Maitri's VatulBlog

JPL’s Uninhabited Aerial Vehicle Synthetic Aperture Radar (UAVSAR) False-Color Composite Image Of Port-Au-Prince, Haiti.  Check out the mondo east-west fault scarp on this baby.

Virtusphere setup, I/ITSEC Orlando, November 2009

If you don’t know already from some of my VizWorld posts, I’m a Flowing Data fangirl. Nathan Yau is the younger, hipper, nerdier Edward Tufte, and one who likes to share his sources and techniques. Understandably, Tufte has his trade secrets, but it was like pulling teeth to get him to share what tools and design methods he uses to make his graphics.  Something about Adobe Illustrator and a cadre of assistants is all I got.

Last night, I made a 2009 United States county-specific unemployment map using Flowing Data’s How to Make a US County Thematic Map Using Free Tools tutorial.  All you need is a Python installation, the BeautifulSoup XML parser, a good text editor and some patience to debug.  (Another reason I like Nathan: He codes in Python, the best, most intuitive programming language out there!)

These are the results, admittedly without a legend (bad Maitri!), which I will work on in Photoshop.  So you know what you’re looking at here, the lightest color is 0% unemployment and steps up from there in 2% increments, with the darkest color denoting 10+% unemployment.  This data was downloaded from the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

1. The Flowing Data original reproduced:

2. Diverging colors (blue=low; red=high)

3. Sequential colors (white=low; orange=high; black=+10%).  The darker the hues, the more trouble folks have telling them apart.  Black shows the worst hit spots and provides a backdrop with which to differentiate between the other colors

Check out the original Unemployment, 2004 To Present to see how bad things have become just in the last two years. This isn’t news, but just as well when you look at it in a county-by-county color graphic.  The nation is indeed bleeding.  Let’s make more casinos at home and start more land wars in Asia!

General Robert Van Antwerp, chief of the US Army Corps of Engineers, recently stated that “New Orleans can no longer be protected from hurricane storm surges” and that “half of Louisiana will be under water by 2100.”

Back off, man. I’m a scientist. The latest research indicates that sea level will rise at most 1 to 1.3 meters in the next century. At below left is what that ~1 meter of sea level rise looks like on a map. [Source: University of Arizona Environmental Studies Lab Sea Level Rise Viewer]  While New Orleans will be affected, I’d hardly call that half of Louisiana.

Now take a close look at the picture on the right. While New Orleans will be affected, so will the entire northeastern seaboard including beloved New York City and our nation’s capital. I dare General van Antwerp to go up to Washington D.C. and say it cannot be protected. A word that comes to mind is “pilloried.”

If we are the most awesome country on the planet, why can we not accomplish what the Dutch have?  So, don’t say it can’t be done, just admit you are not the one to do it.

And then former New Orleans Recovery Czar Ed Blakely’s pronouncement that New Orleans “isn’t likely” to be around 100 years from now because the Mississippi River and another hurricane/flood would “wipe New Orleans off the map.”  I agree with him to a certain extent about some of his other points on New Orleans’s recovery and how it is plagued by racial distrust, corruption, apathy and inertia.  Blakely is no climatologist, however, and should have stopped there. Besides, how can you take seriously a man who had a church razed “with the statement that God was angry at [its parishioners] for not repairing the church in a more timely fashion?”

New Orleans can recover and be protected from storm surges.  It requires a monumental feat of engineering that can then be applied to other American coastal cities when their time comes.  More than that, it requires honest folks who have a clear scientific and sociopolitical understanding of the situation and possess the nuts to ask for help.  Not those who blindly and singlehandedly take on monumental projects, make asinine decisions based on shoddy research (or for personal gain) and express sour grapes on their way out.  It can be done.

Also read:
Richard | Ed Blakely: so close, and yet …
Cliff | Don’t be mad at Ed Blakely. Be mad at yourself.

Randall at VizWorld noticed that Weather Underground has a new 3D weather radar feature.  “They overlay the existing 2D terrain & radar map with a 3d isosurface extracted from the data.”  It requires a quick install of the Unity Web Player.  (By the way, the Unity game/environment development tool is now available for FREE. Go download now.)

Not to be outdone, weather.com has a new feature, too.  Mapperz discovered “the new ‘Future’ button starts moving into a predicted mode using [TruPoint Beta] technology at 15 minute intervals up to 6 hours into the future.”  Looks like it may warm up this evening.

I recently attended Edward Tufte’s Cincinnati lecture on Presenting Data & Information and interviewed him for VizWorld.  The post and audio interview are available here.

Who is Edward Tufte? In the immortal analogy of @polarisdotca, “Tufte : graphics :: Feynman : physics :: Gretzky : hockey.”  Recommended by computer science and art professors alike, the dog-eared works of Tufte have graced my bookshelves ever since I was a wee computational sciences graduate student.

That reminds me to frame and hang up the print of this amazing infographic created by Charles Joseph Minard in 1812.  Click on the image to get a better look.  I love it when history and the principles of good information design come together to tell a compelling story.