Serge Brunier has created an incredible 360-degree panorama he calls “The Sky of the Earth:”

The images were collected from two exceptional astronomical sites, the Atacama Desert in the southern hemisphere and the Caldeira de Taburiente in the Canary Islands in the northern hemisphere.

It is the sky that everyone can relate to that I wanted to show — its constellations, its thousands year old stars, whose names have nourished all childhoods, its myths and stories of gods, titans, and heroes shared by all civilisations since Homo became sapiens. The image was therefore made as man sees it, with a regular digital camera.

You have to check this out.

I’m a huge fan of Stamen Design out of San Francisco. One of the things they excel at is data-driven map presentations. And SF Crimespotting (pictured above) is a terrific example thereof!

I do a lot of map-based presentation, and I’ve leaned heavily on their work in the past (particularly their open-source project ModestMaps).

For those of you in the East Bay, you might also check out their original work in this genre, Oakland Crimespotting.

Stay safe!

Enjoy the artwork of Mark Weaver.

Enjoy the beautiful design and music at ISO50.

Enjoy the generative art of Robert Hodgin at Flight 404.

Enjoy the inspirations and artwork of James White at Signalnoise.com, who compiled this collection of design inspirations from the 70’s and 80’s:

No, really:

Researchers in Japan made this images of the visible light that’s emitted by normal bodies. Scientists speculate that metabolic processes give off miniscule amounts of visible light.

Important info graphics!

From The Daily What, whose other recent features include the incomparable Wordnik!

For a certain someone who appreciates data visualization and all things aviation…

Aaron Koblin’s Flight Patterns.

My dad just sent me a demo for jaw-dropping “computational knowledge engine,” Wolfram Alpha, which went live this past weekend. You put in a search term, which could be a mathematical formula, two cities, whatever, and it analyzes the term and its context and returns related statistics, plots a curve, gives you a map, shows mortalitiy rates, whatever! Off the hook!

The design reminds me of a suggested contextual search engine design from Tufte I remember reading somewhere…anybody remember?

Check the demo, it’s a must see.

Wolfram Alpha demo

The Massachusetts Executive Office of Transportation has published some animated 3D renderings of the proposed stations on the Green Line extension, which is scheduled to begin service in 2015. Pictured above is the Union Square station, which the Commonwealth is proposing be located along the existing Fitchburg Line railroad right-of-way… that means you’d have to walk up the hill by the Dunkin’ Donuts to get to the station, something Union Square transit advocates object to (it’s harder for elderly and disabled folks to reach it). The advocates’ alternative, though, is to run the Green Line as a streetcar directly into Union Square from about where the Target store is located at the end of Somerville Ave. That’s not likely to fly.

There’s a bunch more information on the web from the Commonwealth, from the City of Somerville, as well as from Union Square Main Streets, a great neighborhood advocacy organization.

I’m skipping around Vimeo in an infographic mood tonight. Here’s a history of the Internet. Apparently foreigners had something to do with it?:

History of the Internet

And a thoroughly modern retelling of Red Riding Hood: Slagsmålsklubben