The Solar System

Here is a fun scale model of the solar system for your computer monitor - just keep on scrolling to the right!

Anscombe's Quartet

Anscombe's Quartet nicely illustrated with Plotly.

Cambridge (MA)

The GIS website for the City of Cambridge (MA) is about as good as it gets these days:

• Cambridge GIS
• The Cambridge GIS Story Maps

The 9/11 Time Lapse 2004 to 2014

The Science of Snowflakes

Great video from It's Okay To Be Smart: The Science of Snowflakes (after waiting 15 seconds for the annoying ad to finish).

Kale and Bacon Map

Here's something for the hipsters: The United States of Kale and Bacon

The Global Language Network

Here is a great project and visualization from the folks at the MIT Media Lab: The Global Language Network. The role and importance of English becomes clear immediately as a connector of people speaking different native languages.

Global View: Climate Change in Perspective

Data viz is going more and more into 3D at the global scale inside your browser: very cool visually and technologically, but not necessarily any more informative. Take Global View: Climate Change in Perspective, for example: what was the point of all this?

This is Statistics!

Let's be honest: statistics is considered by many of our students as about as interesting as watching C-SPAN and I don't think the current R craze in Higher Education is helping that at all...maybe this can help: This is Statistics

The History of the Web (1996 to 2013)

From the Washington Post (15 December 2014):

Solstice Streets and the Golden Hour

Two interesting websites/maps here (via Maps Mania):

• Solstice Streets shows you streets that are aligned with sunrise and sunset.
• The Golden Hour shows you day length and sun angle for the year for any location.

Say it with Icons!

thenounproject.com

Mount Kenya Glaciers

Excellent photography by Simon Norfolk here: Mount Kenya’s Vanishing Glaciers (New York Times Magazine, 18 December 2014).

CA, drought, and open data

California drought, visualized with open data (by the USGS)

Peek and Poke

What could possibly go wrong here? Peek is a gizmo that clips to your smartphone for easy and cheap eye exams. Oto Home by Cellscope turns your smartphone into an otoscope to 'see' if someone has an ear infection.

Infrared Thermometer

So you got FLIR ONE for $249.99 (iPhone 5/5s not included) or the Ryobi Phone Works Infrared Thermometer for $49.97.

How to build a human

Tabletop Whale makes the most awesome animated GIFs and here is How to build a human.

What Is Missing?

What Is Missing? is very impressive - mapping species extinction in the past, today, and tomorrow.

OpenFlights

Open Flights provides airport (6977 around the world!), airline, and route data.

ArcGIS Online goes 3D!

1. Visualizing online analysis in 3D web scenes
2. Fun with GIS 169: A New Dimension
3. Example: 2010 Global Population
4. Example: Airflow Globe

Why (Some) People Don't Believe in Climate Science

Why (Some) People Don't Believe in Climate Science

Amherst Public Art Story Map

Amherst Public Art Story Map - a great application of this particular Story Map template (works great on mobile devices).

Living Atlas of the World

Very nice by Esri: The Living Atlas of the World. Many of these maps are accessible without a log-in and therefore quite useful for teaching.

The World's Ecosystems

Explore the Ecological Tapestry of the World or Explore a Tapestry of World Ecosystems - either way you'll be amazed!

The Brewers

Wired has a nice article about Cindy Brewer - the person behind Color Brewer = the best tool for picking good color schemes. Color Brewer has led to a bunch more 'Brewers' for other map design choices and here's a compilation:

• Color Brewer 1.0
• Color Brewer 2.0
• ScaleMaster
• TypeBrewer
• Map Symbol Brewer

MindMeister

MindMeister is a popular online mind mapping app and offers a free version and reduced-cost versions for education.

Trends and Changepoints

Take the instrumental record and look for trends and changepoints yourself:

1. Temperature: Trends and Significance (interactive tool)
2. Changepoints in time series

The World Climate Widget

Try it yourself: The World Climate Widget

Hipsters!

Young Adults Then and Now is a nice visualization of census data for the Hipster Generation (adults 18 to 34 years old). You can visualize the data as interactive charts, maps, and tables and embed those on websites (see below).

The Green Marble

Datawrapper

Upload data, make a chart, and share it. Datawrapper is great and the free basic version is very useful.

Climate Science: Here's What You Need To Know

Adobe After Effects

Adobe After Effects is huge in the animation / motion graphics world and here is a pretty nice basic tutorial from the folks at Video Copilot.

The Randolph Glacier Inventory 4.0

The Randolph Glacier Inventory 4.0 (1 December 2014) is a global inventory of glacier outlines intended for the estimation of total ice volumes and glacier mass changes at global and large-regional scales.

Landline and Stateline

Landline and Stateline allows our Javascript addicts to create interactive web-based choropleth maps.

Scientific Data Viz

Highcharts

Highcharts is a JavaScript charting library written = an easy way of adding interactive charts to websites. Highcharts currently supports line, spline, area, areaspline, column, bar, pie, scatter, angular gauges, arearange, areasplinerange, columnrange, bubble, box plot, error bars, funnel, waterfall and polar chart types. Plus it is free for personal use, education, and non-profits!

Tools for Web-based Data Viz

Here's a nice viz of data viz tools: Tools and Libraries for Building Web-based Data Visualisations

The History of Web Design

This is great: The History Of Web Design Explained In 9 GIFs. Personally I started with web design ca. 1995 and image maps were cutting-edge back then. Here's the first website I ever created: The Taconite Inlet Lakes Project - A Systems Approach to Paleoclimatology.

Carbon Emissions: past, present, and future

As usual...Carbon emissions: past, present and future – interactive is a great visualization by The Guardian of how CO2 emissions have changed over the last 150 years.

The most unpredictable weather

Interesting analysis by Nate Silver and Reuben Fischer-Baum: Which City Has The Most Unpredictable Weather? The title is, unfortunately, a bit misleading - this study is not really about predictability (as in how well do the weather forecasts match what actually occurred) but rather variability.

FME

FME is the data management software for geospatial data.

Vertical Farms

This is pretty cool (and scary): how can we create indoor farms so we can grow enough food to feed all people?

• MIT City Farm
• Philips Green Sense

6 Billion Tweets

Meandering River

Here is a great image comparison by NASA showing how the course of the Rio Mamore has changed between 1985 (top) and 2014 (bottom). Be sure to look at the image comparison and full-resolution images online!

Web GIS for Glaciers in Svalbard

This is pretty nice: the Web GIS for glaciers in Svalbard by the Norwegian Polar Institute.

Digital Photography

There are some interesting things out there in terms of digital photography

• Time-Lapse Photography and the Canon Hack Development Kit.
• NIR photography using standard digital cameras using the instruction from Public Lab, Eigen Imaging, or instructables.com.

http://publiclab.org/wiki/near-infrared-camera

Open Cities

Open Cities is a project aimed at creating an open data ecosystem for large cities / urban areas in South East Asia as part of the Open Data for Resilience Initiative (OpenDRI). (seen here on Geoawesomeness)