This actually isn't made with D3. If you look at http://hereistoday.com/today.js, it is all done in Canvas. Their code is fairly well commented, so start by reading through that. At the same time, Google around how to use Canvas for animation.
How it works: they bind the getPosition function the mousedown event, which in turn starts the appropriate draw function. They have 19 frames, each of which has its own draw function that draws rectangles. Every 1000/FPS seconds, the the update and beginDraw functions are called, which are responsible for tween effect.
Isn't that (loosing yourself in the grand scheme of things) the whole point of the animation ? A bit like Power of Ten [1] and Scale of the Universe [2] but with time instead of space.
I don't know what tzaman was saying exactly, but what I noticed was that "today" got down to one or two pixels pretty fast, while the larger and larger time periods were restricted to only another ~1000 pixels or so, so at some point you have to shift back to imagining the relative lengths of time in your head again, instead of seeing e.g. "today" as 1/30 of the month.
I'm not sure if it was intentional or not, but for me the most striking point was when it circled back to today. It was a reminder that in that grand scheme of things, there's some stuff you do control. Now, time to get that stuff I was planning to do done.
The problem with this one is that you actually don't lose yourself. Today remains highlighted and continues to occupy a pixel or two. Even the millennium vanishes next to epochs to preserve our bookmark on today. It's jarring, and completely ruined the effect for me.
"Many moons have risen and fallen long,
long before you came.
So which way is the wind blowin',
and what does your heart say?
So follow, follow the sun,
and which way the wind blows
when this day is done."
Thanks! I like these scales, how small the Earth is, how young humanity is.
But once someone starts preaching about how this means we are insignificant I lose interest quickly.
If we are the only sentient life in the universe, then we are extremely significant in the grand scheme of things. If there was/is a god or another alien civilization from another universe, they would certainly conclude that the evolution of sentient life is one of the top ten wonders of this universe.
I get tired of all this "insignificant" talk, its simply not true. Our minds are perhaps behind the wonder of life in the first place, but not that far behind, and life is one of the greatest things about our universe. How inanimate material started to think and move and do things. I think that is in no way insignificant, even if life only exists for a fraction of the time the universe will exist.
I guess what I wrote is entirely subjective, I wonder how many people would agree or disagree with my statement, or at least my feeling towards how others would view our sentience and life in general?
I really don't think humanity and life is insignificant even when we are small in comparison to giant stars and distances and short-lived in comparison to the age of the universe.
I think the main assumption you're making is that we represent the pinnacle of anything. Whether or not it's true, I think the exercise of seeing how small today is vis-a-vis how large it feels contains an analogous insight: the vastness of what was and what will be is so incomprehensible that it would be shortsighted to ascribe any kind of superlative significance to what's here now.
People who say humanity is the summit of some mountain might as well be saying "we are living in the newest day to ever have happened." Technically true, but far from certain that it means anything. Personally, I think it behooves the character of humanity to sit quietly in humility.
An eon from now, when the technological lifeforms which have succeeded recall instantly this thread from their archive, and witness how you once crowed about the grandness of humanity, they may experience an emotion which you might call humor -- only with a dimension and richness that your mind cannot possibly fathom. Or they may experience disdain, contempt, and ridicule at the thought that you had anything to do with them or their existence. Do you credit the millionth timid mammal, your potential forebear, for surviving the Cretaceous-Paleogene extinction? Of course not -- not unduly at least -- it was only doing what was assigned to it, a biological directive.
And you consider the mind so great, which we scarcely understand -- to direct your own mind toward the contemplation of its grandness seems, at least, arrogant. If you should live so long, in your own lifetime it will not only decay, but before that it will trick you, deceive you and trap you. And soon, it will also be made obsolete. What did it do in between that was so great? Gamify some social metrics to increase ROI and user engagement? Contemplate and slightly reduce the runtime complexity of an algorithm whose need will be eliminated within a decade? Eat, sleep, shit and fuck?
So I'm not sure what exactly you mean by calling us significant, you don't know that at all. The statement means less than calling today the youngest day to ever have happened, because at least that is true.
In sum: all that you consider to be esteemable and worthy of elevation will be reduced with time. Whatever significance you imagine it holds is a function of another observer who -- if it exists -- is driven by motives and a character you don't understand.
Or in other words, just live today; it won't matter in the grand scheme of things. And likely, neither will humanity.
Carbon dating is actually only effective up to about 50,000 years, so its really only ideal for tracking human history after we started migrating out of Africa. This is because the unstable carbon-14 isotope only has a half-life of about 5700 years.
There are many other forms of radiometric dating, though. Uranium-lead dating has proven relatively accurate for periods of time between 1 million to 4.5 billion years ago.
Note: I'm not a geologist. I remembered that carbon was only effective for a few thousand years from a geology course I had in college, but all of this information is actually taken from articles on wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radiometric_dating
Due to the way radiometric dating works, you don't need to actually verify in the way that you are using the word. However, there are at least two ways to verify the date:
1) Verify the half-life value. Radiometric dating works on the same principle: look at the ratio of pre-substance to fissioned substance. If you have a good half-life value, you can determine the age of the specimen using those values.
2) Use two different methods for getting the same age. If you use multiple, independent methods of determining the age of something, and they all come out the same, you have greatly lessened the probability that you're wrong or missed something.
Of course there are ways that these can be strengthened even more using practices like double blinding the measurements.
It's more like a , you might get killed by a car if you step into the street kind of theoretical. Or the drip of a water clock will fill the container in 8 hours kind of theoretical. Or a don't plant too early or your people will starve kind of theoretical.
A theory in science is a model backed by the huge majority of observational evidence and the collective experience of the model's community. There are no other equivalent human institutions for reliability. None.
So saying "it's just a theory" in the case of uranium-dating is a fairly unreasoned attitude.
The best way I know to "check" radiometric ages is to date a rock using more than one isotopic system (e.g. K-Ar and U-Pb) and compare the ages that you get. If you get the same age from isotope systems with different decay rates and systematics, that is strong evidence that your technique is working.
People have done this many times, and most of the error comes from different levels of uncertainty in the decay constants from one system to another. Many of the decay constants have not been updated for decades (e.g. Steiger and Jager 1977) and are suspected to be a few percent off, but the people who are qualified to make such measurements (physicists + chemists) aren't the people who want to use them in applications (geochronologists and geochemists). So the incentives aren't aligned and I doubt anyone will ever fix them.
Note: Was a geology/geophysics PhD student until recently.
Single crystal uranium-lead dating is one of the best all-around methods and gets used a lot for vanilla geological applications of Earth rocks; any rock that contains trace amounts of the mineral "zircon" can be dated with this technique. Zircon is special because it tends to incorporate a lot of uranium when it crystallizes while excluding lead. As time passes after the zircon crystal cools, uranium decays into radiogenic lead, and by measuring the relative abundance of these two things in the crystal we can estimate the time since that zircon crystallized (with no lead inside) and get an "age" that tells us how long it has been since that zircon crystal was formed. Zircon is common in many types of igneous rocks, which are rocks that began in a molten state. The zircon crystals in an igneous rock are resistant to weathering (compared to feldspars, another common igneous constituent), so sometimes they end up as grains in sedimentary rocks and we can use a variation on the technique called "detrital zircon geochronology" to estimate the age of sedimentary deposits.
Other systems (like samarium-neodymium) are most often used when trying to date things older than the Earth, e.g. meteorites.
I've always wanted to do something like that! It's brilliant. You should add "here is your grand-grand mother, what's her name?" and "here will be your potential grand grand son, do you think they'll remember your name?"
Same here. These sort of time scales should really make us humble and question the meaning of "making a dent in the universe" or taking our legacies too seriously.
Out of interest, what country are you from? I'm curious at the fact you called it 'grand-grand'. Here in Australia we use 'great grand(mother etc.)'. Must be a cultural thing.
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Like others, I liked the loop-back to today. I think it would be nice to include decade before century. Also, more or less at/after "period" I started to get a little bored (see the discussion in these comments about losing perspective) UNTIL you added the second dimension about life itself and then it got interesting again because we think of dinosaurs and such to be so, so, so long ago and yet this animation shows that in the grand scheme of things, it's as if it had been last week.
Including those additional segments helped maintain perspective for me -- seeing each one shrink incrementally gave a better sense than one animation from Holocene to all of Earth's history.
This is great. My only suggestion is to increase the font size on the timeline labels. They were too small for me to read, even with my eyes right up to the monitor.
This reminded me of something I saw at the Science Museum in London a few years ago.
A round clock face is used to represent the history of the earth and a narrator tells us the geological events that happen as the clock hands travels around the clock face. At a few seconds to midnight, we're told this is when humans appear.
I thought it was a clever way of illustrating how human history occupies such a tiny segment in the overall scale of the earth's history. (I don't know if the exhibit is still there)
One of the first couple of episodes of Cosmos (maybe the first?) has a similar thing to convey the scale of time in our existence in the universe. Pretty cool.
Rather than place the present day at midnight on the clock, how about placing the present day on the current value given by the Doomsday Clock [1]. Then, with a little arithmetic, you can label midnight with the projected date of Doomsday :)
There's a growing academic discipline called "Big History"[1] that attempts to examine all of history from the big bang to the present. Bill Gates sponsors a project to teach a free public course to high school students[2].
very nice, however "today" always remains one pixel in width, which kinda breaks the comparison on larger time frames. I would also maybe add another step, like this decade. still really nice!
The appropriate trick here would be to change the point of reference each time you zoom out. At the millennium scale, the point of reference might become this year. At the epoch scale, the point of reference might become the millennium.
115 comments
[ 6.3 ms ] story [ 205 ms ] threadNo. Picked it up from r/dataisbeautiful[1].
[1] http://www.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/comments/1d9c1y/here...
That's the short answer.
How it works: they bind the getPosition function the mousedown event, which in turn starts the appropriate draw function. They have 19 frames, each of which has its own draw function that draws rectangles. Every 1000/FPS seconds, the the update and beginDraw functions are called, which are responsible for tween effect.
We have a vision of the past, of the future, of a huge portion of the universe. And that's not nothing.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0fKBhvDjuy0 [2] http://www.htwins.net/scale2/
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0aOVItJHZEM
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0E1bNmyPWww
"Many moons have risen and fallen long, long before you came. So which way is the wind blowin', and what does your heart say? So follow, follow the sun, and which way the wind blows when this day is done."
But once someone starts preaching about how this means we are insignificant I lose interest quickly.
If we are the only sentient life in the universe, then we are extremely significant in the grand scheme of things. If there was/is a god or another alien civilization from another universe, they would certainly conclude that the evolution of sentient life is one of the top ten wonders of this universe.
I get tired of all this "insignificant" talk, its simply not true. Our minds are perhaps behind the wonder of life in the first place, but not that far behind, and life is one of the greatest things about our universe. How inanimate material started to think and move and do things. I think that is in no way insignificant, even if life only exists for a fraction of the time the universe will exist.
I guess what I wrote is entirely subjective, I wonder how many people would agree or disagree with my statement, or at least my feeling towards how others would view our sentience and life in general?
I really don't think humanity and life is insignificant even when we are small in comparison to giant stars and distances and short-lived in comparison to the age of the universe.
People who say humanity is the summit of some mountain might as well be saying "we are living in the newest day to ever have happened." Technically true, but far from certain that it means anything. Personally, I think it behooves the character of humanity to sit quietly in humility.
An eon from now, when the technological lifeforms which have succeeded recall instantly this thread from their archive, and witness how you once crowed about the grandness of humanity, they may experience an emotion which you might call humor -- only with a dimension and richness that your mind cannot possibly fathom. Or they may experience disdain, contempt, and ridicule at the thought that you had anything to do with them or their existence. Do you credit the millionth timid mammal, your potential forebear, for surviving the Cretaceous-Paleogene extinction? Of course not -- not unduly at least -- it was only doing what was assigned to it, a biological directive.
And you consider the mind so great, which we scarcely understand -- to direct your own mind toward the contemplation of its grandness seems, at least, arrogant. If you should live so long, in your own lifetime it will not only decay, but before that it will trick you, deceive you and trap you. And soon, it will also be made obsolete. What did it do in between that was so great? Gamify some social metrics to increase ROI and user engagement? Contemplate and slightly reduce the runtime complexity of an algorithm whose need will be eliminated within a decade? Eat, sleep, shit and fuck?
So I'm not sure what exactly you mean by calling us significant, you don't know that at all. The statement means less than calling today the youngest day to ever have happened, because at least that is true.
In sum: all that you consider to be esteemable and worthy of elevation will be reduced with time. Whatever significance you imagine it holds is a function of another observer who -- if it exists -- is driven by motives and a character you don't understand.
Or in other words, just live today; it won't matter in the grand scheme of things. And likely, neither will humanity.
Two reactions to that, either: ahhhhh sweeeeeeet, or I feel sick, pass me a bucket. So, up vote for sweet, or down vote for bucket. :)
(Normally I like a Sunday rant. I feel different today)
There are many other forms of radiometric dating, though. Uranium-lead dating has proven relatively accurate for periods of time between 1 million to 4.5 billion years ago.
Note: I'm not a geologist. I remembered that carbon was only effective for a few thousand years from a geology course I had in college, but all of this information is actually taken from articles on wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radiometric_dating
1) Verify the half-life value. Radiometric dating works on the same principle: look at the ratio of pre-substance to fissioned substance. If you have a good half-life value, you can determine the age of the specimen using those values.
2) Use two different methods for getting the same age. If you use multiple, independent methods of determining the age of something, and they all come out the same, you have greatly lessened the probability that you're wrong or missed something.
Of course there are ways that these can be strengthened even more using practices like double blinding the measurements.
A theory in science is a model backed by the huge majority of observational evidence and the collective experience of the model's community. There are no other equivalent human institutions for reliability. None.
So saying "it's just a theory" in the case of uranium-dating is a fairly unreasoned attitude.
People have done this many times, and most of the error comes from different levels of uncertainty in the decay constants from one system to another. Many of the decay constants have not been updated for decades (e.g. Steiger and Jager 1977) and are suspected to be a few percent off, but the people who are qualified to make such measurements (physicists + chemists) aren't the people who want to use them in applications (geochronologists and geochemists). So the incentives aren't aligned and I doubt anyone will ever fix them.
Note: Was a geology/geophysics PhD student until recently.
Other systems (like samarium-neodymium) are most often used when trying to date things older than the Earth, e.g. meteorites.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radiometric_dating
Pick... some?
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I hope you resolve this downtime as comments are favorable, and it appears interesting.
http://www.astro.princeton.edu/universe/
TL;DR:
http://www.astro.princeton.edu/universe/all100.gif
http://xkcd.com/482/
A round clock face is used to represent the history of the earth and a narrator tells us the geological events that happen as the clock hands travels around the clock face. At a few seconds to midnight, we're told this is when humans appear.
I thought it was a clever way of illustrating how human history occupies such a tiny segment in the overall scale of the earth's history. (I don't know if the exhibit is still there)
http://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLBA8DC67D52968201
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doomsday_Clock
There's a growing academic discipline called "Big History"[1] that attempts to examine all of history from the big bang to the present. Bill Gates sponsors a project to teach a free public course to high school students[2].
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_History
[2] http://www.bighistoryproject.com/Home