The Halo Of A Removed Flower.

Britney Spears & Justin Timberlake performing ‘I Feel For You’ by Chaka Khan on MMC (1993) 

Lost Books, Lips and

A patron approached the desk with two small children.

Patron: “Could you settle something for me? My grandkids want to ask what you do to someone who loses a book, because on the way here, the one told the other that they better not lose their books because the librarians will tear their lips off.”

Me: “Uh…No! No, that’s harsh. We just make you pay some money so we can buy a new copy.”

Tableau 9.0 beta, some network graphs, and my missions for this year

View the interactive visualizations here.

The Internet Backbone, Europe, 2015.  Data via Maxmind.  Background map for reference purposes only (chord lines shown).

The Internet Backbone, 2005.  Data via The Opte Project.

Tableau 9.0 beta 

Tableau 9.0 beta has been released, and Tableau Public has shaped up to be real eye candy.  The UI in both desktop and Tableau Public have been given an overhaul, and there is a lot to like.  Regular expressions, random function, in pill editing, and the mapping gets a lot more power: in-map entity search, lasso/marquee select - although my favorite new capability (although the Apple Mac users have had it a while) - a color picker! With RGB and hex values!

Network graphs

I’ve been quietly sitting on the two data sets above, trying to make sense of the underlying fields; for example, with the maxmind dataset, I had to work out how to parse an interger as an octlet; i.e. 1.0.0.1 - and then using split_part in Postgre SQL (no CHARINDEX function available) to get rid of the end of block. The workbook has two inner joins and a union (Maxmind), and a second data source in MS Excel.

Why bother though?  Well, I’m fascinated by flow. Whether that is people, aircraft, money, or ip packets. Of course we can animate these graphs over time - but really, what are we looking for; what is the story?

Well I’ll tell you what I think know from experience what decision makers are looking for.  They are looking for anomalies. They want to know what are the biggest fluctuations, usually in the fattest “pipes”.  Flat lines and small pipes (think opportunities) are typically just noise.  For those building bar and pie charts into pretty looking dashboards, this is going to come as news and a bit of a shock.

Graph edges (vertices) can be encoded in size by metric - and once you build the matrix (array) you can also compute cost (distance is a normal consideration, time, bandwidth etc).  This can also be represented as a Sankey, but if there is a geo-spatial component to the data, then a map helps us interpret the data quicker.  As cave dwellers, we didn’t make bar or pie charts to tally up the hunt/gender ratios, we drew a map in the sands of how to get to the killing fields.

My Missions

I am going to continue pushing the integration of Business and Geo-spatial Intelligence.  I continue to champion Tableau, and I’m starting to integrate not just with ESRI, Mapbox, Geoserver etc but also with other XML/JSON based APIs, javascript libraries such as Cesium, d3, & three.js.

This is to support the next mission though - full sensory data exploration.   I’ll go further in depth at a later date; explain though some technologies, where I’ve got too so far, and why.

O intrebare...

Ai recomandări de podcast-uri românești (nu doar știri)? Ceva de genul radioambulante.org, dar în limba română?

ARTILLERY SHELLS, MINES, and other ordnance still litter Cambodia, years after the Vietnam War and the fall of the Khmer Rouge. Disposing of them is dangerous work, and nowhere is the task more daunting than under water.

READ MORE: Dive deep with the men clearing cambodia’s bombs by hand.

Portuguese azulejo (by Nacho Coca)

Follow me on Instagram

http://www.lillipad.co.nz/

I already got my first choice Christmas present this year, but this is a close second!

Andy's awesome!

Musician Andy McKee Performs ‘Streets of Whiterun’ from Skyrim on a Beautiful Combination Harp Guitar

and here we go: all current Flight Rising dragon breeds, all together! I used the average sizes for each breed, which is is as follows (in order from left to right in the second image):

Imperial: 21m

Ridgeback: 18m

Guardian: 15m

Snapper: 5m

Pearlcatcher: 5.65m

Mirror: 5.7m

Wildclaw: 5m

Tundra: 3.48

Skydancer: 5.66

Spiral: 3.25

Fae: 1m

and again, the human silhouette is 1.83m/6’. this was a fun project and I think I can get back to actual arts now, and while I enjoy having this reference, I also still take dragon sizes with a big grain of salt (and don’t even get me started on wingspan & weights ok)!

you can also nab a larger size (2500x1185 pixels) of the second image over here on dA, and you can check out my tag #drag size chart for individual size charts of each breed (with smallest, largest & average).

Romanian Traditional House

source: Zestra Neamului