Shannon Larratt is Zentastic

The first thing I need to mention is this video I made based on the Afghanistan IED data that got published via Wikileaks. Others have already been doing their own visualizations (which is how I got started), but I decided to brush off my memories of the tool I wrote ages ago (that link just gives you the idea, I didn’t bother tracking down anything better) that built animated geolocated-data map videos that showed web usage around the world and so on (it was sort of neat watching the users swing around the globe, sync’d with the sun) and apply it to bombs in Afghanistan.

You can watch the video here, but do yourself a favor and view full-screen it at 720p over on YouTube — I rendered it at 2560×1440 so the bigger you can view it, the better it will look, and it will be so much easier to see map details like roads. If you don’t have time to watch it all, then you should watch the last bit, because in 2008 and 2009, the bombing gets much more intense…

The map itself is a modified version of one that I grabbed from the NATO website that was easy to work with because it has clearly labeled lat/lon markings, and more importantly, the projection is flat and aligned with a grid, so setting up a scaling system to translate the points is easy. When the bombs go off, they can be green (no casualties of any sort), yellow (injuries only), or red (people were killed), with the casualties being recorded both in terms of “enemy” kills, and everyone else (both allies and civilians — in hindsight I should have had three columns).

Anyway, hope it’s interesting to someone. Feel free to repost it, feel free to modify it, feel free to ask me for data sets and source code… whatever… As always, enjoy. Hopefully it is not too buggy, and double-hopefully if it is, the bugs are not of the visible sort!

Edit: I just saw (thanks Lou) that the Guardian has posted a similar and in some ways much better visualization of this same dataset, which you can view here. That said, I’ve downloaded the full dataset (the entire war, not just IEDs), so I’m analyzing that as I find time and energy, so I’ll post something much more interesting when I can.

* * *

I’ve been doing loads of programming. My carving/bump-map editor is coming along very nicely, with a great number of the routines written. At this point I just have a couple to do and I’ll have something quite useful that I can begin physically testing. I must concede that the work goes more slowly than I’d like, and some days I get almost… no… literally nothing done because I just can’t think straight. The positive synchronicity there is that Nefarious has been visiting her grandmother for the last week, having a great time with her, her cousins, and her great-grandmother as well. Before we dropped her off, we spent the day hitting the beach and then the hotel pool and waterslide when we retired for the day.

I’m quite curious as to what I was looking at in the final photo.

When Nefarious got back from the County today, one of the the things we did was to go and visit Shane so he could take some final measurements of my left leg since we’re starting the tattoo this weekend. I’ve mentioned before that’s it’s a sort of Iron Sky (Nazis UFOs) meets Hell Boy (Nazi Occultism) meets Blood and Snow (Nazi Zombies). It’s a big project, and it’s been some time getting started, so fingers crossed that Shane, who has a new child occupying his attention much more than my leg, will be able to find time to get it done this fall. Here’s a couple teasers of the sketches that don’t at all do it justice, but continue to give you an idea of where we’re going.

Of course effort is being taken to be clear that this is a sci-fi tattoo, not a neo-nazi tattoo!

When we were at his studio (after a long walk through Kensington market and China Town because my mental map had him at the opposite end of the Dundas-College/Bathurst-Spadina rectangle than in reality), Nefarious was quite interested in the skulls and which ones were real and which were not… Shane inherited some of my skulls when I stopped selling them (I think with BME’s redesign, my old “Skulls For Sale” webpage is finally dead — which reminds me of what an incredible resource archive.org is), and it’s quite amazing how these skulls went from enduring a dubious start, being most likely grave-robbed, passed around academia for a while, and then ending up on my particularly trashy, tacky webstore… and then finding their way into Shane’s hands, who has worked to “purify” for lack of a better world, and by inserting these exact skulls, with care and respect, into places of honor in dozens if not hundreds of custom tattoos, he’s added a fascinating end stone to these mystery men’s biographies.

I don’t mind paying taxes to make sure there’s a welfare system, and I don’t mind accepting a small possibility of burglary in order to allow martyrs like Colton to keep our fantasies free. I guess it was always a story with an end, but I would have liked to see him find his place in the islands rather than a prison cell. While Caitlin and Nefarious were playing with a family of swans at the beach today I made this little tree spirit and left it there. I hope it’s discovered by a child with a plenty of imagination.

It bothers me a lot that the police can break the law indiscriminately, and even brag about their ability to do so, without any apparent consequences. At G20, we had police beating up the handicapped, raping and torturing women, and general disregard of the law, and I can pretty much guarantee you that there will be zero consequences, let alone the criminal charges that would ensue if anyone other than the pigs were the ones doing it. Of course, the law enforcers and law makers have always been above the law, so why am I surprised? Because I kidded myself into thinking that Canada isn’t as corrupt as every other top-of-the-class-system nation out there?

No surprise admission: I like driving fast. However, driving fast is largely illegal. So the police camp out at spots where the letter-of-the-law and the public’s driving habits are out of sync when they feel like making some money, and I’ve been caught more than a few times. But what I don’t get is why speeding is aggressively policed, but no one seems to care about smoking? Smoking kills a lot more people than cars, and if we’re going to have laws to protect the public from second hand smoke, it seems reasonable to say that they ought to be enforced. But any day I go to the park or any other no-smoking space, there are always people puffing away, stinking up the area… And the police just drive right on past, ignoring it, and I’m a little confused as to why one law is enforced but the other isn’t.

Today I went to Canada’s Wonderland with Nefarious. This is the first year that she’s 48″ tall, meaning that she can finally go on all the big roller coasters, so we had plenty of fun doing just that, as you can see below. The picture above was also taken at Wonderland, and as you can see, these lovely classy ladies not only are chain-smoking as they’re pushing little kids around in strollers, but the one is and carrying another baby around in their belly. Ah, pregnant smokers. Really nice… And again, even though it’s a no-smoking facility, no one bothers doing anything to stop this child abuse.

The good news about Wonderland today was that the lines were really short, so for many of the rides we only had to wait two or three minutes to get on… I’m not sure that I would have had the endurance to stand in the sun for an hour to get a thirty second high-G beating. We have seasons passes though, which means there’s no need to make the most of a single visit — the nice thing about the passes is that we can go for a couple hours, have fun but not get tired out, and then go again a few days later.

Oh, and while I’m thinking of health issues, holy WOW are there a lot of fat kids these days. When I go to Ontario Place or Wonderland, I’m completely floored by the number of grotesquely overweight children there are, both male and female. When I was a kid, being fat had a stigma to it, and was rare (so on average a given class of thirty kids would have at most one “fat kid” and they’d be “THE fat kid” as a result), but these days it seems like it’s the norm. On one hand it’s great that no one is suffering and living in shame, but on the other hand, how sad that being morbidly obese is so normal that no one notices. But I was just blown away by the number of little boys with huge breasts moving in on two hundred pounds, and ten year old girls with bellys overflowing into a term that should never be applied to children — BBW… It’s really sad, and I don’t understand why the parents haven’t stepped up to help their kids, because the consequences that being fat as a child has on adulthood is profound.

The foundation is the most important part of a building, and the foundation that one builds for one’s life as a child is the most important factor in determining how your adult life will unfold, and in determining the limits of its potential. As has been remarked on many times before, how have we evolved to the point where the generation currently growing up is expected to have a shorter lifespan than its parents? I mean, it’s nothing but slow suicide.