Our eyes and minds are not really designed to assimilate the scale of things that scientific observation reveals. Perhaps understandably, many still resist. Even the scientist deals with such things by abstracting the terms to a modicum of familiarity.
The following video wonderfully dispenses with the equations and numbers to give us a feel of the scale of the objects populating our night sky.
Aug 10, 2011
Feb 25, 2011
So when do India/China catch up?
I've had the opportunity to see Hans Rosling before in conferences, and one can't help but be infected by his sense of enthusiasm at the stories which his powerful interpretation of statistics reveal.
I guess his broadmindedness is partly explained by this stint in India as a student. I didn't know that before.
There is a new field or term emerging called data visualisation. The experts describe 'a sea of data' which is now available globally and accessible anywhere online. The problem is how to interpret it to reveal its hidden narrative. To find the simple story within the data/information overload. Rosling has been doing that since a long time before.
Thanks to the following presentation, 37 years from is now a milestone all of Asia would have its eye on. Striding along the stage with an "environmentally-friendly" presentation pointer, Rosling looks a bit like a modern day Gandhi, just carrying a bigger stick. He understands and sympathises with the emotional touch points of Indian audience and navigates them well. The prediction graphs and statistics are not going to progress on their own, we will have to live each day to that future date and contribute to the trajectory.
I guess his broadmindedness is partly explained by this stint in India as a student. I didn't know that before.
There is a new field or term emerging called data visualisation. The experts describe 'a sea of data' which is now available globally and accessible anywhere online. The problem is how to interpret it to reveal its hidden narrative. To find the simple story within the data/information overload. Rosling has been doing that since a long time before.
Thanks to the following presentation, 37 years from is now a milestone all of Asia would have its eye on. Striding along the stage with an "environmentally-friendly" presentation pointer, Rosling looks a bit like a modern day Gandhi, just carrying a bigger stick. He understands and sympathises with the emotional touch points of Indian audience and navigates them well. The prediction graphs and statistics are not going to progress on their own, we will have to live each day to that future date and contribute to the trajectory.
Jan 2, 2011
Happy New Year 2011!
The first decade of the millenium - the 00's have passed. We are all a bit more 'digital', a bit more 'cyborg'. My new mobile phones now carry the internet along with me, there is now no escape from the information overload.
My little boy, now three, now recognizes and classifies his environment quite accurately. Soaking the world around him like an eager sponge. His toys are a bit different than mine were, he can control the TV and media remote without yet having learnt to read the words on the instructions.
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