GRAIL’s gravity map of the moon, March - May 2012
via NASA
5 months ago
December 11, 2012
new GOCE geoid model (“the surface of an ideal global ocean in the absence of tides and currents, shaped only by gravity”)
via ESA Portal
2 years ago
March 31, 2011
The Gravity of Numbers
Gravity isn’t just for the physicists. The force, or at least the notion of it, actually influences how we interpret scientific data, so much so that when shown a donut chart, some people thought it might actually roll away, says Robert Kosara, a researcher at UNC Charlotte. Kosara and his graduate student found that people interpret charts that had an unequal distribution of “weight,” or darker and lighter colors, as unstable. The donut can roll away because gravity can turn the color imbalance into movement. The question why or how we do this has no scientific answers, yet. Researchers in information visualization, InfoVis, should focus on building the theory of visualization as much as they focus on creating new systems and developing new techniques to represent data, Kosara argued while presenting the Nov. 12Visualization Friday Forum lecture. […] Because scientists do not yet know how and why some visualizations work and some don’t, it’s hard to know which visualizations to use. Kosara illustrated this point with a bar graph and a line graph charting sex versus height. When shown the bar graph, subjects interpret that, on average, males are taller than females. When shown a line graph representing the same data, subjects argue that as one becomes more male, he or she, becomes taller. “That’s bad,” Kosara says. The subjects are attaching meaning to the representation rather than the actual data. The example is an exaggeration, but sheds light on the challenge of deciding what graph or picture best represents more complex data sets. If he can determine scientifically why men do better looking at tree graphs compared to females or how people rationalize gravity in an abstract donut chart, Kosara says, it might better transform scientific numbers into real-world stories.
2 years ago
November 15, 2010
Gravity of Water -
These maps show changes in water storage in the Western Hemisphere from July 2009 through June 2010; that is, they show how much more or less water is tied up in lakes and rivers, groundwater aquifers, soil moisture, snow, and glaciers. The measurements were made by the Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment (GRACE), twin satellites that measure subtle changes in Earth’s gravity over time. In this case, the satellites measured how Earth’s gravity field changed as water piled up or was depleted from different regions at different times of year. Though it is distributed over the landscape, water has mass; the greater the mass, the greater the gravitational attraction. Blues indicate increases above the normal water storage (mass) for an area, while browns indicate decreases. Water storage changes are measured in centimeters because they are, according to NASA hydrologist Matt Rodell, “expressed as an equivalent water level change, as if all the land’s water were ponded on the surface.”
2 years ago
October 31, 2010
2 years ago
June 28, 2010
The real reason for the cancellation of this year’s cheese-rolling extravaganza in Gloucestershire:
We did some sums on the back of an envelope and it looks like all those cheeses rolling down the hill are creating a local gravitational anomaly. It’s sucking in people from the other side of the world.
via The Chatter Box
3 years ago
March 13, 2010
3 years ago
December 27, 2009
reblogged via 
Surviving the World - Rational Explanations of Irrational Phobias, Part VI
fear of stairs = climacophobia
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