Monday 17 November 2014

Beautiful round diagrams may not be the sexiest title for an article - but that's what they are


The above diagram isn't round, obviously, but it features lots of spheres. It's a National Geographic map representing all NASA space explorations over the past fifty years. But that's not really the point, is it? Forget what it's depicting, and it becomes a mysterious, compelling painting which seems to mean something vaguely hippyish. I'd be happy to have it in a frame on our sitting-room wall. You can study it in greater detail here.

The next one is a fractal drawing by Jason Padgett, a furniture salesman from Tacoma, Washington who turned into a maths genius after an attack outside a karaoke bar in 2002 left him brain-damaged (you can read about him and see some more of his drawings in the Huffington Post, here).


This NASA map visualises the flow of ocean surface currents around the world during the period from 2005 to 2007 (it says in the Daily Mail article from which I stole it, which you can read here).


The following beguiling representation of weather data comes from the same Mail article about a British LIbrary exhibition of scientific maps which was on earlier this year. Wish I'd caught it.


The next diagram was created with Circos Imaging software, and might be something to do with genomic data. There are dozens of similar images available at the company's website, here.


I'll end with this gorgeous geological map of the South Polar region of the Moon, which is available on the Discover Magazine site, here:


Far out, or what!

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