http://benfry.com/writing Visualizing Data Thu, 24 Jul 2008 01:31:26 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en I've never really been fond of tag clouds, but Wordle, by MacGyver of software (and former drummer for They Might Be Giants) Jonathan Feinberg gives the representation an aesthetic nudge lacking in most representations. The application creates word clouds from input data submitted by users. I was reminded of it ... http://benfry.com/writing/archives/154 The O'Reilly press folks passed along this review (PDF) of Visualizing Data from USENIX magazine. I really appreciated this part: My favorite thing about Visualizing Data is that it tackles the whole process in all its blood, guts, and gore. It starts with finding the data and cleaning it up. Many ... http://benfry.com/writing/archives/153 Some potentially interesting data from NASA passed along by Chris Lonnen. The first is the Earth Observatory, which includes images of things like Carbon Monoxide, Snow Cover, Surface Temperature, UV Exposure, and so on. Chris writes: I'm not sure how useful they would be to novices in terms of usable data ... http://benfry.com/writing/archives/151 I was reminded this morning that Mario Manningham, a wide receiver who played for Michigan was rumored to have scored a 6 (out of 50) on the Wonderlic, an intelligence test administered in some occupations (and now pro football) to check the mental capability of job candidates. Intelligence tests are ... http://benfry.com/writing/archives/147 Scale is one of the most important themes in data visualization. In Monty Python's The Meaning of Life, Eric Idle shares his perspective: The lyrics: Just remember that you're standing on a planet that's evolving And revolving at nine hundred miles an hour, That's orbiting at nineteen miles a second, so it's reckoned, A ... http://benfry.com/writing/archives/146 Maximillian Dornseif has adapted Zipdecode from Chapter 6 of Visualizing Data to handle German postal codes. I've wanted to do this myself since hearing about the OpenGeoDB data set which includes the data, but thankfully he's taken care of it first and is sharing it with the rest of us ... http://benfry.com/writing/archives/144 While taking a look at the code mentioned in the previous post, I noticed two things. First, the PointCloud.pde file drops directly into OpenGL-specific code (rather than Processing API) for sake of speed to draw thousands and thousands of points. It's further proof that I need to finish the PShape ... http://benfry.com/writing/archives/143 Radiohead's new video for “House of Cards” built using a laser scanner and software: Aaron Koblin, one of Casey's former students was involved in the project and also made use of Processing for the video. He writes: A couple of hours ago was the release of a project I've been working on ... http://benfry.com/writing/archives/142 Derek Jeter vs. Objective Reality is an entertaining article from Slate regarding a study by Shane T. Jensen at the Wharton School. Nate DiMeo writes: The take-away from the study, which was presented at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, was that Mr. Jeter (despite ... http://benfry.com/writing/archives/140 Wonderful article about the work of J. Todd Anderson, who storyboards the Coen Brothers' movies: Anderson’s drawings have a jauntiness that seems absent from the more serious cinematic depiction; Anderson says he is simply trying to inject as much of a sense of action as possible into each scene. Anderson describes the ... http://benfry.com/writing/archives/138