Darwin

This and others like it are for sale via Zazzle. The artist is donating profits to the National Center for Science Education.

Is the Crime Mapping initiative failing UK communities?

A Cimex study looked at a bunch of police-operated crime maps in the UK and found them confusing and difficult to use, even when compared to the tabular crime data presented on UpMyStreet, a non-governmental website offering information for people planning a move within or to the UK.

The police websites mentioned in the article include:

West Yorkshire Police Authority
Greater Manchester Police
West Midlands Police
Metropolitan Police

Trawlers are 'destroying history on the seabed'

The chains and cables used by commercial fishing ships are wrecking British shipwrecks.

Investigations using robot submarines have revealed that serious damage has been inflicted on vast numbers of the 32,000 pre-1945 ships whose wrecks litter Britain’s coastal waters. Examples include the recently discovered 18th-century warship HMS Victory, which led Britain’s fleet before Nelson’s flagship of the same name. In 1744, Victory sank with all hands near the Channel Islands. Cannon hauled from the wreck showed it had suffered severe damage from trawlers.

TV's new model?

In a post dense with ideas about the future of television, Noah Brier wonders if television will eventually deliver two different forms of content: the traditional “live” form and a new “time shifted” form enabled by DVR and related technologies.

There’s also a thought-provoking quote from Jared of the Naked NYC blog: “Technology and music reward early adoption, but television does not.”

Agreed. I just finished watching Arrested Development for the first time. About halfway through the first disc, I was glad I hadn’t seen the show when it was on TV; I would have been too heartbroken upon hearing of its cancellation.

The focus

I think this experiment is going alright. I’ve settled on posting items singly, I’ve announced the first clique reshuffle, and I’ve streamlined the way posts are presented both on the site and in the RSS feed.

What might not be as obvious is the slight shift in focus. Instead of posting links that seem to have appealed to a large number of people already (based on the number of times they’ve been bookmarked in delicious), I’m focusing on bookmarks shared by only a handful. That doesn’t mean I won’t occasionally post something that’s been well-loved, just that I’ll do it less often.

I don’t want The Daily Clique to be about what people in the clique have read and shared that everybody else has; I want it to be about what people in the clique have read and shared that almost nobody has.

Put another way: if I’m going to tell a story about twenty-one strangers using nothing more than their shared bookmarks, I need to focus on what makes them different from the millions of other delicious-using strangers.

How accurate was Kubrick's "2001: A Space Odyssey" about the future?

Martin Belam compares the present with Kubrick’s vision of it. While Kubrick got plenty right, he failed to predict that meetings of the future might become less humane.

No PowerPoint

Part of the reason that Dr Floyd has been sent to Clavius Base is to deliver a morale-boosting speech to a crew bemused by what they have unearthed on the moon.

Frankly, there is no way that this would have been done in the real 2001 without the judicious use of PowerPoint featuring Excel charts and inspiring pictures of puppies, and probably some free branded goodies to take away and cheer everybody up.

Planetizen's top ten websites of 2009

Wait.

A best-of list for 2009? Already? I’ve bookmarked them all in delicious; go and save them all to yours if you’re pressed for time.

Where is the path (or street)

A split-screen map, with the Ordnance Survey map on one side and your choice of Google map on the other.

It might be interesting to try two types of Google map on either side of the screen, or four types in each corner. Overlay maps—and I’m thinking specifically of Google’s hybrid version—obscure some of the visual data. With side-by-side you don’t get this; it just takes up more space—a forgivable sin if you’re building a map for monitors only.

Migurski found this via Tom Taylor.

NYTimes: 365/360

A Flickr set containing some absolutely stunning visualizations created by Jer Thorp using Processing and the New York Times article search API.

These visualizations show the top organizations and personalities for every year from 1985 to 2001. Connections between these people & organizations are indicated by lines.

He must have added some recently, because he’s got 1984 to 2009 represented now.

Update: there’s more information about the visualizations over at blprnt.

Wikipedia in academic studies

A list of peer-reviewed papers and other academic literature with Wikipedia as the subject.

Related: Wikipedia in culture.