Mapping things 1: dogs ‘n kids

I was incredibly fortunate to be able to attend Open Data Day* last week in Christchurch. While there, the very awesome @kayakr (Jonathan Hunt) gave an unconference session on how to build APIs from static webpages**. After some playing around with a table I got from the Wellington City Council of inland offleash dog areas, I […]

The best visualisation of the solar system yet

Regular readers may be aware of my penchant for whimsy. My happy grinnings when people mix pedantry with a sense of humour*. And today’s offering is just such a one. The description is perfectly apt: it IS a tediously accurate scale model of the solar system. But there are some wonderful surprises, and I found […]

Winners of 2013 International Science and Engineering Visualization Challenge announced

And my goodness but there are some stunners this year. As readers of this blog will know, I’m something of a fan of data visualisation, and this year’s competition winners have a great deal to offer, in categories from games to video, posters and more. It’s difficult to pick a favourite, but I did want […]

Classifying plankton: more fun than you might think

One of my favourite things to do with this blog these days is to catalogue/chronicle awesome citizen science initiatives. And there’s a new one! And it’s lots of fun! In Plankton Portal, you get to help identify plankton from images taken . I’ve just started playing, and so far it’s actually trickier than it looks, […]

Happy World Octopus Day!

Today is, apparently, the tenth annual World Octopus Day. So, I figured you’d all enjoy this fun infographic, courtesy of the National Aquarium. And what better time to go and read this stunning article about these stunning creatures (my favourite form of the plural), and, if you live in Wellington, make a date to go […]

Meet the newest members of our family

Our family just keeps growing and growing. In addition to me and Partner, there’s Beefcake, Monster and (very recently) Hank, the motorbikes. And of course Derek, the car. Leviathan, my bicycle, is on long term loan, but we haven’t forgotten it, heh. And now? I’d like to introduce you to Tim, Hippolyta, Mary-Sue and Pip […]

Book review: The Year Without Pants

UPDATE: Free book chapter here, the movie trailer here. And in case you such things, them to make a decision, high profile endorsements here. You can also buy the book here. Oooh, and interesting interview on WordPress.com with Berkun, here. If sometimes you wonder whether everything possible hasn’t already been written about startups, business, software startups, software […]

Future Timeline – a visual representation Pt 2

After some agonising, I’ve decided to go with the easy route. Confused? See Pt 1 for an explanation of what this is all about :) So, here’s the full thing, in two formats: 1) Future Timeline - visual (a webpage, sorry about some of the mashed formatting. Time mutter grumble grumpy grumble) 2) A PDF (see […]

Future Timeline - a visual representation Pt 1

Future Timeline is an extremely interesting site.  Calling itself a “speculative timeline of future history”, it has page upon page of really interesting content. Some of it is very much based on fact, while others is based more on supposition and hypothesis. It’s an excellent exercise for casting one’s mind forward. Unfortunately, however, the structure […]

Scientific collaboration between researchers - map

Following my last post, which talked about work which has been done ranking the excellence of scientific organisations around the world, there’s this: a map of scientific collaboration between researchers. Developed by Olivier H. Beauchesne, who makes really interesting data-visualising maps, it looks at scientific collaboration between cities (and their researchers) all over the world. […]