Jer Thorp from blprnt.com (and author of the incredibly useful getting started in visualising data post) managed to get his hands on a data set of mobile phone records of 10 million people from an undisclosed European country, crunched them in Processing to produce this rathre beautiful 3D rendering of call length data.
Especially liked this goal to creating a data visualisation:
I want people to say ‘Oooh…!’ when they turn the page to it. Once they’re hooked, though, I want them to learn something – the ‘Aaah!’ moment.
Robert Sapolsky explains the lifecycle and behaviour controlling feature of Toxoplasma — a protozoan which can only reproduce sexually in the gut of a cat. It comes out in the cat faeces, the faeces get eaten by rodents, then to get back in the cat, it enters the brain and creates dopamine — the neurotransmitter in the brain that’s all about reward and anticipation of reward — to attract the rat to the cat.
The rat could, presumably, be human and have a controlling influence on the brain …
On a certain level, this is a protozoan parasite that knows more about the neurobiology of anxiety and fear than 25,000 neuroscientists standing on each other’s shoulders, and this is not a rare pattern.
