processing

New Early Release from O’Reilly: Making Things See (Kinect, Processing, and Arduino)

New Early Release from O’Reilly: Making Things See (Kinect, Processing, and Arduino)

I’m proud to announce that my book, Making Things See: 3D Vision with Kinect, Processing, and Arduino, is now available from O’Reilly. You can buy the book through O’Reilly’s Early Release program here. The Early Release program lets us get the book out to you while O’Reilly’s still editing and designing it and I’m still finishing up the last chapters. If you buy it now, you’ll get the preface and the first two chapters immediately and then you’ll be notified as additional chapters are finished and you’ll be able to download them for free until you have the final book. This way you get the immediate access to the book and I get your early feedback to help me find mistakes and improve it before final publication.

200 countries, 200 years, 120,000 data points, 4 minutes…

…and a pretty sweet Minority Report-esque dynamic infographic (“infomotion?”), to boot. The point? The world today has more than its share of problems, but we can all be thankful it isn’t the world of 200 years ago.

The charming Swede is Hans Rosling–physician, statistician, and host of BBC 4’s The Joy of Stats. Pretty much everything about this video makes me happy, not least of all that the Brits have a TV program celebrating statistics itself. [Thanks, Dad!]

P.S. If you’re feeling cynical, check out the equally-cool-but-way-less-uplifting Animated Map of Nuclear Explosions, 1945-1998 by Isao Hashimoto.