IOGraph is an application that runs in the background while you work on your computer for a period of time. It tracks mouse movements and durations and creates a visual representation of your working.
I’d like to experiment with this to come up with some ideas for my poster.
Above are some images generated from my browsing and general computer use. Some of it is the result of my research for this paper. Each dot and circle represent mouse pauses, clicks and durations.
I find it interesting to see a simple visual extrapolation of my hand movements and pauses, translated from an evening of using my computer. Each web source I read information from (consumed) required generally the same types of hand movements, where the ones that I spent longer reading or viewing resulted in a larger, more opaque circle. Where I quickly read over details or was ‘linked through’ onto another source of valuable information there are thin connecting lines dotted with small circles.
This is simple and not as complex or even visually as stimulating as some of the Open-Frameworks and processing examples, but I think it still illustrates an interaction or relationship between information nodes.
Watched a doco on the universe, which looked at its scale in particular. The model of dark matter connections was of particular interest to me so I decided to post up some screen caps. This post might be a work in progress with updates to come.
3rd May update:
I read an interesting article where bloggers asked a physicist ‘why believe in Dark matter?’
What I like about Dark matter in the context of my assignment topic area is that it hasn’t been ‘seen’ at this stage, yet it has been theorised to exist when the laws of physics are brought into the equation of explaining the physics of the universe. It ties everything together, preventing it from flying apart some believe.
1.) Gravitational Lensing
Light gets deflected as it travels past massive objects. We can use the distorted images of background galaxies to make mass maps. For those interested in Dave Goldberg background info, this is the area that I work in. Lensing reconstruction has been done (and found lots of extra mass) for tons of galaxy clusters, but one system has gotten a lot of attention in the press.
Lensing does double duty in the Dark Matter game. We can use a different effect, called “microlensing” to look for dark stars (or black holes, perhaps) in our own Galaxy. Whenever one of those passes in front of a more distant star, the star gets magnified. Cool idea, but we can now definitively say that our Galaxy (and presumably the others) isn’t filled with enough black holes to solve the Dark Matter problem.
This is the only ‘suggested image’ taken of what scientists believe Dark matter to be (in action).
In the image of the “Bullet Cluster” up top, two clusters of galaxies have recently collided with one another, stripping out the gas (shown in red). The blue indicates where gravitational lensing shows the mass to be. Whatever is making up the mass is neither gas nor stars. This image is the closest to “seeing” Dark Matter so far.
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