Month: March 2012

Galileo commands us “Measure what can be measured, and make measurable what cannot be measured.” An updated version of this might be “Visualize what can be visualized, and make visible what cannot be seen.”

If you grew up with a globe like this, you can be forgiven for thinking the big blue oceans weren’t much more than big and blue. But even a sailor with direct experience of the sea and its many tides and currents might be surprised by what the folks at NASA have done with a visualization called Perpetual Ocean.

Maximize the window when you look at it. There’s so much to see. The Gulf Stream jumps out, as you would expect. But what about the string of gyres peeling off South Africa? You can see how shallow and relatively calm the Java Sea and Strait of Malacca are, whereas the Caribbean fairly churns. And then there are the spectacular Roaring Forties that chase their own tail all the way around Antarctica. So much to see.

It’s one thing to be shown something new that you’ve never considered, something like the surface of Titan or a giant aquatic isopod. But to suddenly see something that is all around you, to have the mundane made exotic, that can be something of a shock. It’s also worth considering that, as complex as these flow diagrams are, they still constitute only one two-dimensional slice through a larger and still more complex three-dimensional flow field. I guess visualizing that that can wait a few years.

Flow visualizations seem to be in the air these days (heh), because what NASA has done with water, Martin Wattenberg has done with air. Behold his Wind Map. Where does all that wind come from? And where does it go to? A visualization can only tell you so much. Someone older than Galileo had words on the subject: “The wind bloweth where it listeth, and thou hearest the sound thereof, but canst not tell whence it cometh, and whither it goeth.”

While I was watching all these visualizations, I was thinking to myself, where have I seen that before? Then I remembered this little guy that made the rounds a few months ago.

Like I said, flow visualization is in the air. And the water and the stars, I suppose.

Watch this.

This is a wrenching video to watch. But rather than build it up any more than that, I’ll just encourage you to watch it. It was recommended to me under the heading this is what leadership should look like. I agree.

(Thanks to Karim for the link)

Great hovering kookaburras! Pi Day is upon us, and me with my best pi coat at the cleaner’s.

In honor of the blessed event, I like to point people back to the Pi-Ku poetry we made up on this site back in 2007. There still are some great poems in there. My favorite is Chris K’s

Opa! I know a
Greek character to denote
disks’ key ratio

Naturally, haikus also put me in mind of the fit of pangram haikus that we did a while back.

You can see where this is headed. And so I thought to myself… hmmm. Do you suppose we could make a hai-ku-pi-pan-gram*? How about this:

For a quiz I found
vexatious Pi, mystic Greek.
She: jewel, blossom.

There we go. Haiku syllables. Pi letter count. Alphabetic pangrammitude. And the topic is the Queen herself. It won’t win any prizes, but still.

You must do better! Use this.

* Coincidentally, Haikupipangram is also the name of the Minister of Weights and Measures in King Kamehameha’s first administration.

If you have a fondness for epigrams, you should follow Alain de Botton on Twitter. The man is a bon mot machine. One morsel: “What disappears from memory is how much of any moment is spent worrying about the future.”

He’s a sort of Philosopher 2.0, contending with the problems that confront us in the modern world, and rather than simply ranting like most of us, he offers subtle analysis and thoughtful alternatives. I’m a fan. The book that first propelled him to prominence was How Proust Can Change Your Life. Most recently, he’s just completed Religion for Atheists. Tag line: “Religions are too interesting to be left simply to those who actually believe in them.”

Here’s nice quick essay on it over at The Atlantic: What the Secular World Can Learn From Religion – Maria Popova. And since everything has a TED talk, here is his. Interestingly, he takes rather direct aim at the Dawkins camp of what he calls fundamentalist atheism: “They argue not just that religion is wrong, but that religion is ridiculous… I think it’s too easy to dismiss religion that way.”

There’s a lot of religious ferment going on these days. If you’re intrigued, you might also want to look into David Eagleman’s notion of Possibilianism.