IBM scientists have created the smallest 3D map of the earth – so small that 1,000 maps could fit on a grain of salt. The scientists accomplished this through a new, breakthrough technique that uses a tiny, silicon tip with a sharp apex — one million times smaller than an ant — to create patterns and structures as small as 15 nanometers at greatly reduced cost and complexity. This patterning technique opens new prospects for developing nanosized objects in fields such as electronics, future chip technology, medicine, life sciences, and opto-electronics.
Iron Man has a fun website online where you can view yourself wearing the Iron Man or War Machine helmets, or see the “Heads Up Display” seen in the movie with all of the overlays and elements. Works on both Mac & PC, but requires a lengthy download of plugins and assets.
GOOD magazine recently held a contest asking people to contribute infographics explaining the recently passed US health-care bill. Well now, the entries are in and they’ve posted them on their website.
Only 7 entries are shown, varying from a full-page basic bar chart to other more complex and intricate designs pulling in voting trends, funding sources, and state-by-state breakdowns of the impact.
Kentucky has the highest average credit card balance of any state, coming in at $10,181.08. Mississippi ranks number 2 with an average credit card balance of $9,821.80. The lowest state is Pennsylvania with an average credit card balance of $2,508.55, but Virginia is not far behind with $2,586.28.
BillShrink has posted a graphic showing these and other fascinating facts about credit cards. They take a look at the Credit Card Accountability, Responsibility and Disclosure Act, or CARD Act, and tell you what it means for you.
Most adults carry credit cards, but many are still not sure what the new CARD Act does to protect them — and what it does not do. Many carry high balances on more than one card and have relied on credit during the recession, driving the balances even higher. Those who have missed payments and damaged their credit during the hard times will find it even harder to pay back the money owed, as people with bad credit are charged significantly higher interest rates. Here is a visual look at the credit card situation in America, which when paired with the poor economy and high unemployment rate, has arguably reached the crisis level.
Cool Infographics brings us an interesting research project that takes the data from “Where’s George?”, a community-driven website to track individual bills by Serial Number across the US, to find unorthodox and unexpected patterns in the flow of currency across the US. While some of the trails take huge jumps as passengers take money in one location, then fly somewhere else to spend it, most of the money moves in small localities, creating fascinating discoveries.
From Manuel Lima on VisualComplexity.com: Some places, such as Los Angeles, California, have many bills passing through it from across the nation, while others, such as Anderson County in Tennessee – Grady’s home – have bills circulating mainly within a more local neighborhood. Shown here are images from the video. The data from the Where’s George? project is in fact so pertinent that is also being used by researchers to predict the spread of flu across the United States.
Be sure to read the full details at their site, and check out the video that shows various patterns at both small and large scales.
“Clash of the Titans” was widely panned by critics, and heavily criticized for the poor use of post-processed 3D, but the CG was actually quite well-done. CGNews has some details from MPC on the creation of the final sequence with the Kraken.
For the final sequence, MPC created the Kraken and a CG ocean. To achieve a fully realistic fluid animation over 20 passes of water were used, combining volumetric rendering for water particles and mesh rendering for the water surface. All fluids were done using Flowline and rendered through RenderMan. MPC also created the FX for the ‘rockifying’ Kraken. To achieve the shattering effect, MPC used proprietary software PAPI.
Cnet has posted an article with their take on the recent updates to the MacBook Pro update. The article comments on the recent graphics switching capability that Apple has included in the new lineup. They also note that on the 13 inch MacBook Pro, Apple updated the graphics chip but did not update the Intel CPU. This dovetails nicely with what Nvidia has been preaching for some time now: that many workloads can be offloaded to the graphics chip.
“Incremental [processing] workloads are being driven more by video and graphics and that’s where Nvidia comes into play,” said Ashok Kumar, an analyst at Rodman & Renshaw. Says Bajarin: “Apple is strategically writing software that is able to harness the GPU.”
The Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO) was launched February 11, 2010 which produced a spectacular Sonic Boom Meets Sun Dog. One of the instruments on the SDO is the Atmospheric Imaging Assembly (AIA). The AIA is a collection of four telescopes which will photograph the Sun’s surface and atmosphere. The AIA uses a 4096×4096 CCD to capture the images of the Sun. The AIA will take these images across 8 different wavelengths (out of the 10 available wavelengths) every 10 seconds. In other words, that is eight 16.78 million pixels images every 10 seconds.
We reported yesterday that NASA had released images from the SDO. Today we bring you some extraordinary videos on our Sun that NASA has released.
In a surprising move, the US Air Force will now be providing all new military recruits with Second Life virtual avatars that will travel with them through their entire military career.
“Everyone who comes into the Air Force will be given an avatar, and that avatar travels with them, grows with them, changes appearance with them,” Larry Clemons, of the Air Education and Training Command, told the magazine. “It will provide them a history of where they’ve been and a notion of where they’re going.”
The Air Force has been running an inworld program called “MyBase” since 2008, but the hope is to provide clubs, chapels, classes, review materials, and even pre-deployment exercises in-world.
“If this is truly effective, it will become a way of life,” Clemons said. “It will be the way the Air Force does business.” Not only this, but with recruitment levels declining, the Force sees MyBase as a way to reach a younger demographic, as noted in the 2008 proposal for MyBase to become a legitimate part of the Air Force.
Iron Man has a fun website online where you can view yourself wearing the Iron Man or War Machine helmets, or see the “Heads Up Display” seen in the movie with all of the overlays and elements. Works on both Mac & PC, but requires a lengthy download of plugins and assets.
Today’s links:
“Clash of the Titans” was widely panned by critics, and heavily criticized for the poor use of post-processed 3D, but the CG was actually quite well-done. CGNews has some details from MPC on the creation of the final sequence with the Kraken.
In a surprising move, the US Air Force will now be providing all new military recruits with Second Life virtual avatars that will travel with them through their entire military career.
VizWorld.com 
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