Because of the circle, no organism is privileged with being above another. A circle has not top. We humans are somewhere in the lineup, but where depends on how you turn the chart. This circle of life also better captures the idea that all living organisms today are equally evolved. By definition, any organism alive today (shown on the outer rim) can boast an unbroken chain of ancestors who have survived the same number of years, 4.5 billions years. The snail, fern, clam and mite have all undergone an equally long path to now. They are all the results of 4.5 billion years of evolution. The fern’s 4.5 billion-year answer to how to survive is to steal energy from the sun; the snail to steal it from the fern; the mite to steal it from the snail, and the deep vent clam, to steal it from the heat of the earth.
Though our intelligence, cellular complexity, or phenotypic traits are far from equal, all organisms alive today are equally evolved. Each species has been down a 4.5 billion-year path that led it to the niche it fills today.
Kevin Systrom, founder of Instagram, has been working on this site that gives up-to-date reads on Rt by state, giving a read on how fast the coronavirus is spreading.
These are up-to-date values for Rt, a key measure of how fast the virus is growing. It’s the average number of people who become infected by an infectious person. If Rt is above 1.0, the virus will spread quickly. When Rt is below 1.0, the virus will stop spreading.
Tabbing between the time ranges shows how infection rates are changing over the last 4 weeks.
An technical piece on restoring Alan Kay’s Xerox Alto he donated to Y Combinator. Amazing piece of technology history, and inspired so many future developments in computing — graphical user interfaces, WYSIWIG text editing, bitmapped graphics, the mouse, and Ethernet for connectivity.
Xerox built about 2000 Altos for use in Xerox, universities and research labs, but the Alto was never sold as a product. Xerox used the ideas from the Alto in the Xerox Star, which was expensive and only moderately successful. The biggest impact of the Alto was in 1979 when Steve Jobs famously toured Xerox and saw the Alto and other machines. When Jobs saw the advanced graphics of the Alto, he was inspired to base the user interfaces of the Lisa and Macintosh systems on Xerox’s ideas, making the GUI available to the mass market.
This is a physics simulator that replicates the physics of interstellar objects. You can simulate massive planetary collisions or supernovae in the Earth’s solar system, in case you want to see what would happen.
A neat catalog “map” of mathematics, with visualizations of things like prime numbers, symmetry, calculus, and more. Quanta Magazine does fantastic work.
In 2019, there were over 33,000 businesses in Japan over a century old, according to research firm Teikoku Data Bank. The oldest hotel in the world has been open since 705 in Yamanashi and confectioner Ichimonjiya Wasuke has been selling sweet treats in Kyoto since 1000. Osaka-based construction giant Takenaka was founded in 1610, while even some global Japanese brands like Suntory and Nintendo have unexpectedly long histories stretching back to the 1800s.
Mike Bostock published this cool Observable notebook that generates snapshots showing road networks of centrally-planned cities. Brasilia as an example:
It uses a combo of D3 and OpenStreetMap data to generate vector tiles.
An interesting idea for looking at data. Rather than the typical negative, dour news you read daily, this site presents data demonstrating positive progress.
It’s surprising that it’s not more common to pay attention to where we’re making progress. More on this theme about progress studies here. Also check out Hans Rosling’s Factfulness for a great primer on the subject of data-driven appreciation of human advancements.
Blot is a super-minimal open source blogging system based on plain text files in a folder. It supports markdown, Word docs, images, and HTML — just drag the files into the folder and it generates web pages. I love simple tools like this.
An interesting post from Robert Simmon from Planet. These examples of visualizations and graphics of physical phenomena (maps, cloud diagrams, drawings of insects, planetary motion charts) were all hand-drawn, in an era where specialized photography and sensing weren’t always options.
A common thread between each of these visualizations is the sheer amount of work that went into each of them. The painstaking effort of transforming a dataset into a graphic by hand grants a perspective on the data that may be hindered by a computer intermediary. It’s not a guarantee of accurate interpretation (see Chapplesmith’s flawed conclusions), but it forces an intimate examination of the evidence. Something that’s worth remembering in this age of machine learning and button-press visualization.
I especially love that Apollo mission “lunar trajectory” map.
Descartes Labs built a wildfire detection algorithm and tool that leans on NASA’s GOES weather satellite thermal spectrum data, in order to detect wildfires by temperature:
While the pair of GOES satellites provides us with a dependable source of imagery, we still needed to figure out how to identify and detect fires within the images themselves. We started simple: wildfires are hot. They are also hotter than anything around them, and hotter than at any point in the recent past. Crucially, we also know that wildfires start small and are pretty rare for a given location, so our strategy is to model what the earth looks like in the absence of a wildfire, and compare it to the situation that the pair GOES satellites presents to us. Put another way our wildfire detector is essentially looking for thermal anomalies.
This is a great narrative story from the Wall Street Journal about the current situation in California with PG&E, the rolling blackouts, and the wildfires ravaging the state. Drone video, maps, data on fire risk and infrastructure paint a pretty grim picture of the problem. It’ll take years for PG&E to catch up to where there’s anything resembling a long-term solution to this problem.
In preparation for this year’s Geography 2050 theme (“borders in a borderless world”), this map gives a helpful sense of how relatively young most of the world’s international boundaries are. Outside of Europe, most boundaries are shades of red or blue (dating from 1800 or later).
This week’s links are all interactive notebooks on Observable. Their Explore section always highlights interesting things people are creating. A great learning tool for playing with data and code to see how it works.
Easily the most impressive interactive notebook I’ve ever seen. This one from Tom shows the electromechanical pathways of the German Enigma machine at work — enter a character and see how the rotors and circuits encrypt text.
Another great example of the power of interactive programs. This one lets you compute bicycle chainring gear ratios by speed setting. You can add multiple cassettes and chainrings to compare:
Have to include a map example. Here the author brings in DEM data then styles and generates it all in code with GDAL for data manipulation and D3 for graphics.
Most people don’t know how earth imaging satellites work. All they know is a camera is flying overhead snapping photos. This visualization gives you an animated picture of how Planet’s satellite constellation can cover the entire globe every day for a continuously-updated view of the Earth:
In four years, Planet has flown on 18 successful launches and deployed 293 satellites successfully into low Earth orbit. With more than 150 satellites currently in orbit, Planet has the largest constellation of Earth imaging satellites in history.
Amazing that we’ve got this kind of capability with microsatellite technology. Right now most of the sensors (the “Doves”) give 3m resolution, but this’ll just keep getting better.
Zoom is one of those admirable SaaS companies built on solid product and amazing execution. I love this — not relying on anything sexy or super inventive, just solving a known problem better than everyone else. My favorite bit is their retention; it proves what can be done even in SMB with lock-tight product market fit:
Zoom has 140% net revenue retention. This is similar to RingCentral from our last analysis and other leaders. Zoom also shows that yes, this can be done with smaller customers too, not just enterprises.
This is a great quick animation showing the sun’s path across the globe during the summer solstice. It shows very clearly why, as you move toward northern latitudes in the summer you get such long days, with perpetual sunlight above the Arctic Circle.
The TeachOSM crew has been doing grest work training teachers how to use OpenStreetMap in their classrooms. Geographic education is critical, especially in primary education, to form a baseline understanding of the world. I got to help out at one of these workshops last year and the outcomes were truly impressive.
Since 2016, TeachOSM has trained ~350 teachers and vocational educators in open mapping techniques. So giving open mapping workshops for teachers has become a staple of our programming over the last few years. In this post, I briefly outline what we do in our workshops, why it is vital work, and how you can help us to make OSM available in geography classes everywhere.
