I’ve been experimenting with various ways to present data in this blog, mainly using static screen shots of graphs. But over the weekend, I started exploring interactive options. In particular, there is a very capable tool out there called Tableau that provides a way to publish analytic graphics to the web, using their publicly available server to process the data. It has quite a lot of flexibility. The analyses below are my first foray into this endeavor. I also updated my earlier post on the Kepler telescope results to make it more interactive as well. All data is from the U.S. Geological Survey earthquake database. This first visualization shows the world-wide distribution of earthquakes from January 1, 1973 to October 14, 2011 from magnitude 4.9 to the maximum recorded of 9.1. The tectonic plate boundaries are easily visible. You can change the magnitude and year sliders to limit the data…
Earth as an Asteroid Target
Good news regarding the likelihood of getting hit by an asteroid: the estimated count of those bodies that cross Earth’s orbit has gone down. Although the probability that any one rock might hit us has always been very low, the calculation shrunk even further after data from the WISE spacecraft (Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer) was analyzed. The number shrunk by almost half (35,000 to 19,500). Finding small objects (less than about a mile across) is challenging because they’re not very bright to begin with, and past surveys have relied on visible light to see them. WISE uses heat (infrared radiation) emitted from the object, which doesn’t depend on how reflective the surface is. Since asteroid surface brightness varies across a wide range, it was difficult to determine how big each of them was (observations could be bright because the asteroid was large, or because it had a very high surface…
How Deep the Quantum Well Near-Future Science Fiction
I completed my first science fiction novel this summer and went the self-publishing route. It was great fun writing it, with a lot of help and encouragement from my friends Tim and Tari, not to mention a fair amount of patience from my family as I spent long hours on the back patio typing away on the laptop. I also went to a writer’s workshop in Tucson during the course of the project, which was quite interesting. The highlight of the event for me was sitting with a bunch of strangers, one of whom was an elderly lady with an old Polaroid of herself standing with John Wayne. She had quite a story to tell of sneaking into the Old Tucson studios wearing a badge she had borrowed from a friend who worked there. Her goal, of course, was to meet the Duke, filming “Rio Bravo”, which she eventually managed,…