BP has released an infographic showing the current state of the Relief Well, the “final solution” in resolving the Gulf Oil leak caused by the Deepwater Horizon, that shows the current progress (As of yesterday) as well as the proposed design of how they plan to intersect the previous pipe.
BP needs to cement 7 casings into place before the relief well can intersect with the main drill pipe which is pouring approximately 5,000 barrels of oil per day into the ocean. They have completed 3 casings, with 4 remaining. They have reached a drill depth of just below 10,000 feet, with another 8,000 feet remaining. At about 12,000 feet they will begin angling toward the center of the damaged oil pipe.
Anna Marie Jarvis is known as the founder of the Mother’s Day holiday in the United States of America. She started working on getting the holiday recognized in 1907, and succeeded in 1914. However, by the 1920s, she realized that the holiday had become commercialized. She spent her family inheritance campaigning against the holiday that she had helped to establish. She ended up dying in poverty.
Why did she turn against the holiday? Because people started sending their mothers a printed greeting card. As she said,
A printed card means nothing except that you are too lazy to write to the woman who has done more for you than anyone in the world. And candy! You take a box to Mother—and then eat most of it yourself. A pretty sentiment. —Anna Jarvis
Click on the link below to go see the full graphic.
If you’ve followed IBM’s Many Eyes and the IBM Visual Communication Lab very closely, then you’ve probably heard the names Fernanda Viegas and Martin Wattenberg. They recently left Big Blue and formed their own company named “Flowing Media”. They sit down with InformationAesthetics in a great interview on why they moved and what they hope to do in their new business.
Why did you start Flowing Media?
We believe that visualization is ready to come of age as a communication medium, and we’re excited to focus full-time on consumer and mass-audience visualizations.
We see a huge range of applications for this flavor of visualization. A non-profit group might want to draw widespread attention to data on the environment. A news organization might want a new set of tools for its reporters. A fashion house might even see the chance to make a striking statement.
Flowing Media offers strategy, design, and development services. We can help figure out what kind of visualization is right for a particular purpose, and then invent and design the technology to bring data to life.
The Herschel Space Observatory is an infrared telescope run by the European Space Agency (ESA). It is named for Sir William Herschel who discovered the planet Uranus and the infrared spectrum. The primary mirror for Herschel Space Observatory is 3.5 meters wide, making . The ESA has released new images of star formation clouds in the Milky Way.
The image to the right shows a galactic bubble in RCW120, which is about 4,300 light years away. At the center of this bubble is a massive star, that is not seen at these wavelengths. This star is pushing on the surrounding gas with just the power of its light, compressing it until the gas can collapse to form new stars. However, it is the bright star at the lower center portion of the image is of real interest.
Herschel’s observation of the star-forming cloud RCW 120 has revealed an embryonic star which looks set to turn into one of the biggest and brightest stars in our Galaxy within the next few hundred thousand years. It already contains eight to ten times the mass of the Sun and is still surrounded by an additional 2000 solar masses of gas and dust from which it can feed further.
Not all of this 2000 solar masses of gas and dust will fall into the new star. However, it does raise a puzzling question. According to theory, new stars should stop forming at about 8 solar masses since their light should overcome gravity, and push away the surrounding gas and dust. However, astronomers also know that there are stars that are much larger than 8 solar masses. Therefore astronomers want to know how some stars can grow so large. Hopefully images from Herschel can help them out.
VR-Zone takes a look today at the first custom GeForce GTX 470, which is made by Galaxy. This graphics card is factory overclocked to 625 MHz on the core, up from 607 MHz. Meanwhile the shader comes clocked at 1250MHz, up from 1215 MHz, and the GDDR5 memory is clocked at 3348MHz. They really only show pictures of it, and have not performed a full review with benchmarks. Those are coming in the future.
While there is no breakthrough in cooling performance, the GALAXY cooling solution is able to keep temperatures under control without becoming too noisy. Operating temperatures peaked at 88°C about 30 minutes into the FurMark session. Idling temperature was around the mid-fifties, and ambient temperature was a warm 28°C.
I never have seen much use for the Quadro or Tesla series of graphics processing units from Nvidia. Most of the time you can use the cheaper GeForce series to accomplish the same task at a fraction of the cost. With the new Tesla series, you get full double precision support and ECC. I can now see a reason to buy them over the GeForce series.
Here’s another behind the scenes look at NVIDIA. General manager Andy Keane explains how Tesla-based servers will help engineers and scientists solve complex problems, with teraflop-class computing at their fingertips. With the first wave of Tesla-based servers launching earlier this week – and more news from OEMs expected in the weeks ahead – this is an exciting time for the Tesla team.
This new Google Chrome ad that showcases the incredible rendering speed has been making the rounds all week, but I just noticed it’s been updated with some detailed technical information on how they made it. Recorded with the Phantom v640 High Speed Camera at full-HD (capable of 2700fps), they had to get creative with the monitor to capture any image.
Chrome sends the rendered page to the video card buffer all at once, which is why allrecipes.com appears at once, and not with the text first and images second. Chrome actually paints the page from top to bottom, but to eliminate a shadow from the driver board, we had to flip the monitor upside down and set the system preferences in Windows to rotate everything 180 degrees, resulting in the page appearing to render from bottom to top.
Note that these tests are only of Rendering Speed, so they use locally cached versions of the pages shown.
Over at the University of Missouri, researchers have paired a remote controlled robot with a ‘light detections and ranging’ sensor (LIDAR) capable of capturing 500,000 datapoints per second and designed a system capable of processing and reconstructing 3D models from the captured data. The result is a remote data acquisition and visualization system perfect for search and rescue in dangerous terrain like the recent mine explosions.
Of course, this set-up won’t likely be limited to search-and-rescue missions. “This system could be used for routine structure inspections, which could help prevent tragedies such as the Minneapolis bridge collapse in 2007,” Duan says. “It also could allow the military to perform unmanned terrain acquisition to reduce wartime casualties.”
Microway, a systems integration specialized focusing on high-end GPGPU systems, has published a PDF slide deck showing the various capabilities and specifications on the higher end NVidia and ATI video cards. It includes details on memory structures, silicon design, core counts, and much more in easy tabulated forms. Read the whitepaper here (Online with Google Viewer) and check out their website.
BP has released an infographic showing the current state of the Relief Well, the “final solution” in resolving the Gulf Oil leak caused by the Deepwater Horizon, that shows the current progress (As of yesterday) as well as the proposed design of how they plan to intersect the previous pipe.
If you’ve followed IBM’s Many Eyes and the IBM Visual Communication Lab very closely, then you’ve probably heard the names Fernanda Viegas and Martin Wattenberg. They recently left Big Blue and formed their own company named “Flowing Media”. They sit down with InformationAesthetics in a great interview on why they moved and what they hope to do in their new business.
Over at the University of Missouri, researchers have paired a remote controlled robot with a ‘light detections and ranging’ sensor (LIDAR) capable of capturing 500,000 datapoints per second and designed a system capable of processing and reconstructing 3D models from the captured data. The result is a remote data acquisition and visualization system perfect for search and rescue in dangerous terrain like the recent mine explosions.
VizWorld.com 
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