As of this past weekend I have a new home online at rikenography and the rikenography blog. Come check it out.
-greg
Another addition of Riken Links here. I’ll start it off with a nice little article about cities, their quirks, problems, and general proclivities by the man who penned the anthem of Cities, David Byrne. Moving on, we have a nice little slide show in the New York Times about a man who makes houses entirely out of recycled materials. They are not only not ugly, but are quite beautiful and extremely livable in their design and comfort. Next, we have a video of a photographer dealing casually with a near mauling by a rally car. He is not phased and goes on to take photos of the accident. Another video entry from the classic film Point Break – immortal words, “Utah, gimme two.”
That’s all for now. Until next time.
- David Byrne on Cities (The Cities Anthem)
New pictures from my new location.
Jude's Garage
In the US we launch things into space from a beach-side site in Florida and recover them in the Pacific, or in the case of the Shuttle, a landing strip in Texas. The USSR however used a very landlocked region of Kazakhstan as its launch-pad and recovered its own crafts by landing across the steppe. This led to a really sweet (or dangerous) opportunity for space junk to land in your backyard if you lived out in the Kazakh countryside.
Here is a really interesting photo essay of the space program’s presence in Kazakhstan. Sadly this won’t be happening any longer as Russia has decided to launch vehicles from its own territory.
Found thanks to Dangerous Minds
Mostly sunny with a chance of bliss
A straight month of rain had led to a period of intense thunderstorms followed by solid periods of summer. This photo is taken from a moment in between the two extremes.
So not long after the post regarding visual representations of complex information, I happened upon Craig Robinson’s collection of baseball related info-graphics. The images explain very simply the central idea behind each graph’s data. This may seem irrelevant as it is merely baseball. I can agree with many out who think that baseball statistics are an overindulgent and essentially meaningless art. The more one parses the numbers, the less relevant they are to the game.
Amazin?
These stats manage to overcome the inherent problems in things like OBPS. (On Base percentage Plus Slugging average) Naked numbers lack a depth of meaning necessary to understanding why a player or team is capable of winning.
Craig Robinson’s work seems to do away with much of hollowness in his statistics. This strangely colored chart explains who played for the Mets during the fateful 1986 season, but what I find so interesting is how it explains each player’s journey to and away from the World Championship team. One can see the stars aligning, fate taking over and it all starts to make sense. The graphic also explains who was new to baseball and who were veterans, therefore providing a representative range of age and experience.
The only problem obviously is that we can’t appreciate the majestic and timely failings of Bill Buckner. But perhaps that ground ball could use its own info-graphic some day.
Lets move on.
The next two pieces of visual data concern ballpark design, corporate sponsorship, weather possibilities and for the orientation image, the direction in relation to due North the ballpark itself faces.
And last but not least, a simple but powerful representation of baseball’s highest and lowest ticket prices for the 2009 season. Slightly embarrassing to see my Yankees representing the Bernie Madoff factor in baseball but nevertheless, here it is:
Here we go for a links post #2. Didn’t think we’d make it, but here we are. This time around we got an answer to the eternal question; what do goths do in the summer? Gazprom is the massive oil and gas conglomerate owned largely by the Russian government, and is the creator of a rock epic in ode to itself for being such a great and important company. From there we go to an excellent collection of old theaters in various states of disrepair. I’m not a huge fan of the urban explorer craze. It reminds me of people who think post modernism is the answer to every serious question. And last but not least, the real location of sleepy hollow’s bridge on which the headless horseman reigned his mindless terror. (The link hasn’t been working as the whole site has crashed. I’ll keep things updated when it comes back online. It’s Back) So until then, we’ll have to make do with WWIII Tweet Propaganda.
In this age of modernity (or thereabouts) we take it for granted that data is represented in the most efficient and assuredly, most visual of manners. Our power point presentations documented the hypothetical (and then very real) invasion of Iraq – our excel spreadsheets improperly, though with a flair for the aesthetically enlightened, organized and presented the market’s capacity for debt trading.
These novel and assuredly clever visualizations of the world’s data do much, but they do lack the elegance of John Thomson Edinburgh’s representations of the world’s rivers and mountains. Each one perfectly scales the length of the waterways, height of the mountains, relative volume of the river, and changes in course of the water.
- Comparative View of the Lengths of the Principal Rivers of Scotland
Though Edinburgh’s illustrations approach art, their proportions, angles, and overall composition are provided purely by the Earth’s various measurements.
The only other representation of facts I have seen that lays out its subject so elegantly is the chart pictured below. It shows Napoleon’s Grand Armee heading towards Moscow in 1812 (represented in red) and the subsequently brutal return trip a year later with only 10,000 of a 422,000 man force.
The thickness represents troop numbers, direction the relative route taken including rivers and cities of importance, the length is scaled in proportional to the campaign’s mileage, and quite interestingly, the temperature face by the invading force is marked along the bottom. One can literally see the huge mass of Napoleon’s men fought not just by the Russians, but by the shear ardor of the required march and the increasingly hostile, frigid air.
There are some who try to keep things interesting in their mapping of data and hopefully, over time, there will be more of them. Over at strange maps, they try to document the most interesting forms of mapping. For words, there is the visual thesaurus, though it is lame having to pay for its features. That can be fixed here.
