From a cool blog called Information is beautiful comes this animation. It’s sort of an animated rehash of an older post. Their point is: we hear that this war cost X million dollars and this credit rescue cost Y million dollars. It all sounds like a lot of money but it’s hard to see what things really are without any context. This video presents you with said context in a very clear way:
Tag Archives: data
Visualizing friendships
An intern at a website called Facebook (some sort of up and coming social network, whatever that is) took data from millions of friendships and drew a map using that information. He drew the cities where users were from and lines between cities depicting friendships. More details on how he drew this here.
The result: A pretty picture, not unlike the ones you see taken from the ISS at night… except these aren’t lights, they are Facebook users.
It also shows to an extent the level of internet penetration in the world: not many users in Siberia nor the Sahara – or the level of internet censorship – can anyone see China?
High resolution image here.
Disaster strikes
I started having computer problems a few days ago. They coincidentally started right after I applied the Mac OS X 10.5.7 update. So I blamed that and decided to deal with it whenever I get a chance. The symptoms: my Mac mini would lock up after I use iTunes or iPhoto for a little bit. I didn’t really think it was a problem with iTunes or iPhoto themselves nor their files since they happen to be the applications I use the most on that machine – so I assumed the computer would lock up regardless of what program I’m using.
Turns out I was wrong. What happened is that the external hard drive that I use to hold (surprise!) all of my music collection, videos, and over 8000 photos was dying. It finally stopped functioning altogether tonight. None of my computers can even see it, much less mount it or extract any data from it.