21 ms·
Here is today
- johny154 14y agovery nice work bro... thumbs up
- wes-k 14y agoLove the loop back to here is today. Powerful.
- bennyg 14y agoBeautiful and simple visualization. The meteors/comets shooting by were a great touch. Did you make this spindritf?
- jere 14y agohttp://whitevinyldesign.com/about/ http://whitevinyldesign.com/about/
- spindritf 14y ago> Did you make this spindritf? No. Picked it up from r/dataisbeautiful[1]. [1] http://www.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/comments/1d9c1y/here_is_today_an_interactive_look_at_time_xpost/ http://www.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/comments/1d9c1y/here...
- Kiro 14y agoHow do you learn to make these things?
- Swizec 14y agoYou go here: http://d3js.org/ http://d3js.org/, you begin. That's the short answer.
- sidcool 14y agoThat was exactly my first reaction. How in the world are so many people doing so many awesome things! Where do I start?
- killahpriest 14y agoThis actually isn't made with D3. If you look at http://hereistoday.com/today.js http://hereistoday.com/today.js, it is all done in Canvas. Their code is fairly well commented, so start by reading through that. At the same time, Google around how to use Canvas for animation. How it works: they bind the getPosition function the mousedown event, which in turn starts the appropriate draw function. They have 19 frames, each of which has its own draw function that draws rectangles. Every 1000/FPS seconds, the the update and beginDraw functions are called, which are responsible for tween effect.
- zozu 14y agoI love these reminders that we are so very small and fairly new to this place!
- CervezaPorFavor 14y agoAnd yet we seem to have accomplished so much, both in advancing humanity as well as in doing damage to nature.
- baby 14y agoWe're just damaging the earth. Which is nothing. We have a vision of the past, of the future, of a huge portion of the universe. And that's not nothing.
- tzaman 14y agoNice, although not very informative, since you somewhat loose perspective with each step.
- PetitPrince 14y agoIsn't that (loosing yourself in the grand scheme of things) the whole point of the animation ? A bit like Power of Ten [1] and Scale of the Universe [2] but with time instead of space. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0fKBhvDjuy0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0fKBhvDjuy0 [2] http://www.htwins.net/scale2/ http://www.htwins.net/scale2/
- jlcx 14y agoI don't know what tzaman was saying exactly, but what I noticed was that "today" got down to one or two pixels pretty fast, while the larger and larger time periods were restricted to only another ~1000 pixels or so, so at some point you have to shift back to imagining the relative lengths of time in your head again, instead of seeing e.g. "today" as 1/30 of the month.
- Scriptor 14y agoI'm not sure if it was intentional or not, but for me the most striking point was when it circled back to today. It was a reminder that in that grand scheme of things, there's some stuff you do control. Now, time to get that stuff I was planning to do done.
- dvanduzer 14y agoThe problem with this one is that you actually don't lose yourself. Today remains highlighted and continues to occupy a pixel or two. Even the millennium vanishes next to epochs to preserve our bookmark on today. It's jarring, and completely ruined the effect for me.
- glurgh 14y agoFortunately, someone put on a turtleneck and got this covered. On PBS, in 1980. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0aOVItJHZEM http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0aOVItJHZEM
- Schlaefer 14y agoSuggestion: change the URL so one is able to bookmark a particular perspective.
- jeromesalimao 14y agoThis reminds me of a song by Xavier Rudd (great aussie artist). http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0E1bNmyPWww http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0E1bNmyPWww "Many moons have risen and fallen long, long before you came. So which way is the wind blowin', and what does your heart say? So follow, follow the sun, and which way the wind blows when this day is done."
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]
- jschuur 14y agoI expected to see some kind of reminder to put your life (or our society) into perspective, based on the vast cosmological timeframes).
- jschuur 14y agoAnd the share/like buttons kind of break a simple design.
- TheBoff 14y agoI think it's nice that it leaves you to draw your own conclusion, and doesn't preach or talk down to you, one way or the other.
- josephagoss 14y agoThanks! I like these scales, how small the Earth is, how young humanity is. But once someone starts preaching about how this means we are insignificant I lose interest quickly. If we are the only sentient life in the universe, then we are extremely significant in the grand scheme of things. If there was/is a god or another alien civilization from another universe, they would certainly conclude that the evolution of sentient life is one of the top ten wonders of this universe. I get tired of all this "insignificant" talk, its simply not true. Our minds are perhaps behind the wonder of life in the first place, but not that far behind, and life is one of the greatest things about our universe. How inanimate material started to think and move and do things. I think that is in no way insignificant, even if life only exists for a fraction of the time the universe will exist.
- jessedhillon 14y agoYou should stop and count the assumptions in your statement there.
- josephagoss 14y agoHaha I count at least 7! I guess what I wrote is entirely subjective, I wonder how many people would agree or disagree with my statement, or at least my feeling towards how others would view our sentience and life in general? I really don't think humanity and life is insignificant even when we are small in comparison to giant stars and distances and short-lived in comparison to the age of the universe.
- apunic 14y agoI always wonder how scientists do know that something was 25, 540 million or 2.560 billion years ago.
- maresca 14y agoCarbon Dating
- twotimesposter 14y agoWrong, carbon dating has a limit of 62 millenia. Maybe you meant radiometric dating?
- maresca 14y agoOf course I did.
- alan_cx 14y agoWith out knowing, I some how got involved with carbon dating. I must have, I married a diamond..... Two reactions to that, either: ahhhhh sweeeeeeet, or I feel sick, pass me a bucket. So, up vote for sweet, or down vote for bucket. :) (Normally I like a Sunday rant. I feel different today)
- ezequiel-garzon 14y agoIs this joke yours? It's great!
- courtewing 14y agoCarbon dating is actually only effective up to about 50,000 years, so its really only ideal for tracking human history after we started migrating out of Africa. This is because the unstable carbon-14 isotope only has a half-life of about 5700 years. There are many other forms of radiometric dating, though. Uranium-lead dating has proven relatively accurate for periods of time between 1 million to 4.5 billion years ago. Note: I'm not a geologist. I remembered that carbon was only effective for a few thousand years from a geology course I had in college, but all of this information is actually taken from articles on wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radiometric_dating http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radiometric_dating
- rodrigoavie 14y agoNice visualization. Gives me the impression (a good impression) that so much can be done.
- frogpelt 14y agoWhat was before the universe?
- milliams 14y agoThe Big Bang
- baby 14y agoWe don't know. But from what I've read it's nonsense to think about before and after.
- Sharlin 14y agoWhat's to the north of the North Pole?
- NuZZ 14y ago1. The bigger universe that spawned us 2. The multiverse that generated us 2. The same energy that generated this universe 3. Everything 4. Nothing Pick... some?
- shin_lao 14y agoOne unicorn is enough.
- wtetzner 14y agoWell, if time is part of the universe, does it make sense to ask if something was before it?
- aroberge 14y agoNo, because the very concept of "before" requires time to exist for it to make sense.
- reddit_clone 14y agoTurtles.
- baby 14y agoI've always wanted to do something like that! It's brilliant. You should add "here is your grand-grand mother, what's her name?" and "here will be your potential grand grand son, do you think they'll remember your name?"
- siavosh 14y agoSame here. These sort of time scales should really make us humble and question the meaning of "making a dent in the universe" or taking our legacies too seriously.
- Evbn 14y ago"Dent" is not something large, and doesn't have to be a conscious memory. A tree you plant won't remember you.
- e3pi 14y ago...and 'hereis': Service Temporarily Unavailable The server is temporarily unable to service your request due to maintenance downtime or capacity problems. Please try again later. Apache Server at hereistoday.com Port 80 I hope you resolve this downtime as comments are favorable, and it appears interesting.
- malign 14y agoVery impressive.
- ISL 14y agoLogarithmic map of the universe: http://www.astro.princeton.edu/universe/ http://www.astro.princeton.edu/universe/ TL;DR: http://www.astro.princeton.edu/universe/all100.gif http://www.astro.princeton.edu/universe/all100.gif
- PetitPrince 14y agoObligatory XKCD reference: http://xkcd.com/482/ http://xkcd.com/482/
- rlu 14y agoLike others, I liked the loop-back to today. I think it would be nice to include decade before century. Also, more or less at/after "period" I started to get a little bored (see the discussion in these comments about losing perspective) UNTIL you added the second dimension about life itself and then it got interesting again because we think of dinosaurs and such to be so, so, so long ago and yet this animation shows that in the grand scheme of things, it's as if it had been last week.
- rquantz 14y agoIncluding those additional segments helped maintain perspective for me -- seeing each one shrink incrementally gave a better sense than one animation from Holocene to all of Earth's history.
- keekdown 14y agoIt is cool made
- sidcool 14y agoSimply brilliant. Very innovative.
- brianberns 14y agoThis is great. My only suggestion is to increase the font size on the timeline labels. They were too small for me to read, even with my eyes right up to the monitor.
- chestnut-tree 14y agoThis reminded me of something I saw at the Science Museum in London a few years ago. A round clock face is used to represent the history of the earth and a narrator tells us the geological events that happen as the clock hands travels around the clock face. At a few seconds to midnight, we're told this is when humans appear. I thought it was a clever way of illustrating how human history occupies such a tiny segment in the overall scale of the earth's history. (I don't know if the exhibit is still there)
- therandomguy 14y ago3000 years over 360 degrees.
- SageRaven 14y agoOne of the first couple of episodes of Cosmos (maybe the first?) has a similar thing to convey the scale of time in our existence in the universe. Pretty cool.
- charlieok 14y agoRather than place the present day at midnight on the clock, how about placing the present day on the current value given by the Doomsday Clock [1]. Then, with a little arithmetic, you can label midnight with the projected date of Doomsday :) [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doomsday_Clock http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doomsday_Clock
- roc 14y ago
- jcfrei 14y agovery nice, however "today" always remains one pixel in width, which kinda breaks the comparison on larger time frames. I would also maybe add another step, like this decade. still really nice!
- jonny_eh 14y agoWas he supposed to use half a pixel?
- dvanduzer 14y agoThe appropriate trick here would be to change the point of reference each time you zoom out. At the millennium scale, the point of reference might become this year. At the epoch scale, the point of reference might become the millennium.
- paulwithap 14y agoWhy would you disable zoom? How am I supposed to enjoy your site while pooping?
- johnwards 14y agoTake your laptop in with you? Come on, I bet you have...
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]
- denzil_correa 14y agoIt does not work on Safari Version 6.0.4 (8536.29.13)
- djbender 14y agoWorks for me. Same browser.
- jaebrown 14y agoI love it, puts things in great perspective.
- dkural 14y ago.. and here is us, destroying millions of years life, in what is a split of a second in comparison. We are undertaking the greatest mass extinction of all times.
- Samuel_Michon 14y agoThat’s kind of melodramatic. The universe will be just fine without humans, or even our tiny planet Earth.
- Pwnguinz 14y ago99.99%+ of all life form that have ever existed on Earth are extinct. And it isn't because of Humans. Think about that for a second: The universe is--gasp--actively trying to 'kill' life. For us to undertake the greatest mass extinction of all times (that is to say, rival or exceed mass extinction caused by natural causes itself on Earth), we'd have to destroy at least--at least--another 10,000 Earth-like planets, each one replete with life as Earth is currently. I would love to see Humans possess such amazing technological prowess one day[0], but alas, that will not be today, tomorrow, nor even this century. [0] Wanting to see possession of technological capabilities does not imply I want to see future Humans use it to destroy extra-terrestrial planetary life.
- dkural 14y agoThey are indeed extinct, but spread over that time span. The "mass" in "mass extinction" come from the fact that a much greater # than usual are going extinct at the same time. Which is the case today. You may eat one burger a day for a long time. Which adds to a lot of burgers. In fact, 99.99% of all burgers you ate. But if you ate 100 burgers in one single day, I'd say something is wrong with you. Similarly, in a mass extinction, we are killing a great number of species, in a short amount of time, by completely altering the habitat/ecology of entire regions of Earth. Darwinian extinction on the other hand is driven by being out-competed by other species exploring the problem space, and long-term geological change.
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]
- victorhn 14y agoLife on earth started 3.6 billions (3500M) years ago.
- esamek 14y agoWhat I find funny, is how the visualization of scale on a pixel based screen is inherently limiting. At a certain point, you want to represent today as a scale of everything else...but at certain point, the line for today would definitely be smaller than a single pixel. Just a thought, obviously this is not practical by any measure.
- zobzu 14y agotoday is always "1px wide" so it doesnt give a good sense of proportions ...
- christiangenco 14y agoI'd love to have the day/month and day/month/year views as a calendar. Some kind of Geek Tool thing, perhaps?
- hkmurakami 14y agoThis is the first time I've seen something online that really made me go "Wow! I want to make something like this too!" And since I felt so strongly about this reaction, I messaged the guy behind the site (Luke Twyman) saying "Thanks for the inspiration!" It's quite a feeling being (a) inspired by something that you just bump into one day, and (b) being able to shoot the guy/gal behind it telling him/her how much you enjoyed their stuff. It's always a great feeling getting positive feedback for some of my blog articles, and I'm strangely feeling perhaps just as positive and cheery for giving such a thumbs up to someone! http://whitevinyldesign.com/about/ http://whitevinyldesign.com/about/
- uppe 14y agoTHE Haruki? If so, I read your book on running yesterday! What a wonderful coincidence. I was also very inspired (inspirational ripple going on here..) and decided to run every day instead of just every other day. Great read! Edit: went to your website and found out, no, you're not Haruki Murakami. Sorry for confusing you with him!
- hkmurakami 14y agono worries I get that all the time. apparently my Japanese writing has a strong resemblance to his style though.
- hcarvalhoalves 14y agoAmazed how old Earth actually is compared to the estimated age of the universe. Also, about how old is primitive cellular life.
- acerock 14y agoYeah, I like this, but it becomes less effective as the scale increases. At "Here is the Earth", the line for Today should be invisible (certainly not the same width as in "Here is this century"). It demonstrates the limits of this kind of explicitly visual approach. By contrast, language, which leverages the imagination, can be even more effective at revealing how insignificant we are: "...stretch your arms to their fullest extent and imagine that width as the entire [4.5 Billion year] history of the Earth. On this scale...the distance from the fingertips of one hand to the wrist of the other is Precambrian. All of complex life is in one hand, 'and in a single stroke with a medium-grained nail file you could eradicate human history.' " (from Bill Bryson's A Short History of Nearly Everything) Another example of language illustrating an abstract concept better than visual/graphic design: If you filmed or animated the following thought-experiment, would it render it any more effective? "Imagine people's height being proportional to their income, so that someone with an average income is of average height. Now imagine that the entire adult population of America is walking past you in a single hour, in ascending order of income. The first passers-by, the owners of loss-making businesses, are invisible: their heads are below ground. Then come the jobless and the working poor, who are midgets. After half an hour the strollers are still only waist-high, since America's median income is only half the mean. It takes nearly 45 minutes before normal-sized people appear. But then, in the final minutes, giants thunder by. With six minutes to go they are 12 feet tall. When the 400 highest earners walk by, right at the end, each is more than two miles tall."
- dsrguru 14y agoWhat I find most interesting is that the dawn of anatomically modern humans is actually visible on the 4.54 billion year timeline of the Earth. 200,000 years out of 4.54 billion might only be about 1/23000 of our planet's history, but that's also a whole 1/23000!
- bmunro 14y agoIf the period of time that humans have been around was drawn to scale, it wouldn't really be visible. If we assume that the width of the bar for the life of the earth is 1500 pixels (the width changes depending on the window size), then the period we have been around will be around 0.06 pixels wide (1500/23000 = 0.065). Much closer to zero pixels than one pixel.
- dsrguru 14y agoGood point.
- kevinSuttle 14y agoIs it odd that I don't see the point of this? Don't get me wrong, this is skillfully crafted, and kudos to the developer, but I'm missing the 'why?'.
- D9u 14y agoWhat, no Unix Epoch?
- thegyppo 14y agoFound it difficult to follow once "today" got down to 1px in size. Shows us just how insignificant we are compared to time itself.
- dutchbrit 14y agoBeautiful to see how earth has evolved. Wonder what the next few million years has to bring.. Will we be looked upon as primitive Neanderthals?
- pit 14y agoThat was just what I needed to hear.