Tryangulation

Still another way to look at the world

I'm collecting sites that have interesting ways of depicting data, and came upon Worldmapper, which uses unusual maps to show all kinds of economic and development indicators, such as literacy and life expectancy. The maps are reshaped so that the relative distribution of the indicator value is shown in the relative size of each country. 

I played around with some of the maps showing education indicators and economic development, and was struck by the similarity in the distribution of spending on primary education (first image), secondary education, and research/development (second image).

Countries with high spending in one category tended to also have high spending in the other two categories. Likewise, countries with low investment in education also had low investments in R&D. I also found a lot of similarity with the map showing the distribution of new patents, a good indicator of innovation. Draw your own conclusions, or read more in the Eldis resource page on education and economic growth.

Worldmapper currently has 366 different maps, and they keep adding more. Visit their site, pick a few indicators, and see if you can guess what shape the world is in.

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TED Talks: recharge your mind

TED -- which in this case stands for "Technology, Entertainment, Design" -- is a yearly gathering of inventors, activists, intellectuals and other big time thinkers.  The conference is an exclusive event that until now conference attendees have kept all that great talking and thinking to themselves. But now, the 2006 conference has posted several of its best talks for free on the web.

So far I've watched dynamic talks on energy, creativity, environmental justice, and the power of decisions, and I can endorse them as a sure cure for summer brain atrophy. Each of the talks is only 18 minutes, but by the end you'll wish each one was longer.

Click here to start recharging.

A news story for your physics teacher

Researchers at Manchester University have discovered a way to capture wave energy from the ocean with a device that produces more than twice the output of wind turbines.  According to a recent story on The Engineer Online, the technology converts the oscillatory motion of waves into a one-directional motion, which drives the generator.  For more, click here.

... and one for your chemistry teacher

One of the difficulties of depicting a round earth on a flat map has been the long perceived distances between points at opposite sides of a world map, when in fact those points are very near to each other.

Did you realize that the same difficulty has occurred in chemistry? In 1869 a Russian chemist named Dmitri Mendeleev created the periodic table of the elements, arranging elements in order according to their atomic number, and in rows according to his theory about concentric clouds of orbiting electrons. 

The table has been very useful to understand shared characteristics of elements that are located close to each other, for example in the same column in neighboring rows. But like our flat maps of the world, the two-dimensional periodic table is distorted.

Now, Philip Stewart, and ecologist at the University of Oxford in England,  has designed a new periodic table with the shape of an elliptical spiral. Click here for an image and brief explanation. For a fuller explanation and to order a poster, click here.