jstn:
This is something I’ve been working on for a long time, and now that we’ve reached the height of hurricane season I’m excited to reveal it.
Radarmatic is a weather radar visualizer. It uses HTML5 and its own API to draw radar images with live data from the National Weather Service.
The white dots on the map represent 155 radar sites across the US. As you drag it around, the radar closest to the center of the map will light up with its most recent data. The colored areas show where precipitation is occurring at varying levels of intensity. Pushing play will animate the last few hours.
The imagery is not pre-generated, but rather drawn in-browser with Javascript. For this reason it can be processor intensive, especially while animating. Safari and Chrome are recommended over Firefox.
I’ve always wanted to do something with radar data. The NWS creates an incredible wealth of information available every day about the physical world around us, but it’s locked away in an obscure binary file format developed long before the web. In order to visualize the data the way I wanted to, much bigger and in crazier colors than I’d ever seen used for weather radar before, I needed to translate it to a format I already understood.
After many hours of research and fumbling around with a hex editor, I wrote a program in C called radar2json to convert the binary product files from the NWS into JSON (and which I’ve open sourced under the MIT license). I built a web service around it that anyone can use.
From a user interface standpoint, I set out to make something that puts as much focus as possible on the imagery itself and drastically reduces the friction of moving through it. Every other interface to radar data I’ve seen so far is scientifically oriented and does a poor job of being tactile and interactive, which I think is important for making a rich impression of what’s happening in our physical environment.
Give it a try and let me know what you think. And keep your eye on the Carolinas in the next 24 hours!
sam champion eat your heart out.
“I only bring this up because I’m fascinated by the degree to which brains have evolved to become more powerful than guns. Society’s founding geniuses engineered a social system that encourages the young people who have guns to shoot at each other instead of robbing old people. Forgive me for calling that awesome. Arguably, the most important function of human language is to protect the smart from the strong. Humans use words to create sentences, and sentences to create concepts, such as our notions of duty and honor. Powerful concepts control behavior. Without our language and concepts, the strong would kill the smart, and humans wouldn’t evolve to be any smarter. I think you could say that human evolution is being guided at least partly by the power of ideas.” — Scott Adams Blog: Future Generations Steal from Themselves 09/01/2010 (via peterwknox)
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35 Life Hacks You Should Know -
(via azspot)
all very good. some i’ve heard of before, most i haven’t.
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UBS analyst Neil Currie had been looking at satellite data on Wal-Mart during each month of 2010, and he’d concluded that there was enough correlation between what he was seeing in the satellite pictures of Wal-Mart’s parking lots to the big-box chain’s quarterly earnings, that he was ready to incorporate that data into UBS’ report on Wal-Mart (via New Big Brother: Market-Moving Satellite Images - CNBC)
damn, that is serious business.
so there is a fun, navel-gazing post about how today is my 28th birthday and whoa is me/white man troubles but hey, let’s keep it light for now. as much as i’d love one of these in my office, i think i might try and set one up for my life. uptime of my site, e-mails i have to respond to, calls i have to get back to, the “honey do” list into basecamp.
it can happen. and then i’ll try for a walk-on roll for big bang theory and the face time percentage with my girlfriend will probably go up. ;)
NiceKicks: NIKE FILES PATENT FOR AUTO LACING SYSTEM PATENT A LA MARTY MCFLY
OH SHITTTTTTTTT
More pictures of the patent filed if you click the image -
f’ jet-packs. this is where it’s at. now we’re really living in the future.
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