London’s Oyster Card Tidal Flow

Excellent map animation from Oliver O’Brien that visualises the touch ins and outs of Oyster cards, London's travel cards. Originally created for the “Sense and the City” exhibition at the London Transport Museum, which ran from Summer 2011 to Spring 2012, this animation powerfully illustrates the flow of London's population towards its centre as people commute in to work.

The in/out numbers are for each 10-minute interval. For stations where the in/out numbers are roughly equal at that time, the colour is white. Red stations indicate a strong flow into the network and green stations show a predominately outward flow. The Oyster card data was supplied by Transport for London and a version of this animation was created and shown at the London Transport Museum during its "Sense and the City" exhibition in 2011/2. The video here is a screen capture of a OpenLayers map which was produced by me at UCL CASA for the exhibition. The background map is based on data from Ordnance Survey Open Data (Crown Copyright) and OpenStreetMap contributors (ODbL). Background imagery created using Mapnik.

Globaia - The Anthropocene

The Anthropocene = "A period marked by a regime change in the activity of industrial societies which began at the turn of the nineteenth century and which has caused global disruptions in the Earth System on a scale unprecedented in human history: climate change, biodiversity loss, pollution of the sea, land and air, resources depredation, land cover denudation, radical transformation of the ecumene, among others. These changes command a major realignment of our consciousness and worldviews, and call for different ways to inhabit the Earth."

This video is an illustration of map experiments that demonstrate the Anthtopocene, and it shows several features of our global civilization: cities, built environment, transmission lines, pipelines, main paved and unpaved roads and railways.



This is essentially really intense mapping, but once you've got your head around the rather weighty text introduction (after the link), the true scale and meaning behind it will blow your mind.

via Globaia

A map of the universe

A map of the universe by René Descartes from Principia philosophiae, 1644, one of many fascinating depictions in the visual history of mapping the cosmos.

Read more over on Brain Pickings.

Maps before maps

Awesome collection of medieval maps from the 11th to the 14th centuries. Some of them are geographic, but most of them are more like rough sketches of how the individual saw the area the image represents.

Check out more here.

Wind map

An invisible, ancient source of energy surrounds us—energy that powered the first explorations of the world, and that may be a key to the future.

This map shows you the wind flowing over the US in real time.

Check it out here http://hint.fm/wind/

Perpetual Ocean

Using a computational model called Estimating the Circulation and Climate of the Ocean, Phase II (ECCO2), the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center Scientific Visualization Studio visualizes surface currents around the world.

Read more here.

World population densities mapped

National Geographic has a look at where and how we live:

The map shows population density; the brightest points are the highest densities. Each country is colored according to its average annual gross national income per capita, using categories established by the World Bank (see key below). Some nations — like economic powerhouses China and India — have an especially wide range of incomes. But as the two most populous countries, both are lower middle class when income is averaged per capita.

via National Geographic

World subway map

Time-lapse of the night sky with the Very Large Telescope

The Very Large Telescope (VLT) in an array of four telescopes operated by European Southern Observatory, and together the array "can achieve an angular resolution of around 1 milliarcsecond, meaning it could distinguish the gap between the headlights of a car located on the Moon."

The Beauty of Maps

This film looks at the way cartography has changed and entered an age of digital map-making.

Denis Lawson explains how digital mapping is shaping the future, letting us see into virtual spaces and into the infinite unknowns of outer-space.

Each image is a breath-taking first look at the world today, showing the extent of human endeavour in the most beautiful ways possible.

Check out the youtube playlist here

and the interactive stuff here

Victorian Infographics

Collection of Victorian infographics

via Bibliodyssey

Nuclear Energy Wall Charts

Absolutely incredible collection of Nuclear Energy Wall Charts - fantastic complext illustrations

via NewMexicosDigitalConnections

Extreme Planning

Incredible display of planning taken to the extreme. If you didn't / haven't played Sim City, then this won't be as impressive.

It's busy in orbit

Since the advent of the space-age over five decades ago, more than thirty-five thousand man-made objects have been cataloged by the U.S. Space Surveillance Network. Nearly twenty-thousand of those objects remain in orbit today, ninety-four percent of which are non-functioning orbital debris. These figures do not include the hundreds-of-thousands of objects too small to be cataloged, but still large enough to pose a threat to approximately nine-hundred operational satellites in orbit around the Earth. In addition, collisions between debris objects could potentially lead to a continuously growing debris population, thus increasing the risk to operational satellites.




via SmartPlanet and Popsci