“Live so that when your children think of fairness and integrity, they think of you.” – H. Jackson Brown

Chicago Trib news app developer leaves Chicago and moves to small town of Tyler, Texas to be a responsible parent. Instead of mostly moaning about life in the boondocks (and, unlike D and me, who used to simply leave Smalltown Ohio for other actual cities), said developer uses his experience to “improve the things [he doesn't] like, either through application of will or technology or both.” Enter Hack Tyler.

Tyler has information that could be freed. Tyler has government that could be opened. Tyler has news that could be hacked. Moreover, Tyler has an almost completely unexploited market. There are no hackers there. The small number of high-tech businesses that exist in the region are either web development shops serving local businesses or robotics companies.

… Is this all going to go off without a hitch? Not a chance. I expect to spend many nights being painfully underwhelmed with the place and with myself, but this is the best way I know how to deal with it.

So far, Christopher Groskopf (@onyxfish) has changed Tyler’s bus transit system from an online PDF to Tyler On Time. And then the city announced they are overhauling the system and routes with it. While (I guess) that project is on hold, Groskopf is now looking at what to do with the city’s demographic and other data.

To be honest, what grabs me about Hack Tyler is not at all Future Boy Brings Fire To Australopithecus And Amuses Himself In Process, but this guy’s surrender to his circumstances as a divorced father. Once you make that decision to be present in your reality and your child’s life, keeping yourself occupied, going and useful comes with the territory, I suppose. And he admits that it is terribly hard. Good parents have always been a heartening puzzle to me – they selfishly procreate and then spend the rest of their lives willing to give those very lives for their children if necessary. When the aliens come and ask why we must be spared, I will point towards parents. That will keep them busy.

What also tickles me is this statement from the O’Reilly Radar interview: “Texas has a history of transparency projects that I was unaware of.” We’re working on cool projects NO ONE KNOWS ABOUT. Solid. Also, no one tell Rick Perry.

The oil spill on New York City (and New Jersey and New York state and Connecticut):

The oil spill on Chicago (and Gary, IN and Lake Michigan into Michigan):

On Houston (D notes that the eastern arm spill stops just short of the Louisiana border):

Along with the regular talks, workshops and brainstorming sessions, there is also a Where Faire, in which “research, academia, and yet-to-be-discovered entrepreneurs” display their projects and we stand around and talk to them with a cocktail in hand. Tom Longson’s Open View Project really stood out this year because the concept is simple-brilliant and community-oriented at once. From the OVP site:

Seeing what [Google] had done [with StreetView] was inspiring, but I wanted to be able to annotate parts of the panoramas, to build my own services around it, and to take pictures of the places Google didn’t go. Instead of creating panoramas of asphalt, I wanted to capture places with people, create interactive panoramas of events, trails, beaches, ice skating rinks, the places where people actually go. The OpenView Project is just this, a way for anyone to create interactive panoramas, and share them to create a new way to view the world … if there’s anything I’ve learned in the 27 years I’ve been alive, it’s that being part of something is far more exciting than just being a spectator.

And how do Longson and his team accomplish this? With the Trike – a recumbent bicycle and a daisy chain of cameras – of course. It’s all Open Source with instructions.

Jay Longson (my brother), Brent Heyning, and I [have built a] panoramic camera on top of a recumbent tricycle, we’ll be able to cover a huge amount of distance, and get the chance to create interactive panoramas of bike trails, boardwalks, farmers markets, concerts … the Burning Man art festival. Instead of just using Google Street View as a spectator, we’ll be building a creative commons of snapshots in time of places all over the world. We’ll be publishing instructions to show you how to do it too, and building an open source service to act as a clearing house for the data.

These folks aren’t amateurs. They had to make the cameras work in unison and look at all this other heavy duty equipment they use to create panoramas.

Check out their posts and panoramas from Burning Man. Social Animal’s 360 HD technology and output for Hollywod is amazing, but their blueprints and methods aren’t open source. And SA’s booth didn’t have a fun-loving Scotsman in it called Haggis.

Can you imagine a better venue for the Open View Project’s Trike than the Krewe du Vieux or St. Anne’s parade? Or Jazzfest? Or any gathering in the city? We have to get these guys to New Orleans! Or, even better, start our own New Orleans Open View Projects. That’s what giving away technology is all about, right?

Flowing Data | Where Bars Trump Grocery Stores: “Red dots represent locations where there are more bars than grocery stores, based on results from the Google Maps API. The Midwest takes their drinking seriously.” Actually, it’s just Wisconsin that does. Central Minnesota, Chicago and southeast Illinois lightweights need not apply.

2. USA Today Science Fair | Tectonic Plate Model Lets Users Play With 3D Planetary Puzzle

Dubbed MORVEL, for Mid-Ocean Ridge VELocity (because much of the data comes from the mid-ocean ridges) it was created by University of Wisconsin-Madison geophysicist Chuck DeMets and collaborators Richard Gordon of Rice University and Donald Argus of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

MORVEL lets allows users model the relative movements of 25 interlocking tectonic plates that account for 97 percent of the Earth’s surface. It’s being presented in the April issue of Geophysical Journal International and is based on work the scientists have been doing for the past 20 years.

A dynamic three-dimensional puzzle of planetary proportions! Chuck was on my MS thesis committee and we used older versions of MORVEL in our graduate geophysics classes. Glad to see this great research and teaching aid get the attention it deserves.

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

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!

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.

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.

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.