December 12, 2006
Easy to Swallow
style.org > Estimating the Airspeed Velocity of an Unladen Swallow is a beautiful and fun analysis of this classic question, not even leaving out the problem of which African swallow we are talking about. The graphs are even better in the preceeding page on Strouhal numbers. The site itself is also worth examining for its nice infographics.
One fun implication of this is that birds on a low gravity world like a fictional terraformed Mars fly at the same speed, but animals tend to run slower. Cats clearly need to be just as stealthy as on Earth.
I found the site from the discussions on Edward Tufte's site, of course. Another interesting discussion involves information and information graphics in the patient-doctor relation. That also linked to the Ping project, an open source project for patient-owned medical records, and a paper about visualizing medical risk with roulette wheels and dartboards. That there was a discussion of information markets was a bit of a surprise, although Robin's entry into it was less of a surprise :-) That discussion brings up one problem I have with them: being a highly visual thinker I'd really like to have good visualisation methods of the information markets to actually get a good intuition about them.
Posted by Anders3 at December 12, 2006 12:08 AM