FlowingData, if you don't already read them: start now

FlowingData has a nice post today rounding up 20 data visualizations related to crime and criminals. Most revolve around maps with temporal components shoehorned into a few. We love maps here at Graphient. We love them for how they visually describe space, and we really love them for the way they provide a fixed contextual grid for organizing other kinds of data. The map visualizations presented at FlowingData stop short of adding in other data and stick to simply reporting the facts of crime, but those maps could have been used to introduce and connect all sorts of other (possibly sensitive) socioeconomic data and maybe tell a deeper story about crime.

Apparently, it’s free-for-all Friday here at Graphient. I just started using live search in TweetDeck for the word “visualization” and I feel like I jacked my head straight into the internerd. Also I drank a lot of green tea just now.

Ok, randomness is a really hard thing. Deriving actual randomness is hard work. A lot of mathematical models have been created over the years to describe randomness. Conveniently for you dear reader, this guy Daniel A. Becker has visualized a bunch of them for you. Enjoy this tasty and nutritious treat here.

Poisson Distribution. Look out Roger Mexico.

I suppose Mr. Tran’s Sriracha concern can’t really be considered a startup anymore, But, it is an epic tale of capitalism. A company with humble roots overcoming epic adversity, including war (try that you web 2.0 feebs) to become the Heinz of hot sauce.

Read the NY Times article here and feel the burn.

Jer’s blog blprnt landed in my inbox this morning via google alert. He’s put together a pretty cool visualization in Processing by mining Twitter for the phrase “Just Landed” and then parsing out the location the tweeter had just landed in, along with the home location listed in their twitter profile. There are some problems with the assumptions made in the data collection process but, whatever. If Jer wants the science to be perfect than he’ll figure that out on his own.

The results of all that mining and processing look like this:

Awesome. Find out more about his methodology and check out some animation here.