data visualization

The American Museum of Natural History's film flies from the Himalayas out through the atmosphere and solar system to the afterglow of the Big Bang, using its Digital Universe Atlas four-dimensional map.

A short demo of the Deep Visualization Toolbox, which shows the activations inside a convolutional neural network as it processes live camera input. Viewers see individual units responding to edges, faces and text.

A short NASA Goddard visualization from the GEOS-5 model showing a year of atmospheric carbon dioxide moving around the globe. It shows plumes from sources, hemispheric differences and seasonal swings as plants grow and die back.

A five-minute lightning demo of VisiData, a terminal tool for exploring and manipulating data. It uses two months of NYC 311 complaint data to drill down, plot points on a virtual map and save selected rows.

A Gource visualization of 826 days of Minecraft development, from alpha 1.2 to release 1.5, condensed into eight minutes. Each dot is a file, folders are links, and developers fly around zapping files as they work on them.

An LGR Oddware episode looking at Sony's MDH-10 MD Data drive from 1995, which used MiniDisc for computer storage years before Hi-MD. The host tries out the drive with its original drivers and software.

Scott Manley's short animation shows every asteroid discovery from 1970 to 2015 plotted over time in 8K. It makes visible how survey technology made discoveries accelerate and where telescopes looked.

A visualization and sonification of 15 sorting algorithms, from selection sort to bogo sort, run on shuffled integers in six minutes. Each algorithm gets a size and speed scaled to its complexity.

A live-coded demo by Jonathan Blow showing how to get object-system-style expressiveness in a data-oriented way, covering structure-of-arrays layouts and composition. It shows features of his Jai language that make programs fast.

A short product demo of Dabble DB, a web tool for importing, entering and manipulating structured data with little effort. It was built in Smalltalk and later acquired by Twitter.

CNLohr maps Wi-Fi signal strength at high resolution by moving an ESP8266 on a CNC mill, then visualizes the 3D data in WebGL. The result shows interference patterns in space.

Avi Bryant demos Dabble DB, a web-based spreadsheet-like database for building apps without code. It shows how users can model and relate data through a smooth interface.

A 49-minute demo of Palantir Foundry by its chief architect. It walks through data integration, ML and AI workflows, analytics, and application building across the platform.

A six-minute journey through the layers of a neural network using Deep Dream, with each frame fed back into the network starting from random noise and the targeted layer changing every four seconds. It is set to downtempo music.

A three-minute capture of SORTDEMO.BAS, the sorting visualization that shipped with QBasic. It animates insertion, bubble, heap, exchange, shell and quick sort with chiptune-like sound.

A short explainer showing what walking through walls would look like with movement in a fourth spatial dimension, using the 4D puzzle game Miegakure.

An animated Gabbard diagram of objects in low Earth orbit from 1959 to 2021, showing altitude over time. It highlights major debris-generating events and how low-altitude debris decays out of orbit.

A two-minute 2008 clip from Sun's Fishworks team in which Brendan Gregg uses DTrace to show disk latency spiking while he shouts at a rack of drives. Bryan Cantrill narrates the demonstration.

Stuart Halloway introduces REBL, a graphical, interactive tool for browsing Clojure data, extracted from Datomic tools. The talk is from Clojure/conj 2018.

A spectrogram visualization of the sounds in a dial-up modem handshake, with an annotated image explaining each noise. It shows how the handshake's tones map to the negotiation steps.

An animation presenting a non-standard helical or vortex model of the solar system, in which the planets trail the Sun through space instead of orbiting in flat circles. The model is a non-conventional view that the author says differs from standard diagrams.

A Belgian bank-safety campaign video in which a supposed clairvoyant stuns people by revealing personal financial details, then shows he found them all online. It warns viewers to be careful about what they share and about online banking security.

An art project by Simon Weckert in which 99 smartphones pulled in a handcart create a fake traffic jam on Google Maps. A green street shows as red, which diverts cars to other routes.

A short video of five people carrying a live, running web server across the city by public transport to a new datacenter. It stayed powered and connected to the internet the whole way, so there was no downtime.

A short demonstration of radioteletype (RTTY), a digital communication mode used in amateur radio, showing what the signal sounds like.

Linus Tech Tips backs up their petabyte server to Google's unlimited G Suite Drive plan and runs into the daily upload cap. It shows how far the 'unlimited' offer can be pushed.

Tom7 (suckerpinch) builds and evaluates a series of absurd hard drives, including storage made from ping packets across the internet. The video accompanies his paper and mixes deep technical hacking with comedic storytelling.

A short film made with cold neutron imaging at the Paul Scherrer Institut showing a moka pot brewing coffee, sped up four times. The neutron beam makes the water and steam inside the pot visible.

A short animation reconstructing a planet's looping orbit using Ptolemy's epicycles and deferents, with the epicycles tracing out the face of Homer Simpson. It shows how enough circles can reproduce nearly any shape.

Steve Jobs demos NeXTSTEP Release 3, showing the object-oriented development environment and UI that later became the basis of Mac OS X. Midway through he builds a database-backed GUI app with Interface Builder and Enterprise Objects Framework with almost no code.

A short demo of Code Bubbles, an IDE interface built around editable code fragments in bubbles instead of files. It was a research prototype for Java development.

Hungarian folk dancers from Sapientia University act out the quicksort algorithm step by step, with music. It is part of the AlgoRythmics series of sorting algorithms performed as dance.

Der8auer tours Hetzner's test lab and shows a custom AM5 server motherboard with the CPU socket rotated 90 degrees, built for rack airflow in their AX52 servers.

LGR reviews the Danmere Backer16, a 1996 backup system that stored a PC's data on ordinary VHS tapes through a VCR. He shows the hardware and software on Windows 3.1 and 95.

A one-minute clip from Cambridge's Prof. Holger Babinsky that debunks the equal transit time explanation of lift. It shows how air actually flows over a wing.

A one-minute clip from SSI showing its Quad shredder destroying computer hard drives and electronic scrap.

Henry Segerman and collaborators demonstrate virtual reality experiences in non-Euclidean spaces, including hyperbolic and mixed hyperbolic-Euclidean geometry. The browser-based demos let viewers move through these spaces and show how strange the geometry feels from inside.

Matthias Wandel uses anemometer measurements to find where to place a fan to move the most air through a house at night. He finds that placing the fan some distance back from the window works better.

Stephen Wolfram gives a 13-minute tour of the Wolfram Language, a symbolic, functional programming language with a built-in knowledgebase. He demos querying large datasets, interactivity and deployment.

A hobbyist compares vertical bifacial solar panels against south-facing angled panels using winter production results. It tests whether the usual mounting approach is actually best.