Theoretical Ken

+ enlarge

Just over 10 years ago, on October 15, 1997, NASA’s Cassini spacecraft was launched from Cape Canaveral, Florida, on a several billion mile trip across the solar system to the planet Saturn.

About seven years later, on July 1, 2004, the Cassini-Huygens spacecraft reduced its speed, and entered orbit around Saturn. The spacecraft is now more than half way through its four-year mission to explore the ringed planet.

The mission, called the Cassini-Huygens Mission to Saturn and Titan also released a probe that landed on Saturn’s moon Titan on Dec. 25, 2004.

You can see the latest incredible images from the Cassini-Huygens Mission to Saturn and Titan at the CICLOPS (Cassini Imaging Central Laboratory for Operations) website.

Tags: Data, Science, Tech by T_Ken
No Comments »

The Compact Edition of The Oxford English Dictionary
Complete Text Reproduced Micrographically (in slipcase with reading glass).

500,000 words, 290,000 main entries, 137,000 pronunciations, 249,300 etymologies, 577,000 cross-references, and over 2,412,000 illustrative quotations in one book. Weighs in at 15.3 pounds.

A direct photoreduction of the entire 20-volume set, with nine pages of the original on every nine-by-twelve inch page.

Painstakingly written by an infinite number of monkeys with an infinite number of typewriters.

Published by Oxford University Press, USA. Available here.

(via cooltools)

Tags: Books, Data, General, Language, Tech by T_Ken
No Comments »

News headlines, grouped by color-category in a Mondrian-like layout; sized and shaded to illustrate, at-a-glance, the quantity and freshness of a news story across thousands of media sources. Tabs across the top allow a country-by-country comparative view of the proportion of news/story coverage in different countries around the world.

You can see Newsmap in action here.

“Newsmap is an application that visually reflects the constantly changing landscape of the Google News news aggregator. A treemap visualization algorithm helps display the enormous amount of information gathered by the aggregator. Treemaps are traditionally space-constrained visualizations of information. Newsmap’s objective takes that goal a step further and provides a tool to divide information into quickly recognizable bands which, when presented together, reveal underlying patterns in news reporting across cultures and within news segments in constant change around the globe.”

“Newsmap does not pretend to replace the googlenews aggregator. Its objective is to simply demonstrate visually the relationships between data and the unseen patterns in news media. It is not thought to display an unbiased view of the news; on the contrary, it is thought to ironically accentuate the bias of it.” –Newsmap website

Tags: Data, Tech by T_Ken
2 Comments »