depressing, interesting

The New York Times has an interesting (and somewhat depressing) interactive times series graph of US unemployment rates. The controls let you slice the data demographically to get a sense of how groups you are not a part of might be feeling the effects of the recession. For the dryness of the presentation, this data tells a very compelling and human story.

So, so cool.

The team behind the core technology that became photosynth is taking things to a much higher level. Sameer Agarwal and his band of computer vision desperadoes rebuilt Rome (or a reasonable simulation thereof) in just under 24 hours. This feat was pulled off using 150,000 images pulled from Flickr and some extremely hot computer vision research.

Check out the digest version here and the full nerd monty here.

Last week I was in Boston briefly and thanks to a logistical spasm I had the opportunity to ride the Silverline from Logan Airport to South Station. While waiting for said Silverline I encountered this map:

Detail of the map in question.

I took a picture of the map because of the wear pattern created by countless travelers tracing their fingers over it. In that wear pattern we can see those travelers working out their routes on the Silverline and picking out the different transfer points throughout the system. In essence the map carries a second channel of data relative to the first. Of course this second channel is pretty unscientific but we haven’t let that stop us from appreciating the aesthetics of information presentation before and we won’t start now.

Later in the day I was talking to my Dad about this phenomena, and the idea that data is being recorded in the physical world all around us, all the time, simply by the way we use things. He mentioned Wells Cathedral in Somerset, England. The stone stairs of the cathedral’s chapter house date to 1306, and they have been eroded along the preferred path worshippers and clergy have taken ascending and descending those stairs all these years.

Those very steps

While much of this naturally recorded information is of limited utility or has ambiguous meaning, we find ourselves oddly stimulated by the idea that a channel of information is projected onto the world in this way.