Tag: visualization

Apollo 11

Those guys didn’t move around very much at all

2009-07-14: Remembering Apollo 11

40 years ago, 3 human beings – with the help of many 1000s of others – left our planet on a successful journey to our Moon, setting foot on another world for the first time. Tomorrow marks the 40th anniversary of the July 16, 1969 launch of Apollo 11, with astronauts Neil A. Armstrong, Michael Collins and Edwin E. “Buzz” Aldrin Jr. aboard. The entire trip lasted only 8 days, the time spent on the surface was less than 1 day, the entire time spent walking on the moon, a mere 2.5 hours – but they were surely historic hours. Scientific experiments were deployed (at least 1 still in use today), samples were collected, and photographs were taken to document the entire journey. Collected here are 40 images from that journey 40 years ago, when, in the words of astronaut Buzz Aldrin: “In this 1 moment, the world came together in peace for all mankind”.


2009-07-24: Apollo 11 Goodwill Messages

May the high courage and the technical genius which made this achievement possible be so used in the future that mankind will live in a universe in which peace, self expression, and the chance of a dangerous adventure are available to all.

2019-06-14: The Biggest Nonmilitary Effort in History

The Apollo computers had a total of 73kb of memory. If you get an email with the morning headlines from your local newspaper, it takes up more space than 73kb. … They hired seamstresses. … Every wire had to be right. Because if you got it wrong, the computer program didn’t work. Even on John Glenn’s famous orbital flight — the first US orbital flight — the computers in mission control stopped working for 3 minutes out of 4 hours. Well, that’s only 3 minutes out of 4 hours, but that was the most important computer in the world during that 4 hours and they couldn’t keep it going during the entire orbital mission of John Glenn.

2019-07-19: Margaret Hamilton tribute

With the anniversary of that moon landing approaching, Google set out to shine a light on Margaret’s influence on Apollo, and on the field of software engineering itself. The tribute was created by positioning over 107K mirrors at the Ivanpah Solar Facility in the Mojave Desert to reflect the light of the moon, instead of the sun, like the mirrors normally do. The result is a 3.6-km2 portrait of Margaret, bigger than New York’s Central Park.

Earth Water

All the water in the world (1.4b km3) and all the air in the atmosphere (5140 * 10e18 kg) gathered into a ball at sea-level density. Shown on the same scale as the Earth.

2008-10-30:

An “atlas of hidden water” has been created to reveal where the world’s freshwater aquifers really lie. “The hope is that it will help pave the way to an international law to govern how water is shared around the world.”

Useful to predict the wars of the future.
2013-12-07:

The volume of this water resource is 100x greater than the amount we’ve extracted from the Earth’s subsurface in the past century

2020-11-24:

The mantle transition zone (MTZ) at a depth of 410 to 660 km is considered to be a potential water reservoir because its dominant minerals, wadsleyite and ringwoodite, can contain large amounts of water up to 3 weight %. To fit the observed mantle viscosity profiles, ringwoodite in the MTZ should contain 1 to 2 wt % water. The MTZ should thus be nearly water-saturated globally.

The MTZ is estimated to hold 3x the amount of water as the world’s oceans. This makes books like Flood more plausible. earlier estimates thought it was more like 2x:

Evidence suggests the middle of Earth’s mantle holds as much water as the planet’s oceans. If scientists can prove without doubt that the middle mantle is filled with water, it calls into question theories that suggest water arrived on Earth from comets.

See also 2.8t Tons of Fresh Water Under the Ocean

Low-salinity submarine groundwater contained within continental shelves is a global phenomenon. While low-salinity groundwater is thought to be abundant, its distribution and volume worldwide is poorly understood due to the limited number of observations. The data suggest a continuous submarine aquifer system spans at least 350 km of the US Atlantic coast and contains 2.8t tons of low-salinity groundwater.

BrightEarth

BrightEarth is a project dedicated to exploring ways in which a new generation of Internet mapping tools can improve the sharing of information about humanitarian issues, both among the organizations directly involved and with the wider public. BrightEarth will help humanitarian organizations publish information to 3D virtual globes such as Google Earth, ESRI ArcGIS Explorer and NASA’s World Wind.

Dataviz Google Gadgets

Google probably intends to use this technology to visualize custom data. One of the interfaces that will allow you create your own Trendalyzer visualizations is an iGoogle gadget which creates a Flash multi dimensional chart. Another gadget creates an interactive table that supports filtering and grouping, the simple table gadget lets you perform queries, while the heat map gadget “displays a map with color intensities that match given values”. There are also gadgets for pie charts, column charts, bar charts, area charts, image lines, scatter charts, organizational charts, time series.

what is the story here? these would be quite useful if documented properly

Playgrounds for Data

Mainstream media is often chided for not being hip with the latest in design technology. The New York Times, having started in 1851, is about as mainstream as you can get. Yet, in my opinion, they are a leader in creating interactive modules to accompany their news stories, often yielding in an impressive and fun experience.

indeed, the nyt is often breaking some new ground. good for them.