The video above depicts an insertion sort implemented through Romanian folk dance.

See also: bubble sort, selection sort, and Shell sort.

So clearly this results in a pretty cool set of images. What I’d really like, though, is a 3-d graph depicting signal strength on a 2-d field.

Imagine if we replaced the rod with a disc composed of a set of concentric circles of lights. Suppose the number of circles that light up correlates with the strength of the signal, so that more signal => more light. Head to the city park, wander around in a grid pattern with this device, point the camera down from a building, and take a long exposure of the results. Signal would be represented as pools of light.

Someone go do this for me. Send me pictures.

In the wake of today’s stock-market-crash-cum-partial-recovery, here’s a diagram¹ documenting the loans that a few of Europe’s weaker economies owe to each other. Figures are in billions of dollars. Click for a larger view.

While there seems to be plenty to criticize about the fiscal policy of the Eurozone, it’s worth noting that America’s national debt is at $12.31 trillion (as of Q4 2009). For the infographically-minded, if we were to extrapolate from the size of the European debt circles then attempting to represent the US debt would exceed the size of the diagram.

¹ Diagram blatantly stolen from the NYT.

I just finished W.G. Sebald’s Austerlitz, which all things considered is a pretty good book, despite my occasional furious claims to the contrary.¹ I started it sometime around October, read most of it, and then put it aside. I just finished the last hundred-odd pages a few minutes ago. This seems to be a pattern — I start a book really enthusiastically, then get a little bored or distracted and put it down for awhile. Eventually I get so tired of seeing it sitting in my queue, shamefully reminding me of my miniscule attention span, that I just plant myself down on the couch and force myself to finish it. The satisfaction of finishing the book outweighs the grueling completion process.

This isn’t usually the case, of course. Only for certain books. I’m pretty sure I’d hate reading if this was the normal situation.

Note that the concept of book-graphing has been explored before, which reminds me: I want the book equivalent of a pedometer, so I can settle this graph thing once and for all. Then I want to correlate information about the structure, genre and subject matter of the book with the pace at which I read it.

If I worked at Amazon, I would be spying on customers’ Kindle usage and mining that data so hard.

¹ No chapters? Really? Why would you do that, Sebald? I demand discrete chunks.

The New York Times has a lovely interactive infographic detailing the proposed 2011 budget.

Nomograms (or sometimes nomographs) are graphical single-purpose analog computing devices. They range from the very simple – like the above BMI calculator – to the (often beautifully) complex. Once upon a time they were commonly used for navigation, astronomy, surveying, and countless other things. Now, what with cheap omnipresent digital computers, they’ve fallen into disuse.

Like beautiful math? Need a calendar for 2010? Download a copy of Ron Doerfler’s Graphical Computing Calendar.

After getting into an argument in the grocery store today over who owns Kashi,* I’m posting – for your consumption edification – a chart of which giant corporations own which organic brands. I think everyone knows some of them (Odwalla ⊂ Coke, etc.), but a few were kinda surprising.

* It’s Kellogg.

The Envisioning Development project has an interactive map detailing the cost of living in various neighborhoods of New York City. It’s nice to know that if I ever get a web design/development gig in NYC I can afford to live in Williamsburg and be the biggest hipster ever.

I wish there were similar maps to detail the CoL for other cities.

via fiveinchpixie

Nice find, [bb-blog]!