[kml_flashembed movie="http://vimeo.com/moogaloop.swf?clip_id=7477655&server=vimeo.com&show_title=1&show_byline=1&show_portrait=1&color=ffffff&fullscreen=1" width="400" height="225" wmode="transparent" /]
HP “Create Amazing” – Director’s Cut byKeith Loutit from Bob Gifford via Andrew Sullivan.
[09 Nov 2009: well, this video got pulled until the director clears rights with HP et al. — too bad; it’s very cool, and I was providing free advertising for HP]
The Journey of Mankind is a simple timeline & world map that illustrates the spread of modern humans out of Africa; it’s amazing to me how much detail we know about this process, down to the catastrophic effects of the explosion of Mt. Toba.
The New York Times reliably has good data visualization graphics. Two examples: “An Accounting of Daily Gun Deaths“, by Bill Marsh, and an interactive (Google Maps based) homicide map of the five boroughs.
Juice Analytics has a treemap-based visualization of the US federal government’s stimulus package.
The Pakistan Taliban war is being fought in areas that 1500 years ago were Buddhist. The districts of Dir, Buner, and especially Swat are rich with Buddhist ruins, a record of a time when they were part of the Gandharan Buddhist heartland centered on the ancient capital of Taxila, now on the outskirts of Islamabad/Rawalapindi. Padmasambhava, for instance, was from Swat, ancient Uddiyana, before he went on to convert Tibet to Buddhism. These were rich, sophisticated centers of learning and art, famous for their monasteries, now sadly the locus of much suffering.
[updated 13 May 2009 with the maps above; for more detail you’re wanting John Huntington’s gorgeous map.]
[22 June 2009: It turns out that the identification of Uddiyana with Swat is contested; it might instead refer to modern-day Orissa, in eastern India.]
I know I’m stating the obvious, but email is very very broken.
I have two email accounts, one personal and one for work, and they are both, each in their own way, profoundly broken. Like most people, I actually have a bunch of email addresses, but they’re logically separated into work and personal. I use a combination of Gmail and Thunderbird for my personal mail, and Groupwise for my work mail.
I try to manage my personal account so that at least occasionally I get to the mythical zero inbox, but my corporate account with 3,000 messages in it is just a stream that flows by with me on the river bank with a pathetic net trying to catch the most important bits roaring by. Right at this moment I have 19 emails open on my desktop, awaiting action.
Usually animated gifs are just annoying, but animation is used to great effect in this gif from a Wikipedia article, itself neatly written, on empennage, the tail assembly that gives stability to an aircraft: “the feathers of an arrow.”