The Man Bath versus The Woman Bath
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Beautiful Visualization of Mantle Plume
4:45 pm
Click for Fullsize
An article at io9 covers a recent discovery from Ross A. Harley and his colleagues of a new continent off the coast of Scotland that now exists 2km under the water. In discovering how it appeared and disappeared, they discovered a “thermal anomaly” they call “Mantle plume”, with the visualization above.
Basically, as you can see in the image at left, superheated rock in the Earth’s mantle (near the core of the planet) can sometimes create giant plumes of heat that push to the surface of the planet. When this happens, radical disruptions can occur — such as huge chunks of the seafloor rising suddenly above the surface of the ocean. And that’s what probably created this short-lived landmass.
via This lost continent off the coast of Scotland disappeared beneath the ocean 55 million years ago.
AMD Claims to Have “World’s Fastest Notebook GPU”
4:20 pm
AMD is touting their new Radeon HD 6990M as the “world’s fastest notebook GPU” with some interesting slides showing it beating recent NVidia mobile offerings.
Slides from AMD show the chip outperforming both its own Radeon 6970M and NVIDIA Corp.’s (NVDA) GeForce GTX 580M in games like Batman Arkham Asylum, Dragon Age 2, Shogun 2, BattleForge, Left 4 Dead, Metro2033, Wolfenstein MP, The Chronicles of Riddick, and ET: Quake Wars. No independent benchmarks have been released yet, so the validity of these claims depends on how much you’re willing to trust AMD.
The chip will land as an option for Dell Inc.’s (DELL) Alienware M18x and Clevo’s P170HM and P150HM notebooks, both of which also offer the GTX 580M.
The chip offers 1120 SPU’s, 56 Texture units, and an impressive 715Mhz core clock. The memory clock and ROP’s remain unchanged, so there may not be much of a different on anything heavily memory dependent. The new chip will support Eyefinity, but won’t support any type of switchable graphics.
via DailyTech – AMD Claims to Have “World’s Fastest Notebook GPU”.
e-on software releases LumenRT 1.2
3:58 pm
Just got a press release from e-on software announcing their release of LumenRT 1.2 for Sketchup. The new version shows some fantastic performance boosts:
The auto-scale lighting feature can improve performance by 30% to 300% depending on the size of the model with a resulting tradeoff of lower lighting quality. The new build also adds several quality and reliability enhancements to improve overall performance and stability. As an example, new optimizations in Release 1.2 can lead to a 14x gain on pre-processing time!
In addition, they’ve got a nice Showcase online that shows off some great user contributions to the LumenRT community.
It’s available for $195 and runs on Windows & Mac.
via e-on software.
Edward Tufte’s “Slopegraphs”
3:53 pm
Edward Tufte will always be remembered for his “sparklines” (among many other things), but one of his earlier creations “Slopegraphs” has gone largely unnoticed by the community at large. Charlie Park takes a look back at them and some of the neat stuff you can see, and makes a prediction that they may be coming back in a big way.
Imagine you have a line chart, showing the change in European countries’ population over time. Each country has a line, zigzagging from January (on the left) to December (on the right). Each country has 12 points across the chart. The lines zigzag up and down across the chart. Now, let’s say you zoomed in to just the June-July segment of the chart, and you labeled the left and right sides of each country’s June-July lines (with the country’s name, and the specific number at each data point).
Daily Viz from Visual Loop – 12/07/2011
7:00 am
We continue today with more infographics made recently about Facebook, from Pixable, JESS3, Online Dating University, Kiss Metrics and Zone Alarm. These infographics cover a wide range of aspects involving the most popular social netwiork in the world, from the numbers behind the profile photos, the impact on relationships, the growing widgetization, to the facial recognition service, among many others. And tomorrow, a whole bunch of new Twitter infographics!
VizWorld.com 
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