Airports of the World

I've been busy in astronomy-land recently, trying to make some headway on my thesis before beginning a summer internship (more on both hopefully in the coming months!) For this site, recently I've been playing with some interesting data, trying to find the "story" - which is really a way of saying I haven't found the truly clever question yet. Lots of pretty/interesting visualizations have been made, however.

In the meantime, I thought the following map was pretty incredible. I present:

The World, Traced by Airport Runways.

Click for high resolution version

This was generated using 45,132 runways (awesome data from here). Think about that number for a moment: there are at least 45,000 places to land an airplane! These range from small dirt fields to LAX, and the data seems to be more complete in the USA. Still, runways on every continent, seemingly every country.

Incredible!

Update: You can now purchase a poster version of this map. Neat!

Airports of the World Poster by IfWeAssume
View custom art Posters & Prints at online Zazzle

What's Trending in Astronomy - #aas222

This week the American Astronomical Society (AAS) is having their biannual meeting. You can follow along with tons of great tweets from many astronomers at the meeting by following #aas222.

Even when I'm not able to go, I still enjoy looking through the meeting's abstract book to get a sense for what's being discussed. If you don't want to parse ~100 pages of abstracts, check out this word cloud I made using every talk and poster abstract:

Full version of the word cloud is here!

This visualization is a little silly, but it does give you a sense for what people are talking about this week. Lots of big name telescopes can be found in the 'cloud (like Kepler and Hubble), and abbreviations for the states that are home to many of astronomers (AZ, CA, MA). I'm happy to see "stars" as one of the biggest science words, and cool to see WIYN getting lots of love (which makes sense given the meeting's location, and ODI being online).

I made one of these word clouds for AAS 221 as well,  though I might have pre-whitened it by removing (e.g.) United, States, and University. I can't recall. Comparing these two word clouds, however, has given me an idea I'd like to pursue: using the word frequency of paper (or meeting) abstracts to track the popularity of astronomical topics/sub-disciplines over time.


Update:

Full version of this cloud is here!

I realized as soon as I hit publish that the IAU Symposium #299 is going on at the same time as AAS 222, which is one reason there are so few uses of "planet" in the original word cloud. Here for comparison is the word cloud generated from the IAUS299 meeting program. Here's where all those planet folks are hiding this week!

How we Perceive Racial Demographics

Last year I conducted a short online survey to (attempt to) answer a simple question:
How accurately do people know the racial demographics of their neighborhood?

This was prompted by overhearing a great many generalizations about the racial composition of Seattle, and the UW in particular. The survey was straight forward: simply provide your guesses for the % of each race in your neighborhood, as well as a few details about yourself (age, gender, race, and most importantly ZIP code in the USA). The ZIP code was used to compare the user-estimated %'s to data from the US 2010 census.

I'd like to share a bit of what I learned...

1. Respondents, or, The Kindness of Strangers

Cubehelix, or How I Learned to Love Black & White Printers

Anyone who's chatted with me about figure design (at least in Astronomy) in the last two years has probably heard my rantings and ravings about some strange color pallet called cubehelix (not to be confused with timecube). I flat out love this color scheme, and I think it could work for you! Here's why:

1. It Works Better for YOU

The most notable feature about CUBEHELIX (or "cubehelix" if you prefer) is that it prints equally well in color and black & white! This is a great time saver when making figures for publications where color is only available online (if like in Astronomy you still use journals with print copies). CUBHELIX accomplishes this by cycling through the RGB cube, while constantly increasing the saturation (black to white). I like this figure, which explains how CUBEHLIX works and its name: