Something to add to your weekly reading:
An MIT alumnus, he wrote “Visualizing Data”, perhaps better known among certain social circles as, “Hot Science Porn”. Fry thinks up novel, intuitive ways of presenting data and information. His “All Streets” project is particularly relevant to Terry*:
All of the streets in the lower 48 United States: an image of 26 million individual road segments. This began as an example I created for one of my students in the fall of 2006, and I just recently got a chance to document it properly…
…I had originally hoped to use this piece to show patterns in street naming, but I didn’t manage to find as much as I had hoped. For instance, names of local trees and flowers being tied to the local geographic regions where they’re found. However, cookie cutter suburban neighborhood developments seem to have obliterated any causation. “Magnolia” is such a nice sounding, outdoorsy word; who wouldn’t want it adorning their street corner? Local flora be damned.
Anyways – check it out.
