TRENDS

an 8 minute "lively" infographic movie about the progress & problems of globalisation. enjoy the people-based bar & line graphs, & top-view world maps.

[links: youtube.com (English) & youtube.com (German)]

see also 1 take shot trampoline video clip.

Lee Dorsey has a stable of hits unlike most other New Orleans artist. He's solid gold.

From a partnership with Allen Toussaint, who seems to be an architect of half of the music that came out of city in 1960s, Dorsey enjoyed many many hits, often with the Meters as his backing band.

Before his career took off as a singer he was a light heavyweight boxer in Portland (after the war) and he also ran a car body repair shop in New Orleans. Hmmm useful information overload.

Lee Dorsey - My Old Car
Brought to you by Jukebox Joints

an interesting news article about the distribution of world records in sporting events & the recent 200m sprint at the Olympic Games in particular. the story links to several interactive graphs that highlight the lack of a normal distribution, as outliers are more prevalent due to the extreme tails of highly selected samples, where usual statistical patterns rarely hold.

several design for a bathroom based on pixel drawings made out of classic 4 by 4 inch colored tiles. the one based on a subway map seems quite infosthetic.

[link: blogs.nytimes.com|thnkx Remy]

And in other news, Jeff Koons has painted a boat. Apparently he
based this design on a WW1 camouflage pattern. Looks like Lego to me. It was commissioned by art collector Dakis Joannou. Make of it what you will...

an online web service that allows users to visualize & share snippets of all sorts of data in form of simple statistical graphs. the Mycrocosm project focuses on social communication & the creation of individual & biographical data profiles (e.g. Feltron's annual report), rather than possible uses of data tracking (e.g. Track-n-Graph) or social visualization (e.g. Many Eyes).

the project seems to come very close to Feltron's Daytum (seemingly still in private beta).

[link: media.mit.edu]

Beyond the Valley have rented this extra shop just behind Carnaby Street for 10 days. It's a sale shop as you can see. They have an interesting idea though. On the first day, this Friday (22nd August) everything will cost £30, then each day everything will drop by £5 per day until they run out of things.

an online visualization designed by Fernanda Viegas, Martin Wattenberg & the crowdsourcing specialists at Dolores Labs, which explores the relationship between the body & its visual & verbal representation.

the Touch body heatmap investigates the collective perception of erogenous zones, based on the input of 100s of people that ranked how good it would feel to touch or be touched by a lover in different points of the body.

the Look interface analyzes the individuality and hidden surprises that each body reveals when bared by abstracting & categorizing visual forms of male nipples & female breasts.

the Listen interface charts how often a specific body part is mentioned in different music genres genre, based on a sample of 1000s songs.

There's a show in London this Thursday that looks pretty good. There's lots of super good people in this group show but I'm just mentioning Luke Best which is the work I'm going to see.

More here.

a collection of physical data sculptures made from found objects of graphs & charts mapping a variety of datasets. the linear geometric forms could easily be dismissed as homage to minimalist object making until the titles reveal their true meaning. the sculptures are pictorial devices measuring human behavior, ranging from military expenditure, US population by race, global tobacco production & so on.

[link: joshuacallaghan.com|via designboom.com & flowingdata.com]

see also:
. laser-cut sound analysis

a small interactive homage to Ben Shneiderman, as an interface resembling his portrait photo, made out of almost a 1,000 thumbnail pictures of different visualization techniques, such as diagrams, charts, maps, tables or visual metaphors.

21st August marks the birthday of Ben, the famous Professor at the University of Maryland who provided fundamental research in the field of human–computer interaction, & more recently, on information visualization, for instance inventing the treemap visualization technique for representing hierarchical data.

You may have read about this guy's record collection. It's pretty serious. They should organise day trips. I think I could die in there.

This is the office of Nonsense, an advertising agency based in Soho, that's Robbie waving. On Monday I needed a desk to work from so I went to FlamingDesks.com. Flaming Desks is something that Nonsense has set up. Basically anyone with a spare desk (in their office) registers and announces that they have a spare desk, then people who need a desk can find one... and use it. The site is still in Alpha stages, but it works pretty nicely.

This is taken from my Jukebox Joints site. Maintaining two blogs is way too much work, so while I'm gonna keep putting sevens onto Jukebox Joints they will also feature on here as well. One stone killing, or rather updating two birds if you like.--------------------

The original of this record is rare as hen's teeth. This is from a limited repress of 500.

This for me, defines what Garage music is all about. Dark, gritty, wailing guitars and a short playing time. If you're wondering why you can barely hear the vocal it's because they use a tape-delay echo device called "the Cooper Time Cube" but didn't set it up properly.

a new set of generative visual themes that are directly created from, & visually accompany poems. each theme can be interactively explored online.

in the 2008 version, all words words in a poem based on their frequency in the text, which are placed on a line. the most frequent words are thus relatively large & placed on the left hand side. then, all words that appear in several poems are connected by a fluid red line. the width of the line is related to the length of the word in the regarding sequence.

I'm told by a friend of mine that there's a quite a trend in Japan of taking pictures of empty buildings. There's a bunch of nice pictures on the site. There's something very intriguing about derelict buildings. I always find myself wondering what they were used for and who occupied them.

I like questions that I'll never know the answer to. It's an excuse for imagination to play more.

a visualization application that is able to generate a wireless (WiFi, 802.11) heatmap based on signal strength. an obvious usage is to find the best physical place or area to work wirelessly with the highest signal strength. the tool allocates a 2D grid that overlaps the geographical sample area, working out the average signal strength based on nearby sample points.

[link: slowchop.com|thnkx Martin]

a Wiki-style global map of important debates that aims to visualize & deepen the understanding of the ways in which different debates are semantically interrelated. every debate map is provisional and open to iterative improvement by anyone who participates. over time, the debate maps mature into the definitive articulations of each debate. debates range from "Climate Change" over "Obama's Vice President" to "Can Computers Think?"

[link: debategraph.org]

see also narrating bits.

This is Mama Thai, one of my favourites in East London. They used to be in Spitalfields market before the corporation of London royally screwed the whole place, now they are just around the corner from there. It occurred to me that I never really write much about stuff in London so I thought I'd mention Mama Thai.

£5 will get you almost any meal in here. The Masaman curry and chicken noodle are what I mostly eat here and I'm always pretty damn happy with it. The folks who run it are super nice, including Pam who is Mama Thai herself.

a beautiful "infographically" animated movie that illustrates a 1969 interview of John Lennon by a 14-year-old Beatle fanatic named Jerry Levitan. armed with a reel-to-reel tape deck, Jerry snuck into John Lennon's hotel room in Toronto & convinced him to do an interview about peace. using the original interview recording as the sole soundtrack, the movie titled "I Met the Walrus" suspends a visual narrative which tenderly romances Lennon's every word in a cascading flood of multipronged animation.

the video was also nominated for an Oscar for "best animated short" at the 2008 Academy Awards.

an analogue, physical information sculpture that displays the daily average of CO2 concentration through a chemical reaction in which chalk particles are formed, which in turn changes the opacity of water encapsulated in plastic tubes. the "Statlab" installation samples air direct from a local area, so that the differences in water clarity creates an analogue graph in which the difference in the amount of chalk particles per tank is a global measure for the fluctuating CO2 concentration within one 1 week.

[link: bitlek.nl|thnkx Tjerk]

see also one trees electronic clones information environment.

This is maybe more for all you feedreader subscribers. Eight or nine months ago I created an audio only Tumblr. I did this so I could keep track of the tracks I'd stumbled across in other places and collect them together. I might have mentioned this before. I used to have it in the sidebar of this blog and then took it away as each song was simply a link and not a very practical way to consume a group of songs.

an alternative way to represent time schedule tracking by stacking different lengths of Lego blocks as a way to convey different sequential time periods. stacking hourly rows on top of each other builds up the whole day, while color represents the different projects at hand. a whole week of time tracking is created by setting up a series of rainbow-colored days.

[link: jexp.de|thnkx Christopher]

see also: Fight Club movie narrative in Lego

multiple, superimposed logarithmic line graphs that show the "big picture" by aggregating the activity graphs from Google Trends for Websites. the domains searched within the last hour are rendered in brighter colors & gradually fade away. red lines indicate sites which are losing traffic. blue lines are gaining

[link: coverpop.com|via krazydad.com|thnkx Jim]

The New York Times have built this great Olympic data chart infographic. This image is from when London hosted the games in 1908. Our size is relative to the medals we won. Look how much arse we kicked, possibly because no one traveled here!Apart from seeing when countries did well it's really interesting seeing how historical events and geographical changes effected the performance of certain countries. Well worth playing with for at least 6 minutes.