound ($1.99 for Android), which also received an Honorable Mention in in BestAppEver’s 2011 Best Weather App competition.

-ddw

What are 3-D Pie Charts Good For?

Posted by d_walker – September 10, 2012

Not much, apparently – except annoying Edward Tufte. Although delivered sarcastically, the message is that a 2-D pie chart adds nothing over a table of percentages and is susceptible to optical delusions; distorting this poor representation of data to a 3-D perspective just adds distortion. I will concede that there are differing points of view, but I’ll take the numbers, thank you.

This graphical joke courtesy of Flowing Data, a site by Nathan Yau dedicated to data visualization using the R statistics package.

-ddw

Map of Physics ca. 1939

Posted by d_walker – September 5, 2012

From Thomas B. Greenslade’s virtual collection comes the Map of Physics, showing the relationships among the various branches of physics and the scientists that contributed to each stream of thought. This map, drawn by Bernard H. Porter in 1939, uses dashed lines as contours of time and represents the principal branches of physics as rivers. True, there has been a lot of interesting physics developed since 1939, but it’s still a useful illustration of using a map to represent a topology of thought, not just for locations in space.

Via the Quantum Pontiff, with thanks to Leo for the tip!

-ddw

Myths about Hurricane Katrina

Posted by d_walker – September 3, 2012

To commemorate the seventh anniversary of Hurricane Katrina striking the U.S. Gulf Coast, the Washington Post examined 5 persistent myths about this hurricane and the destruction it left in New Orleans. This disaster killed 1836, displaced over 1.3 million people, and caused over $81 billion in damage in eastern North America, mostly in New Orleans and Gulf Coast Mississippi. Jed Horne of the Post lists these myths as:

  1. New Orleans’s levees failed because Katrina was just too big. (Truth: The U.S. Army Corps and an American Society of Engineers Expert Review Panel concluded that the system of levees, floodgates, and pumps failed well below its design limits due to poor engineering and construction).
  2. The state response was as bad as the federal one. (Truth: Kathleen Blanco declared a state disaster August 26, three days before landfall, and over the coming days would move 400,000 people out of New Orleans).
  3. The storm gutted the heart and soul of New Orleans, turning it into a majority-white city. (Truth: The 2010 census shows the population of New Orleans declined about one-third, with a post-Katrina influx of hispanics reducing the city’s black majority from 67 percent to about 60 percent now).
  4. New Orleans’s levees are fixed and could withstand another Katrina. (Truth: the Army Corps of Engineers has designed the current levee system to withstand a 100-year storm surge, but Katrina was a much-more severe 400-year storm and not even a direct hit on New Orleans).
  5. New Orleanians learned their lesson and are more likely to evacuate sooner. (Truth: it is very difficult to get people to respond to emergency warnings; in the run-up to Hurricane Issac, some New Orleanians seemed more interested in pre-landfall barbeques than evacuation).

The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers has an excellent flyover tour of the system protecting New Orleans.

-ddw