These are incredible:

They’re made by an Austin company called Zebra Imaging.  I really want to drop by their office and look at some of them in person…

via Landscape and Urbanism

This We Know is one of the first in what will hopefully become an extensive and vibrant community of web pages designed to parse and present all that government data that’s being published over at data.gov.  The web site has a search bar where you can enter a location, then it spits out a list of stuff it knows about that location.  A few interesting things it knows about Austin:

• 307,315 pounds of 32 Pollutants were released (within 22 mi.)
• 38,216 people are Unemployed, while 523,855 have jobs
• There are 122,468 Home Owners and 144,445 Renters
• 63% of people Relocated in the past 15 years (in this town)

I love data.

Tom, Agustina and I had an interesting conversation over beers the other night about the emerging role of computers in the design and construction process.  To my mind two main questions emerged: what is a useful role for computation in the design process and how does architecture respond to the impact of CNC manufacturing processes on the constraints imposed on the builder.  These are both very expansive topics, so I’ll stick to the first.

This sort of speaks for itself (these are inflation-adjusted numbers):

This is probably some of the coolest software I’ve seen in years.

I would explain it – but just watch it, you’ll see.  Supposedly there’s a Google Sketchup plugin coming out soon that makes 3d building models using the same basic technology.

Penn State seems to have just started a video series dealing with the emergence of geospatial information as a significant cultural force – it looks very interesting:

We live in the Global Location Age. “Where am I?” is being replaced by, “Where am I in relation to everything else?”

Penn State Public Broadcasting is developing the Geospatial Revolution Project, an integrated public media and outreach initiative about the world of digital mapping and how it is changing the way we think, behave, and interact.

The project will feature a web-based serial release of eight video episodes—each telling an intriguing geospatial story.

There’s a preview video on the site that’s worth a watch.

Infoaesthetics posted about some researchers who downloaded 35 million geotagged images from flicker and did some data mining.  The images below show the paths travelled by photographers in New York, based on images from the same camera taken within a few minutes of each other.

The researcher’s site has links to the full paper as well as a few more images including this heatmap:

This seems like an interesting way to analyze people’s movement patterns – you could make interesting video showing the frequency and location of pictures taken at different times of the day , days of the week, or days of the year.

Imagine 20 years from now using the accumulated photos of billions of people to create time-lapse fully immersive 3d environments which would allow you to ‘slide’ forward and backward in time.  The technology to create 3d models from a set of images already exists:

A virtual reconstruction of the Statue of Liberty, created from tourists

The coming ubiquity of GPS-enabled gadgetry will undoubtedly create all sorts of interesting information visible (for better or for worse).

Boingboing just posted a review of a book called ‘Sustainable Energy’ which is available in full as a PDF here.  So far I love it.  From the original review:

This is to energy and climate what Freakonomics is to economics: an accessible, meaty, by-the-numbers look at the physics and practicalities of energy. MacKay, a Cambridge Physics prof, approaches the subject of carbon and sustainability with a scientific, numeric eye. First, in a section called “Numbers, not adjectives,” he looks at all the energy and carbon inputs and outputs in Britain and the rest of the world: this is how many kWh of energy are needed to power all of Britain’s vehicles. This is how many kWh you would get if you covered the entire British shore with windmills, or wave-farms. This is Britain’s geothermal potential. Here’s how much carbon vegetarianism offsets. Here’s how much carbon unplugging your idle appliances saves (0.25%, making the campaign to switch off energy vampires into a largely pointless exercise — as MacKay says, “If everyone does a little bit, we’ll get a little bit done”). This is the carbon-footprint of all of Britain’s imports, gadgets, office towers, and so on.

Infoaesthetics just posted a link to a new web page called GeoCommons which allows “non-technical professionals” to view and analyze geo-located data, without the traditional GIS overhead.

As a quick example of why this is cool – here’s a map of the percentage of bridges in each state which are classified as ‘structurally deficient’.  20-25% of the bridges in those states with the big circles are structurally deficient.  Makes you wonder if road trips are such a good idea after all.  Maybe spending some money on roads and bridges isn’t such a bad idea.

The interwebs are all aflutter about the release of Processing 1.0.  Processing is an environment and language for creating data-driven visualizations, and is the engine behind a couple  of the most interesting animations I’ve ever seen.