Tessellatin' Rhythm and Fractal City Maps

Portland - The Fractal (Click to enlarge)One of the craziest art efforts out there is the geospatial art of Nikolas Schiller. Schiller takes satellite photos of cityscapes and melds them into quilts, morphs them onto spherical surfaces, and, basically anything else he can think of. The net result is a set of amazing images of familiar cities looking as if viewed through kaleidoscopes. Many of the images remind me of Escher, only with buildings and landscape features serving as the interlocking escher-figures, receding to infinity at the edges.

Maybe more insane is Schiller's pace: a new map every few days for several years now, all posted on his Daily Render blog, subtitled A Digital Scrapbook for Past, Present, and Future.

Schiller also works with old maps, e.g. combining 16th century maps with current images.

The fractal connection is an obvious one, and Schilling has a special section devoted to images that are more fractal-like. (See the Dupont Circle tessellation, e.g.)

Schiller's motivation is artistic and political. As described in a Washington Post article by D. Montgomery,

Click to read more ...

Visualizing The Core of the Blogosphere

Interactive map of blogosphere. From Hurst. Click to enlargeThere's been a recent flurry of articles concerning visualization of the web itself, and what such visualization might say about the social networks that live and breathe because of the abilities of the net.  This topic is a necessary follow-up, then, to my previous posts on new visualization techniques in web searching.

A conference at UPenn in June 2006 titled The Hyperlinked Society focused on "the effects of digital links on people’s ability to understand and care about their larger society. " The following blurb is from the intro page; the program was quite ambitious:

Most internet users know hyperlinks as highlighted words on a web page that take them to certain other sites. But hyperlinks today are quite complex forms of instant connection—for example, tags, API mashups, and RSS feeds. Moreover, media convergence has led to increased instant linking among desktop computers, cell phones, PDAs, MP3 players, digital video recorders, and even billboards.

Through these activities and far more, “links” are becoming the basic forces that relate creative works to one another. Links nominate what ideas and actors have the right to be heard and with what priority. Various stakeholders in society recognize the political and economic value of these connections. Governments, corporations, non-profits and individual media users often work to digitally privilege certain ideas over others.

Do links encourage people to see beyond their personal situations and know the broad world in diverse ways? Or, instead, do links encourage people to drill into their own territories and not learn about social concerns that seem irrelevant to their personal interests? What roles do economic and political considerations play in creating links that nudge people in one or the other direction?

Click to read more ...

Visualizing Web Pages - HTML Graphs

FractaLog web graph. Click to enlarge. As an interesting follow up to my recent post on KartOO and Google Browser, check out the HTML Graphlet applet created by Sala (no last name), and posted on the Aharef blog. To use the applet, just enter the URL of the page to be graphed.

The applet constructs multi-colored graph of nodes and edges, with each color representing a different HTML tag. As the graph is produced, it grows outward, with branches sprouting - all in a very kinetic/organic way.

The color of the nodes refer to specific HTML tags:

blue: for links (the A tag)
red: for tables (TABLE, TR and TD tags)
green: for the DIV tag
violet: for images (the IMG tag)
yellow: for forms (FORM, INPUT, TEXTAREA, SELECT and OPTION tags)
orange: for linebreaks and blockquotes (BR, P, and BLOCKQUOTE tags)
black: the HTML tag, the root node
gray: all other tags 

The image at the top of this post is a map of FractaLog as of the date of this posting.

Sala asks that those with flickr accounts post a screenshot of their site tree, using websitesasgraphs for a tag. Click on this link to see a wide variety of web page graphs.

Some of these graphs are more fractal-like than the others. I can only hope that someday the FractaLog graph will look suitably fractal to deserve its name.

Update on Thursday, May 31, 2007 by R.A. DiDio

Note:  Just as I published this post, the link to the Graphlet is not working - nor is the link to Aharef.  I am getting  a "WEb Site Suspended" message.

If it is working for anyone, please let me know with a comment here. 

Ben Franklin's Map: The Gulf Stream, Weather, and Climate

Click on map to enlarge. Read more about Franklin and the Gulf Stream at the NOAA library.

The special series that began in Sunday's Inquirer (12/18/2005) is an in-depth look at the gulf stream - from its earliest mapping (by Ben Franklin!) to the far-ranging effects the stream has on weather and climate.

The main articles are written by Anthony Wood, who has covered weather and climate issues for several years at the Inquirer. A number of other staffers have put together other goodies at the web site, including some animated graphics that illustrate the interaction between sun, wind, and earth's spin.

Check out the series by clicking here

In some ways the Gulf Stream reminds me of the Red Spot of Jupiter discussion in the Gleick book - a bit of order within the turbulent seas around it.

The articles do not have any references to chaos, non-linear dynamics, Edward Lorenz, and the theoretical problems with forecasting weather and climate. I believe that the public should be aware of the theoretical limitations faced by weather modelers - especially when modeling and predicting the weather and climate-altering events due to phenomena as large as the Gulfstream. Given its highly non-linear nature, predicting the on-going stability and variations of the Gulfstream may be as difficult as predicting the stability of the Solar System.