VizWorld.com

Facts about South Park.

infographics

The Marvel Universe.

infographics

Some fantastic photographs ( and a few other images ) taken of the planet Earth from non-planet-Earth locations show amazing beauty over at SyFy’s Blastr website.

Yeah, we know—space is the final frontier. But sometimes the best part of space is looking back over our shoulder at the planet we left behind.

Some these are stunning because of how crisp and clear our big, blue marble looks as we hover above it. Others are stunning, even though they seem to be only distant dots, because it takes our breath away that we made it that far away from home.

via 16 stunning images of Earth seen from space and other planets | Blastr.

Graphics, Science photography

GPL Technologies, provider of IT & pipeline infrastructures for several companies in the entertainment industry, has announced that they’ve hired Jason Blum as their new CTO.  Jason Blum has an extensive history through Intel, Youbet.com, Miracle Data, and several others, and 20 years of IT experience.

“We are extremely excited to have Jason sign on as our CTO,” said GPL Technologies founder, Brian Terrell. “Demand for GPL Technologies’ services has been growing rapidly. With Jason’s deep IT infrastructure knowledge, entertainment experience and managerial skills, we have the ideal executive for leading GPL into the next phase of our evolution as a company.”

GPL’s clients include jumP, Legend Films, and Legend 3D.  Read the full press-release after the break.

Read more…

Graphics gpl

The Origins of Programming.

infographics

The State Of The USA website has an interactive graphic showing job growth and loss across the private sector, federal government, and local governments from 2007 to present.  Some of their observations:

• Local governments cut 38,000 jobs in July, but lost 128,000 since the recession began.
• State governments trimmed 10,000 jobs in July and lost just 6,000 jobs since December of 2007.
• The federal government eliminated 154,000 jobs in July, but gained 262,000 jobs since the start of the recession.

Don’t be too surprised tho.  The huge jump in federal jobs is (I’m pretty sure) related to the Census, so they’ll all be laid off (many already are).

Hit their site to see the numbers.

The State of the USA | Still In the Red: The Recession’s Impact on Job Growth.

Science employment, financial, government, recession

A Gun for Everyone.

infographics

An international team of astronomers using gravitational lensing observations from the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope has taken an important step forward in the quest to solve the riddle of dark energy, a phenomenon which mysteriously appears to power the Universe’s accelerating expansion. Their results appear in the 20 August 2010 issue of the journal Science.

This video zooms in on the galaxy cluster Abell 1689 as seen by the Hubble Space Telescope. Overlaid in purple is the distribution of dark matter in the galaxy cluster. The distribution of normal and dark matter in the lens, the relative geometry of the lens and distant galaxies behind the cluster, and the effect of dark energy on the geometry of the universe, together explain the distorted shapes of some of the galaxies visible here. Astronomers are able to use this relationship to probe the properties of dark energy.

credit: NASA, ESA, ESO/Digitized Sky Survey 2, E. Jullo (JPL/LAM), P. Natarajan (Yale) and J-P. Kneib (LAM). Music: John Dyson (from the album “Moonwind”). Acknowledgment: Davide De Martin

Science hubble, nasa. astronomy

I just learned from this infographic, which I found at Information is Beautiful, that Inca Kola is 50% owned by The Coca-Cola Company.

Three firms control 89% of US soft drink sales [1]. This dominance is obscured from us by the appearance of numerous choices on retailer shelves. Steve Hannaford refers to this as “pseudovariety,” or the illusion of diversity, concealing a lack of real choice [2]. To visualize the extent of pseudovariety in this industry we developed a cluster diagram to represent the number of soft drink brands and varieties found in the refrigerator cases of 94 Michigan retailers, along with their ownership connections.

via Philip H. Howard | Soft Drink Industry Structure.

infographics infographic

VLC is a free, open-source media player that can handle many different codecs. They have recently come out with version 1.1.3 which fixes a few crashing bugs, and one potential security problem.

• Taglib crash (CVE-2010-2937 / VideoLAN-SA-1004)
• Fixes for FTP relative paths and directories
• Fixes for Podcast and DVD modules
• Extensions and scripts updates
• Miscellaneous fixes in interfaces
• Updated translations
• … and many other crashes and errors fixed

via : VLC 1.1.3

Graphics vlc