Home » Archives for May 2010
Deepwater Horizon costs $365 million dollars to build. The rig had 130 crew members, and covered the size of two football fields. Its owners, Transocean, rented the rig to BP at a cost of more than $500,000 a day. Last September, it drilled six miles down to an field that contained 3 billion barrels of oil. Today it lies sunk in the Gulf of Mexico.
The Wall Street Journal has posted an interactive timeline of events in the Deepwater Horizon Rig Disaster.
via : Deepwater Horizon Interactive Timeline @ WSJ
Science interactive infographic
AMD has just refreshed their ‘Vision’ technology and plans to bring AMD to 109 notebooks and 26 ultrathin notebooks this year. The technology boasts 8 hours of battery life, DDR3 memory, and DirectX10.1 support, putting it on par with the latest battery-conserving offerings from NVidia and Intel.
In testing with HQV 2.0, a VISION-based system with AMD integrated graphics achieved a video experience score almost 2x that of a comparable Intel-based system. Additionally, a VISION-based system with AMD discrete graphics scored 50% better than a comparable Intel-i5 based system with Nvidia discrete graphics.
via AMD Vision Refresh: Better, Faster, More – Amd vision 2010 – Gizmodo.
Hardware amd, ati
Matt McKeon has created an interactive infographic which takes a look at the evolution of privacy on Facebook. He starts with the terms of service for 2005, and brings it forward in time up to April 2010. Given the nature of the data, the graphic is somewhat open to interpretation. However, the trend is very evident. Personally, I like how the radial nature and concentric circles of the infographic work very well.
The point that Matt McKeon is making is to check your privacy settings and make sure that they are set to a level that you are comfortable with. He still likes and uses Facebook.
However, Facebook hasn’t always managed its users’ data well. In the beginning, it restricted the visibility of a user’s personal information to just their friends and their “network” (college or school). Over the past couple of years, the default privacy settings for a Facebook user’s personal information have become more and more permissive. They’ve also changed how your personal information is classified several times, sometimes in a manner that has been confusing for their users. This has largely been part of Facebook’s effort to correlate, publish, and monetize their social graph: a massive database of entities and links that covers everything from where you live to the movies you like and the people you trust.
via The Evolution of Privacy on Facebook.
Graphics infographic
Information Visualization software package Tulip has an interesting addition that has been written up and accepted at IV2010, a method for GPU-accelerated computation and rendering of curved splines consisting of over 100 points.
Written in C++ the framework enables the development of algorithms, visual encodings, interaction techniques, data models, and domain-specific visualizations. One of the goal of Tulip is to facilitates the reuse of components and allows the developers to focus on programming their application. This development pipeline makes the framework efficient for research prototyping as well as the development of end-user applications.
via Graph Visualization Software | Tulip.
Science algorithm, software, tulip
In northern Pakistan on January 4, 2010, a landslide blocked the Hunza river. Soon a lake formed behind the landslide, which inundated farms, roads, and homes. Nasa took an image of the new lake in mid-March. Since then, they have taken another image which shows the growing size of the lake. There are some videos of the effects of the landslide on the local population, and the attempts to create a spillway, available here.
The Advanced Spaceborne Thermal Emission and Reflection Radiometer (ASTER) on NASA’s Terra satellite captured this false-color image of the landslide lake on the Hunza River on May 2, 2010. Blue indicates water, red indicates vegetation, and shades of beige and gray indicate bare rock. The approximate extent of the lake on March 16, 2010, appears as a white outline. This image has been rotated, so north is to the right.
via Landslide Lake in Northwest Pakistan : Image of the Day.
Science nasa
As many of us focus on the recent Gulf Oil Spill, we tend to forget the dozens of other oil spills that have happened in recent history, such as the Exxon Valdez. Tiffany Farrant has created an infographic for Oil & Gas US that shows some of the biggest oil spills in history, with somewhat scary results.
However a study a number of years after the spill discovered that the oil was disappearing at a rate of just four percent each year far less than people expected and the new study compounds environmental concerns.
“The damage that the spill created is something beyond anyone s imagination ” said Michel Boufadel Temple University s Civil and Environmental Engineering chair who has just completed research on why the oil persists.
Larger size after the break.
via Traces of Exxon Valdez spill can still be found | GDS Publishing.
Read more…
Graphics infographic, oil
The 30 Doradus Nebula (also known as the Tarantula Nebula, or NGC 2070) is about 180,000 light years from Earth. The Hubble Space Telescope has taken a picture of this nebula, and in particular, looked at a star that has 90 times the mass of our Sun, and is traveling at 400,000 kilometers an hour. At that speed, it has traveled about 375 light years from its original home.
A heavy runaway star rushing away from a nearby stellar nursery at more than 400 000 kilometres per hour, a speed that would get you to the Moon and back in two hours. The runaway is the most extreme case of a very massive star that has been kicked out of its home by a group of even heftier siblings. Tantalising clues from three observatories, including the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope’s newly installed Cosmic Origins Spectrograph (COS), and some old-fashioned detective work, suggest that the star may have travelled about 375 light-years from its suspected home, a giant star cluster called R136.
via Hubble catches heavyweight runaway star speeding from 30 Doradus | Press Releases | spacetelescope.org.
Science astronomy, nasa
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Graphics, Hardware, Science pixels
What do you get when you mixt he social features of FourSquare with Augmented Reality systems? TagWhat, a new mobile augmented-reality location-based service that’s free for all and allows users to tag places in geophysical space and share them with their friends. Each market can contain any number of scraps of information such as emails, SMS, photo’s, URL’s, and even cross-posting to other networks like Facebook & Twitter. Just like FourSquare, you can ‘check-in’ at a location and then share your photos and comments with anyone else, but combine it with turn-by-turn directions for your friends and more.
In particular, TagWhat h as already approached businesses and created “Channels” for food, drink, Wikipedia, and a direct link to FourSquare. Advertising & Real-Estate potential is huge, as well, allowing advertisers to target physical locations for AR ads.
“Tagwhat gives us a tool to connect stories and places ” said Anne Dodge Program Director National Public Housing Museum. “It lets us reach the broadest possible audience in the most intimate way expanding our reach and embedding our stories in the places where they actually happened. This is the technology we ve been waiting for.” “
You can create your free account at www.Tagwhat.com and check out the Android and iPhone 3GS apps soon.
via Tagwhat Unveils Augmented Reality AS A NEW PERSONALIZED EXPERIENCE – Tagwhat – pitchengine.com.
Science augmented reality, social media, tagwhat
NASA’s Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE) telescope has captured a beautiful picture of the California Nebula. In the constellation of Perseus, there lies a star named Menkhib. This is the bright star near the red dust cloud in the upper lefter corner of the image. Menkhib is some 1,770 light-years from Earth. Running diagonally through the image is a large nebula known as NGC 1499, which is also called the California Nebula. Menkhib is a large star with the mass of approximately 40 of our suns. Menkhib also burns brightly, with a surface temperature of 66,000 degrees Fahrenheit which is over 6 times hotter than our Sun.
All four infrared detectors aboard WISE were used to make this image. Color is representational: blue and cyan represent infrared light at wavelengths of 3.4 and 4.6 microns, which is dominated by light from stars. Green and red represent light at 12 and 22 microns, which is mostly light from warm dust.
Image Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/WISE Team
via WISE – Multimedia Gallery: Menkhib and the California Nebula.
Science astronomy, nasa
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