Airspace rebooted

Airspace Rebooted from ItoWorld on Vimeo.

In April of this year, much of Europe's airspace has been closed for several days, due to the volcanic ash after the eruption of the Eyjafjallajökull volcano in iceland. itoworld.com, with support from ideasintransit.org, made a visualization of the airspace traffic of Europe slowly coming back to life again.

The flight data is courtesy of flightradar24.com and covers a large fraction of Europe. There are a few gaps (most noticeably France) and no coverage over the Atlantic, but the picture is still clear.

Other than slowing the "reboot" of the flight lines, it also shows the density of airtraffic in on certain lines and airports. It also makes one wonder whether the amount of flight that we, in general, use nowadays will continue to exist - or better yet: how it could be made sustainable to maintain this density of flight...

Mapping the presidency

Personally, I've been getting a bit fed-up with the maps used in the coverings of the more recent elections for the next president of the United States of America. To be honest, the maps, like the ones above are a bit bland and boring, with red being republicans and blue being democrats. Big TV networks, such as CNN, come up with high-tech gadgets (such as those ridiculous holograms), but seem to be unable to come up with a decent alternative for the map as displayed above.

One of my main troubles with the map is that it's a non-corresponding image. What I mean is such: simply looking at the map, one is suggested first that McCain won the elections (concidering that the largest part of the image is coloured red). The map shows a relation between color/votes and land mass, while it in fact should show a direct relation between population and votes. Or, better yet: between electoral college and votes.
I am not the only one who has been thinking about this non-representational representations in relation to the US-elections. And among the people who have taken this thought further is somebody called Mark Newman (who's also the person behind "atlas of the real world". And the good thing is: he didn't just moan about this issue (such as I do), he actually has the skills to adjust the maps, which he shows on his website.


Like this map right here. Here, the land-mass of the various states are left behind, and the votes are linked to the electoral college. It gives a better impression of the actual result of the election: a larger proportion is coloured blue. And the actual importance of various states is shown: just look at the size of states like Montana and New York in the two previous maps, for instance. The vast, outstretched state of Montana, while looking relatively important when land mass is considered, is, in fact, pretty useless for the final outcome.

But what happens when this is taken one step further: look at the map below. In this one, the results in each county are shown, also with the winner-takes-all principle. This clearly seems to indicate a landslide victory for the republicans. But we all know that to be wrong, right? So actually, the only thing this seems to prove is that McCain has had a stronger rural electorate than Obama, which won more votes in the densely populated areas.


And still, one can go further than this. What if the inhabitants pro state are linked to the results? Well, the map below is the outcome of that. Pretty fascinating, right?


For those of you inspired by these maps, Mark Newman went all out on the creative common principle: the software he uses is available for all to use, to be found, again, on his website. Unfortunately, you need to understand something about computer coding languages. Or, at least, own a C++ compiler and a whole bunch of patience, two things I unfortunately lack...

"They drew first blood, not me"

The series of Rambo-movies, starring Sylvester Stallone, could've only be successful by going "bigger" by every sucessive movie. It's just that kind of movie with all that gratuitous violence that needs to be more over the top, every time around. And that's exactly what these statistics prove: every Rambo movie is more violent than the previous one. Strangely enough, Stallone also gotten a bit more "untouchable": in the lastest version, there were only 2 sequences in which he was shot at (without result, of course), which is quite little in relation to the abundance of 38 sequences in part three.

Other than that, it is obvious from these statistics that Sylvester Stallone realized that he's clearly too old to take off his shirt to kill a random bad guy.
So, it appears that even silly action movies are put together based on statistics: there's probably some guy with an excel-sheet somewhere that figured out exactly the right amount of kills and torture scenes for visitor optimalization.