Month: October 2006

TreeJuxtaposer

Structural comparison of large trees is a difficult task that is only partially supported by current visualization techniques, which are mainly designed for browsing. We present TreeJuxtaposer, a system designed to support the comparison task for large trees of several 100K nodes. We introduce the idea of “guaranteed visibility”, where highlighted areas are treated as landmarks that must remain visually apparent at all times. We propose a new methodology for detailed structural comparison between 2 trees and provide a new nearly-linear algorithm for computing the best corresponding node from one tree to another. In addition, we present a new rectilinear Focus+Context technique for navigation that is well suited to the dynamic linking of side-by-side views while guaranteeing landmark visibility and constant frame rates. These 3 contributions result in a system delivering a fluid exploration experience that scales both in the size of the dataset and the number of pixels in the display. We have based the design decisions for our system on the needs of a target audience of biologists who must understand the structural details of many phylogenetic, or evolutionary, trees. Our tool is also useful in many other application domains where tree comparison is needed, ranging from network management to call graph optimization to genealogy.

String Theory

The final episode shows how in 1995 Edward Witten of Princeton’s Institute for Advanced Study, aided by others, revolutionized string theory by successfully uniting the 5 different versions into 1 theory that is cryptically named “M-theory,” a development that required a total of 11 dimensions. But the new 11th dimension is different from all the others, since it implies that strings can come in higher dimensional shapes called membranes, or “branes” for short. These possess truly science-fiction-like qualities, since in principle they can be as large as the universe. A brane can even be a universe — a parallel universe — and we may be living in one right now.

this is awesomely done. narrated by brian greene

Google Earth Archaeology

I found more in the first 5, 6, 7 hours than I’ve found in 25 years of traditional field surveys and aerial archaeology.

2007-01-07: overview article. a bit thin on detail, unfortunately.
2014-05-05: holy shit:

A study of Cold War spy-satellite photos has tripled the number of known archaeological sites across the Middle East, revealing 1000s of ancient cities, roads, canals, and other ruins.