"Humanity will make the historic transition from a rural to an urban species some time in the next year, according to the latest UN population figures. The shift will be led by Africa and Asia, which are expected to add 1.6 billion people to their cities over the next 25 years. Read more."
Amazing Demonstration of Photosynth by Blaise Aguera y Arcas.
Photosynth Website.
Bugaboo Daytrips maps stroller-friendly routes for excursions. Each route features an artist-designed map. Many of them are quite beautiful, and as they are all downloadable in PDF format, might make for nice location-based art prints.
Data Mining points to a great interactive visualization by the BBC which maps the ongoing violence in Baghdad. The program draws body count numbers from the Iraq Body Count project, which as of this moment estimates a minimum and maximum number of civilian deaths in Iraq at roughly 59,000 and 65,000 individuals.
BrowseGoods.com's intuitive interface "maps" available shoes from multiple sellers in a highly structured layout organized by style or brand within overarching departments. The "map" is navigated by dragging and zooming in and out. Hovering over a shoe provides basic pricing and availability details, and clicking on a shoe provides a larger box with more details and a link to buy it on Amazon. At first glance, a very natural way to shop.
The only oddity is the sizing. Individual sizes for the same shoe style are displayed as separate icons but are not clustered together. Fix it, code monkeys! [Via]
From his description of the "Distellamap" project:Like any other game console, Atari 2600 cartridges contained executable code also commingled with data. This lists the code as columns of assembly language. Most of it is math or conditional statements (if x is true, go to y), so each time there's "go to" a curve is drawn from that point to its destination.
Hackszine's Brian Sawyer points to the great Google Maps mashup Gmaps Pedometer, which allows you to "walk off" distances using a simple method: set your starting point, double-click to add new points along the map, and drag the map wherever you want to go. I can't get enough of it; I just confirmed that a popular exercise route around the lake at my work - on nameless roads and footpaths - is just shy of a mile. I am also fairly obsessive about learning the relative lengths of multiple routes to get places I frequent, but I am also very forgetful, so usually forget to check my end odometer when I arrive, and have never been so obsessed as to attempt to keep a log. Now I can just walk them off in one fell swoop and know once and for all which is the shorter route.
