spodgod

When I look at this image, I wish it had been rendered and presented in a 3D format I could grab, rotate and zoom in on… There’s just too much detail to glean at this paltry resolution – even though you’ll get a bigger image if you click through:

It comes from the Cooperative Association for Internet Data Analysis, as reported previously over at Discover magazine – and shows Internet connected hubs over a period of two weeks in 2007.

“Tracing the circumference clockwise corresponds to moving from east to west. Each square represents a data hub, which lines up on a spoke with the city in which it is registered. The closer to the center it lies, the more data it traffics.”

Digging deeper, there are earlier animated versions of the graph/map – showing the flux in traffic to specific hubs over a period of two years.

We develop a shorthand bag of semantic tricks over the years, don’t we? The one liners you keep coming back to ‘cos they worked well the first and second time.

I’ve been using one particular line as a description of a potential dystopian future for a donkey’s age… It goes like this; someone with young kids will moan about how cheeky their four year old is getting. And I’ll reply, “Just wait until they’re 16, listening to music made with chainsaws and getting their eyeballs tattooed”. Then we laugh because it’s a bit silly. No one will be listening to Einsturzende Neubaten in 2020 – and eyeball tattoos? THAT’S JUST DAFT.

Then UK tabloid The Sun reports this:

World’s First Eyeball Tattoo

And I weep for the future. Weep blue tears