Pictures from the sky

Tracking Orangutans from the Sky

0001 The recent discovery of a Hobbit-like hominid on the Indonesian island of Flores was startling in some respects—its rather modern existence, for one—but it represents a classic case of Darwinian evolution. For reasons that are not entirely clear, when animals make their way to isolated islands, they tend to evolve relatively quickly toward an outsized or pint-sized version of their mainlan...

Scorch marks from the sky

Daily sunshine duration is commonly reported at weather stations. Beyond the basic duration report, more information is available from scorched cards of Campbell-Stokes sunshine recorders, such as the estimation of direct-beam solar irradiance. Sunshine cards therefore potentially provide information on sky state, as inferred from solar-radiation data. Some sites have been operational since the...

ruby of the sky

in a profoundly impressive verse in shahnameh, sky is likened to red ruby. the present paper is attempted to probe into the background of the conventional belief regarding the relationship between sky and stone, for the semantic structure of the verse is composed in such a way that it is not possible to consider this relationship as being a conceptualistic viewpoint so that one may establish so...

Pictures from Words, Pictures from Text: Constructing Pictorial Representations of Meaning from Text

Distinguishing Visualizations from Pretty Pictures

In 1987, Bruce McCormick led an extensive study of the benefi ts of combining computer graphics and computational-science methods. This culminated in the US National Science Foundation panel report “Visualization in Scientifi c Computing,” in which I was (serendipitously) a participant. Many people identify this event as the birth of scientifi c visualization as a distinct discipline. It was so...