POLITICSHYPE: Thematic Campaign Mapping

With all the noise about the American Presidential campaign in the media, it can be hard to discern longer-term patterns. The various talking heads are always ready to supply the soft-brained with the sound bite or talking point of the moment (and there is no shortage of soft-brained people in this country).

However, for those interested in a geographic breakdown of where the candidates have been spending their time, the New York Times Election Guide has put together a database of campaign events. That's obviously quite a bit of work in and of itself, but they've presented this information in an Adobe Flash GIS application. It's really quite interesting to see where the candidates pressed the most flesh and kissed the most babies.

This should only get better as the campaign continues... but what's with Iowa? They sure seem to be enjoying a whole lot of attention so far!

If you appreciate this type of data visualization, you'll definitely be interested in the Atlas of Cancer Mortality in the United States. More hype on that later.

WEBHYPE: Space, Real and Fictional

Two new web applications made their debut this week, affording armchair astronomers fun and fascinating new ways to explore space.



















Google's totally cool Google Earth program, which you should all be familiar with, has turned its view to the heavens with the new Sky add-on. A new button has been added to the menubar allowing you to switch between earth and sky. Once you are looking into space, you can zoom in to highly detailed views which include educational links and high-res images. In the image above, a Hubble Space Telescope image is overlaid on the Great Orion Nebula, and a pop-up gives detailed information. Sky is designed for user-added content, so bookmarks and imagery can proliferate in Google Sky as they do on Google Earth.

Google Earth download

[ Of course, if you want to get deep into space, get Celestia -- I'll post on this later ]


















If the incomprehensible vastness of space as we currently understand it, isn't enough for you, go deeper still, into the universe of imagination, with Galixiki. Taking the Wikipedia concept into space, users who sign up (for free) and become "Galaxicians" can create solar systems, planets and moons. The possibilities are limitless.

Galaxiki homepage

[ Of course, you can do similar things with Celestia -- check out the user-created Death Star add-on -- I'll post on this later ]