Comments

  1. says

    It’s not just you, that definitely reminded me of the time lapse photography so beloved by my former cell biology colleagues. Fantastic stuff. Anyone know how to make the clip into a screensaver?

  2. demallien says

    In a previous existance I was the engineer in charge of a Royal Australian Air Force radar installation, just at the moment when we were changing over from those round sweep screens that you see in the old war movies, to digital displays.

    The funny thing was that those old screens used a phosphore that remained active for a very long time, so long that the “hits” were visible for around about 5 sweeps of the radar, though they obviously faded with time. This left a fading “track” on the screen which air defence controllers find very useful. The net result is that as these systems were replaced around the world, we were obliged to emulate this fading track in software, so that the controllors were kept happy. Aaron’s first screens show this effect very nicely.

  3. demallien says

    I should point out that this replacement happened only about 8 years ago for the RAAF. Ahead of the times they were not!

  4. HPLC_Sean says

    Awesome indeed. Roads, rails, air travel; all examples of our extended phenotypes. All expressions of our genes gone wild. It’s no surprise it looks alive. It is.

  5. James says

    That was just mind blowing. When you consider the scale of human achievement that represents it is just stunning. As Christopher Hitchens has taken to saying: More impressive than any burning bush.

  6. gerald spezio says

    All due respect to Bernoulli, the Wrights, and human achievement.

    All those seemingly alive tracks represent tons and tons of CO2 – calculated at one pound of CO2 per passenger mile on domestic filghts. Two pounds per/pm on international flights.

    Some folks fly. Other folks die.

  7. John Morales says

    jirpajihad, because the entirety of the article is a link to another site, claiming that the contents thereof are awesome.

    Look again.