visualization

"On a cosmic scale, our life is insignificant, yet this brief period when we appear in the world is the time in which all meaningful questions arise." -Paul Ricoeur Ask anyone who's looked up at a dark sky on a clear, moonless night, and you'll immediately hear tales about how incomprehensibly vast the Universe is. Image credit: Randy Halverson, flickr user dakotalapse, from http://dakotalapse.com/. But what you're looking at isn't much of the Universe at all. In fact, practically every point of light you see, including the vast swath of stars too dim to individually resolve, comes from…
In her recent TED talk, JoAnne Kuchera-Morin described UCSB's AlloSphere, a new project that enables scientists to literally stand inside a three-story projection of their data: The AlloSphere space consists of a 3-story cube that is treated with extensive sound absorption material making it one of the largest anechoic chambers in the world. Standing inside this chamber are two 5-meter-radius hemispheres constructed of perforated aluminum that are designed to be optically opaque and acoustically transparent. (source) Scientists and artists can stand on a bridge through the center of this…
This chart shows where your federal tax dollars go, based on Feb 2008 budget numbers (note: this shows discretionary budget, or appropriations, only - go here for more details, or look at the inset in the lower right corner to see where the other two-thirds of the budget are). Visit wallstats.com for a giant version.