The most excellent Tumblr of the Sunlight Foundation
53 years of nuclear tests as electronic music
I’ve seen this video described as a musical depiction of all the nuclear bombs ever detonated. But that sort of makes it sound like you’re about to get a particularly bombastic version of the 1812 Overture. Instead, “1945-1998” by Isao Hashimoto is more like an infographic with sound effects — or, possibly, a mash-up of the games Simon and Global Thermonuclear War.
What Google’s Self-Driving Car Can See
Idea Lab’s Bill Gross recently tweeted this photo, showing what one of Google’s self-driving cars sees when it attempts to make a left turn at a junction.
Chris Evans sez, “I made this 8bit London Underground map a while ago, entirely in Tile Studio with a bit of Gimp to add text.”
Could prove useful
This is what the world’s biggest prime number looks like.
I took the raw numeric data from the new, 17-million-digit prime, broke it into 6-digit chunks, converted that to RGB colors, and made an image.
Uninsured comic artist with cancer draws the moment she opens first big medical bill
Chicago-based comic artist Laura Park (@llaurappark) was recently diagnosed with thyroid cancer.
Blackout tracker tells you where the electric grid is down
The other day, someone asked me what the most surprising thing was that I learned while writing Before the Lights Go Out, my book about America’s electric infrastructure and the future of energy. That’s easy. The most surprising thing was definitely my realization of just how precarious our all-important grid system actually is.
Digging this drawing by astronomy blogger Invader Xan, showing spaceships of the past, present, and (possible?) future lined up side-by-side for size comparison. I, for one, just learn that the Space Shuttle Orbiter was larger than I thought in comparison to the International Space Station.
Human “Ingredients-List” shirt
Qwantz sends us “A shirt (done in consultation with medical professionals) that not only lists your nutritional information (including how many calories and Vitamin C you contain) but also your elemental makeup and all the cool things inside your body (one spooky skeleton, millions of kilometers of DNA, up to 800 cubic cm of warm urine in a convenient fleshy sack).
The Rise and Fall of Wu-Tang, an epic infodiscography in three parts
“It’s so large (14,000 px) i had to break it into three parts,” Jess explains. “The vital stats for every release of every member of the Wu.”
Saving the whales? Now there’s an app for that, too.
An interesting new iOS app launched today called Whale Alert. Though it’s available for anyone, the iPhone/iPad app is intended primarily for use by workers in the shipping and maritime industry. It “combines science and technology to help save critically endangered North Atlantic right whales by reducing threats of collisions with large ships along the East Coast of North America.”
For more than three decades, veteran music journalist Pete Frame has specialized in creating fantastic Rock Family Trees that map relationships between musicians and bands. In the comments on my post yesterday about our Ed Piskor’s Hip Hop Family Tree, commenter Preston Sruges pointed us to Frame’s family tree of New York New Wave, featuring the likes of Blondie, Talking Heads, Patti Smith, and The Ramones.
The Apocalypse will be a lot like flying coach
What could possibly make a 1960s-era nuclear war worse than you’d already assumed it would be? How about being packed like sardines into a fallout shelter with 13 of your soon-to-be-closest friends?
Can’t wait to get my hands on this forthcoming Taschen title, by art historian and art editor Sandra Rendgen; with graphic designer and editor Julius Wiedemann: Information Graphics. The book explores the visual communication of data, and the “massive flow of information that we must interpret in order to understand the world we live in,” featuring work from masters of the profession.
