Tag: visualization

Space colony simulator

In addition to being a great game, High Frontier is the most detailed and accurate space colony simulator ever made. It’s so detailed, in fact, that work on it has already led to a couple of novel results.

Stability Benefit of Inverted Endcaps
A cylinder tends to tumble end-over-end if it’s made too long. Previous studies on space colonies didn’t study the idea of cylinder endcaps that bulge inward, like the bottom of a soda can. So we tried it out in High Frontier, and found that such inverted endcaps are better. We don’t mean just a little better; they’re a lot better. So much so, that when real space settlements get built someday, we can pretty much guarantee you’ll see inverted endcaps.

Advantages of Low-Earth Orbit
The classic space settlement studies always assumed they would be built in freespace, such as the L4 and L5 orbits. But in researching the radiation environment of various orbits, we found that the environment in low-Earth orbit (LEO) is much, much more benign than higher orbits. Incidentally, we also found that those classic studies underestimated the amount of shielding needed by 2x.

ManyCities

“ManyCities” is a new website that “explores the spatio-temporal patterns of mobile phone activity in cities across the world,” including London, New York, Los Angeles and Hong Kong. Taking complex data and organizing it in a intuitive way, the application allows users to quickly visualize patterns of human movement within the urban context down to the neighborhood scale. You can imagine how useful a tool like this can be for urban planners or even daily commuters, especially once real time analytics come into play. Take a look at ManyCities yourself, here.

Biggest tree of life


this is amazing work, and very much a beginning:

the tree depicts the relationships among living things as they diverged from one another over time, tracing back to the beginning of life on Earth more than 3.5B years ago. 10Ks of smaller trees have been published over the years for select branches of the tree of life — some containing upwards of 100k species — but this is the first time those results have been combined into a single tree that encompasses all of life.


is another nice one.