Unstructured Flight Patterns

This is a snapshot of a twenty-four hour visualization of flights across (as well as into and out of) the continental United States.

I love the way that you can see night and day sweeping across the country. It also astonishes me that so many flights are in the air at the same time. Once again I'm reminded of the fact that we live in a Golden age.

Unstructured Taxis

One time, when I came out to the Bay Area to visit Natalie, we decided to have a date at a restaurant on the edge of Golden Gate park. I unwisely suggested that we could take the train up to the city and then a cab out to the restaurant.

The plan went well as far as getting us to the place but when it came to getting back, we ran into a snag. We were so far off of the profitable routes that we couldn't find a cab to pick us up and drive us back to the train station (in spite of the fact that various taxi companies assured us that cabbies were on the way -- assertions that required us to stand out in a miserably cold drizzle for well over an hour).

Eventually a very nice young couple (whom I would happily include in my will if I had saved their names) took pity on us and drove us back to the station.

Now that I've burdened you with that little anecdote, contemplate this Quicktime visualization of taxi traffic patterns in San Francisco over a 4 hour period.

Please be warned that the file is large and can take some time to load if you don't have good bandwidth.

Unstructured Visualization

It may very well say something about me that one of my favorite books is The Visual Display of Quantitative Information, by Edward R. Tufte, which is an (in my opinion) absolutely fascinating discussion of the right way and the wrong way to create visualizations of raw data.

The visualization of data is a bridge between the world of raw information and our minds. It's a kind of map for the mind and a good one can bring that information to life in a way that simple numbers and statistics can not.


Consider Minard's map of Napolean's march to Russia. The width of the lines indicates the size of Napolean's forces. Look at the way it shrinks and note the temperature scale on the bottom. You can practically feel the frostbitten bleeding of his troops.

The internet has created new challenges to visualizing data but it's also given up new tools. Here is a collection of some of the most ambitious and innovative attempts to visualize data. My feeling is that some are better than others and that a number of them seem to actively get in the way but all of them are very creative and fascinating.

Unstructured Globes

WorldProcessor is a site that neatly converges two of my interests: maps and creative visualizations.

The site features a collection of large pictures of globes. Some of the globes -- as the one, above, which depicts national debts as literal mountains -- convey information while others, such as a transparent globe with a goldfish in it, are more whimsical.

Sadly, some of the graphics on the site are broken (I wonder what the "Chernobyl Cloud" globe looked like) but the overall site is still worth a visit.