Saturday 31 December 2011

The Guardian of Yosemite


HERE is a great piece in the Guardian about a new book on Carleton Eugene Watkins (1829-1916), whose photographs of Yosemite in 1861 had a significant impact on Abraham Lincoln and led to the creation of what was in effect the worlds first "National Park".  The book by Weston Naef is over 600 pages and contains over 1,200 of Watkins' images. Naef spent most of his career as the curator of the J. Paul Getty museum photo collection - an interview with him is HERE.


One notable fact about Watkins was the sheer scale of the work - his photographic equipment weighed about a ton and his images of Yosemite are large format. The Naef book  describes them as mammoth photographs; the negatives were 18" x 22".


The blurb from the book;


Carleton Watkins: The Complete Mammoth Photographs
Carleton E. Watkins, Weston Naef, Christine Hult-Lewis
Getty Publications, 15 Nov 2011 - Photography - 608 pages
The extraordinary body of work produced by photographer Carleton Watkins (1829–1916) between 1858 and 1891 constitutes one of the longest and most productive careers in nineteenth-century American photography. Nearly thirteen hundred “mammoth” (18 x 22 inch) glass-plate negatives were produced, the majority of which exist in only one surviving print. Of these, fewer than three hundred have been previously reproduced or exhibited.

Drawing on the major collections of Watkins prints at the J. Paul Getty Museum, the Bancroft Library at the University of California, Berkeley, the Huntington Library in San Marino, California, and numerous smaller collections, the authors have assembled and catalogued all of Watkins’s known mammoth-plate photographs. These include views of Yosemite, San Francisco, and the Pacific Coast, as well as railroads, mines, and lumber mills throughout the west. The work will contribute not only to a fuller understanding of this pioneering photographer but also portray the barely explored frontier in its final moments of pristine beauty. The catalogue is organized by region and includes an inventory of Watkins’s negatives and an illustrated guide to his signatures, both of value to scholars, collectors, and dealers.     









There aren't many humans in Carleton's photographs of Yosemite - one of them is Galen Clark, who became known as the Guardian of Yosemite Valley. Clark offered guided tours into Yosemite and is sometimes called  the world's original conservationist.  In this Watkins photo Galen Clark stands by the Grizzly Giant sequoia tree, which for many visitors marks the start of their journey into Yosemite.



Image copyright J. Paul Getty Museum




Friday 30 December 2011

Don't trust your memory...

Don't trust your memory, it will trip you up, what is clear now will grow obscure; what is found will be lost. Write down everything in full; time so spent now will be time saved in the end, when you offer you researches to the discriminating public. Don't be satisfied with a dry-as-dust item: clothe a skeleton of fact and breathe life into it with thoughts that glow; let the paper smell of the woods. There's a pulse in each new fact; catch the rhythm before it dies.

Eliot Coues.
Field Ornithology. Salem MA. Naturalists Agency. 1874


Online copy HERE

Cited in Field Notes on Science & Nature. Canfield et al., 2011


For the Nerd who has everything...

For those still struggling to find new presents for their mathematically gifted relatives and friends here is a physical model of a 3 dimensional Hilbert curve created by Henry Segerman and available from Shapeways.


The Hilbert curve is a space filling fractal mathematical object described by German mathematician David Hilbert in 1891 and related to the Peano curve (more on it here). 


Since the curve is a single loop it can be opened up and used as a hair accessory.



Monday 26 December 2011

What Happened in History.

V. Gordon Childe wrote a lot during a full and active life (his collection of artefacts was bequeathed to Edinburgh University, where they are still cataloging.)  




One of his classics books, What Happened in History,  was published in 1942. This was a ground breaking book - it focused more on the development of early societies as seen in the day to day activities going on than the lives of the great leaders normally studied in history.  




I remember buying a copy of the Pelican edition of Childe's book in 1981 in the brilliant second hand book stall in Bath Guildhall market.  I quite often used to walk round there, buy a Chelsea bun and a pint of fresh milk, and while away an hour or so. 

Image from HERE


Skara Brae

Skara Brae is on Orkney. It is a neolithic village that is older than the Great Pyramids and Stonehenge. 


The map below was created by V. Gordon Childe and is dated 1930. At the time Childe was Abercromby Professor of Archaeology at Edinburgh University. 









 

Monday 19 December 2011

Olaf Stapledon's home in Caldy - Simons Field

Olaf Stapledon was a West Kirby based philosopher and science fiction writer. Here is a biographical sketch.
There is a full biography by Robert Crossley available, Olaf Stapledon: Speaking for the Future, which was  published by Syracuse University Press in 1994. It is HERE on Google books. The blurb reads;


William Olaf Stapledon is best remembered for the extraordinary works of speculative fiction he published between 1930 and 1950. As a novelist, he was known as the spokesman for the Age of Einstein and has influenced writers as diverse as Virginia Woolf, Arthur C. Clarke, and Doris Lessing. This biography is the first to draw on a vast body of unpublished and private documents - interviews, correspondence, archival material, and papers in private hands - to reveal fully the internal struggles that shaped Stapledon's life and reclaim for public attention a distinctive voice of the modern era.
Late in his life in an unpublished "letter to the future" Stapledon unwittingly provided the rationale for his biography: "It is just possible that my very obscurity may fit me to speak more faithfully for my period than any of its great unique personalities". A pacifist in World War I, an advocate of European unity and world government, one of the first teachers in the Workers' Educational Association, and an early protestor against apartheid, Stapledon turned utopian beliefs into practical politics. With roots in the shipping worlds of Devon, Liverpool, and the Suez Canal, he was transformed from a self-described provincial on the margins of English literary and political life into a visionary idealist who attracted the attention of scientists, journalists, and novelists, and, given his left-wing political affiliations, even the F.B.I.

Stapledon's novels - Last and First Men, Star Maker, Odd John, and Sirius - have gathered a passionate following, and they have seldom been out of print in the last twenty-five years. But the personal experiences and political commitments that shaped this creativework have, until now, barely been known. Robert Crossley's work reveals how, in public and in private, in his social activism as in his fiction, Olaf Stapledon embodied many of the modern era's anxieties and hopes.











Stapledon also bequeathed a tract of woods in Caldy to the local people - now known as Stapledon woods.


In one of his best known books, Star Maker,  Stapledon begins and ends an interstellar journey from Caldy Hill;



I sat down on the heather. Overhead obscurity was now in full retreat. In its rear the freed population of the sky sprang out of hiding, star by star.

On every side the shadowy hills or the guessed, featureless sea extended beyond sight. But the hawk-flight of imagination followed them as they curved downward below the horizon. I perceived that I was on a little round grain of rock and metal, filmed with water and with air, whirling in sunlight and darkness.



Stapledon built a house for himself called Simons Field on what was an unadopted lane, Mill Hey Lane, and is now on Bartons Hey Drive.  This  house had views directly out onto the Dee estuary and a tennis court at the botom of the garden.


Here is the house marked on a 1956 OS map.









Ordance Survey Map 1956 1:2500
http://www.old-maps.co.uk/maps.html




And here it is today on a satellite image from Google Maps. It looks like the tennis court is still there.










Simons Field is now on Bartons Hey Drive, Caldy, CH48 1PZ.


Sunday 18 December 2011

...not water enough to drown a man, wood enough to hang one, nor earth enough to bury him...

Thomas Keneally, author of amongst other  things Schinlders List, wrote a book in 1991 on his long lost Irish origins. This book, Now and in Time to Be, describes his journeying around Ireland - and introduced me to the other worldly landscape known as the Burren. 

The Burren is a karst landscape - and according to Wikipedia the region measures approximately 250 square kilometres and is enclosed roughly within the circle made by the villages Ballyvaughan, Kinvara, Tubber, Corofin, Kilfenora and Lisdoonvarna. It is bounded by the Atlantic and Galway Bay on the west and north, respectively. 

In Keneally's book there is a quotation from Edmund Ludlow (1617-1692), one of Oliver Cromwell's followers, that describes the distinctive landscape of the Burren. 


'After two days' march we entered into the Barony of Burren, of which it is said, that it is a country where there is not water enough to drown a man, wood enough to hang one, nor earth enough to bury him; which last is so scarce, that the inhabitants steal it from one another, and yet their cattle are very fat; for the grass growing in tufts of earth, of two or three foot square, that lie between the rocks, which are of limestone, is very sweet and nourishing'. 


Edmund Ludlow, 1651


The image of the burren, below is from Wikipedia;





Saturday 17 December 2011

Could the real Myles na gCopaleen stand up, please.

The Irish writer Brian O'Nolan had a  multitude of pseudonyms. One of the better known being Flann O'Brien. 


One of his other famous pseudonyms was Myles na gCopaleen - under which he published a regular column called Cruiskeen Lawn for the Irish Times. 

Here is an example from 1941


January 11th, 1941


A LADY lecturing recently on the Irish language drew attention to the fact (I mentioned it myself as long ago as 1925) that, while the average English speaker gets along with a mere 400 words, the Irish-speaking peasant uses 4,000.

Considering what most English speakers can achieve with their tiny fund of noises, it is a nice speculation to what extremity one would be reduced if one were locked up for a day with an Irish-speaking bore and bereft of all means of committing murder or suicide.

My point, however, is this. The 400/4,000 ration is fallacious; 400/400,000 would be more like it. There is scarcely a single word in the Irish (barring, possibly, Sasanach) that is simple and explicit.

Apart from words with endless shades of cognate meaning, there are many with so complete a spectrum of graduated ambiguity that each of them can be made to express two directly contrary meanings, as well as a plethora of intermediate concepts that have no bearing on either.

And all this strictly within the linguistic field. Superimpose on all that the miasma of ironic usage, poetic licence, oxymoron, plamás, Celtic invasion, Irish bullery and Paddy Whackery, and it is a safe bet that you will find yourself very far from home. Here is an example copied from Dinneen and from more authentic sources known only to my little self.

Cur, g. curtha and cuirthe, m. – act of putting, sending, sowing, raining, discussing, burying, vomiting, hammering into the ground, throwing through the air, rejecting, shooting, the setting or clamp in a rick of turf, selling, addressing, the crown of cast-iron buttons which have been made bright by contact with cliff-faces, the stench of congealing badger’s suet, the luminance of glue-lice, a noise made in an empty house by an unauthorised person, a heron’s boil, a leprachaun’s (sic) denture, a sheep-biscuit, the act of inflating hare’s offal with a bicycle pump, a leak in a spirit level, the whinge of a sewage farm windmill, a corncrake’s clapper, the scum on the eye of a senile ram, a dustman’s dumpling, a beetle’s faggot, the act of loading every rift with ore, a dumb man’s curse, a blasket, a “kur”, a fiddler’s occupational disease, a fairy godmother’s father, a hawk’s vertigo, the art of predicting past events, a wooden coat, a custard-mincer, a blue-bottle’s “farm”, a gravy flask, a timber-mine, a toy craw, a porridge-mill, a fair-day donnybrook with nothing barred, a stoat’s stomach-pump, abroken –

But what is the use? One could go on and on without reaching anywhere in particular.

Your paltry English speaker apprehends sea-going craft through the infantile cognition which merely distinguishes the small from the big.

If it’s small, it’s a boat, and if it’s big it’s a ship. In his great book An tOileánach, however, the uneducated Tomás Ó Criomhthain uses, perhaps, a dozen words to convey the concept of carrying super-marinity – árthrach long, soitheach, bád, naomhóg, bád raice, galbhád, púcán and whatever you are having yourself.

The plight of the English speaker with his wretched box of 400 vocal beads may be imagined when I say that a really good Irish speaker would blurt out the whole 400 in one cosmic grunt. In Donegal there are native speakers who know so many million words that it is a matter of pride with them never to use the same word twice in a life-time. Their life (not to say their language) becomes very complex at the century mark; but there you are.


From the Irish Times - more on Flann O'Brien and his pseudonyms HERE


Wednesday 14 December 2011

Feynman at the Chalkboard


HERE is the BBC Horizon programme No Ordinary Genius on Richard Feynman.


From the video at 5:13 here is Feynman on guesses and observations in science.


Richard Feynman lecturing at the chalkboard 


Now I am going to discuss how we would look for a new law. 
In general we look for a new law by the following process.
First we guess it.  
(Laughter from audience)
Don't laugh that's extremely true.
Then we compute the consequences of the guess.
To see what, if this law is right, to see what it would imply.
And then we compare the computation results to nature or we say compare to experiment or experience.
Compare it directly with observation to see if it works.
If it disagrees with experiment, it's wrong.
In that simple statement is the key to science. 











Monday 12 December 2011

Whitelines

A lesson in how to create a complete product innovation in a market that has existed for hundreds of years.


The Swedish company Whitelines have turned ordinary lined note paper inside out. They have created a range of lined papers that use white lines on a pale grey paper. The result is that deliberately made marks stand out clearly whilst the supporting grid is just that, supporting. 


I have no idea whether they are influenced by the work of Edward Tufte but this is a classic Tufte trick - remove all unnecesary ink and leave just enough for the task at hand.


Below is one of their "spectra" that describes what they have done.



Wednesday 7 December 2011

TANTRA Song

TANTRA Song 


is a book filled with rare 17th Century abstract Indian paintings. HERE.






Saturday 3 December 2011

Beautiful Book Covers

Here is a brilliant piece by Kathryn Hughes in the Guardian on the recent revival of beautifully designed, typeset and manufactured books.





Thursday 1 December 2011

Old OS Maps

HERE is a superb Google Maps type API for old OS maps developed and provided by the folks at the National Library of Scotland.



Below is home.



Monday 28 November 2011

Winter Waves in Caldy

Yesterday (27th November) the hide tide and high winds combined to make the sea at Caldy wild and rough.  



Stop Art

Stop Art - Empty frame is big improvement (September 1965)



From HERE


The Riverbank - Darwin & Negrin


The Riverbank 

It is interesting to contemplate an entangled bank, clothed with many plants of many kinds, with birds singing on the bushes, with various insects flitting about, and with worms crawling through the damp earth, and to reflect that these elaborately constructed forms, so different from each other, and dependent on each other in so complex a manner, have all been produced by laws acting around us. These laws, taken in the largest sense, being Growth with Reproduction; inheritance which is almost implied by reproduction; Variability from the indirect and direct action of the external conditions of life, and from use and disuse; a Ratio of Increase so high as to lead to a Struggle for Life, and as a consequence to Natural Selection, entailing Divergence of Character and the Extinction of less-improved forms. Thus, from the war of nature, from famine and death, the most exalted object which we are capable of conceiving, namely, the production of the higher animals, directly follows. There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved.



********************************************************************************
The above is the fantastic final paragraph of The Origin of Species by Charles Darwin (1859). It is also the text for the childrens book HERE illustrated by Argentinian Fabian Negrin and winner of the 2010 Ragazzi award for non-fiction graphic design.



Sunday 27 November 2011

Whats happenin' Stateside

One of the key elements of my week when I was younger was buying the NME. Along with the regular columns they began releasing a set of collectible compilation cassettes from about 1981. 

My personal favourite was NME 027 - Whats happenin' stateside. Released in Autumn of 1986 this was a compilation of tracks from the Stateside label. I literally wore out the copy I had. 

Now thanks to the wonder of the Internet the complete collection of NME cassettes has been brought together, with artwork and downloadable MP3's. HERE





Friday 25 November 2011

Chasing the Devil out of the Anvil

My Dad began his working life in a workshop in Liverpool. He was originally apprenticed to the blacksmith and his first job was to come into the forge early in the morning and get the paraffin drip fired forge going. In his experience he had found that the blacksmiths tended to be a bit grumpy, probably due to the life time of incessant noisy hammering they had endured. 


The workshop specialised in making the iron hoops or tires that went on the outside of  wooden wheels for horse drawn carts, which were still used in the pre-war haulage trade in Liverpool.  

One of the things that my Dad told me about when I was 14 or 15 was the important tradition that he had learnt in the forge; every morning the first thing that the blacksmith did was run his small hammer gently along the top face of the anvil with a rhythmic tattoo, this was to chase the devil out of the anvil.  For many years I forgot about this small anecdote connecting me back to the early years of my Dad's work in pre-second world war Liverpool.

Between 2005 and 2007 I studied in the Department of Technology Management and Economics at Chalmers University of Technology (CHALMERS TEKNISKA HÖGSKOLA) in Gothenberg. Towards the end of the course we were lucky enough to have a VIP tour of the recently built full scale sailing replica of the Götheborg -  an 18th century Swedish East Indiaman that had sank off Gothenburg on 12th September 1745 while approaching its home harbour after returning from her third voyage to China. Although all the sailors survived the sinking of the ship, the vessel itself was lost.  

After the tour around the ship we had a special meal cooked for us in the blacksmiths forge near to the boat and this included a demonstration of traditional smithing skills by the blacksmith who had made all of the nails, bolts and fittings for the Götheborg.  

Whilst I was making a simple nail with the blacksmith I told him that my Dad had been a blacksmith, I also asked him whether he knew about the tradition of chasing the devil out of the anvil practiced by English blacksmiths. 


Not only did the blacksmith know exactly what I was talking about but he and his fellow Swedish blacksmiths had exactly the same ritual and apparently for the same reason as English blacksmiths. During the night evil spirits come into the forge and make themselves at home underneath the anvil. If a hammer has been left on the anvil the devils play havoc and make a noise in the workshop. Because of this superstition the first thing a blacksmith needs to do before working on the anvil in the morning, and to ensure a good days work, is to use his small hammer to chase out the devil. 


So almost thirty years after I had first heard this expression, and over a thousand kilometres as the crow flies from Liverpool to Gothenberg, I found out the reason why blacksmiths in Sweden and England (and who knows, probably all over the world) chase the devil out of the anvil. 


  




To Do (by John Lennon)


A handwritten "To Do" list by John Lennon in black ink on 8.5 x 11.25 yellow lined paper is now for sale on an internet auction site (HERE)


The list of rather everyday chores includes books that Lennon wanted returned to him as well as books he wanted. Fixing the hook on the bathroom door, moving Sean Lennon's large mattress and waiting for the cable guy to show up. The fourth item Marmalade, shows that Lennon was a typical Englishman in New York. 


It appears that no matter how sophisticated and famous people are, their lives are composed of numerous everyday and prosaic actions. 




Thursday 24 November 2011

The Young Leonardo

HERE is a short and interesting paper describing how free software was used to extract a self-portrait of Leonardo da Vinci from one of his notebooks.



A self-portrait of young Leonardo. 


Amelia Carolina Sparavigna 
Dipartimento di Fisica 
Politecnico di Torino 



"One of the most famous drawings by Leonardo da Vinci is a self-portrait in red chalk, where he looks quite old. In fact, there is a sketch in one of his notebooks, partially covered by written notes, that can be a self-portrait of the artist when he was young. The use of image processing, to remove the handwritten text and improve the image, allows a comparison of the two portraits."



Wednesday 23 November 2011

Paul is Dead

Although I was born in Liverpool in 1961, and I lived there until I was about seven, I have never been a big Beatles fan. However, one of my all time favourite songs is I'm so tired by the Beatles which appears on The White Album.  The song is credited to Lennon/McCartney but was sung by John Lennon.

According to Wikipedia; 

Lennon wrote the song at a Transcendental Meditation camp when he could not sleep. The Beatles had gone on a retreat to study with the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi in Rishikesh, India. After three weeks of constant meditation and lectures, Lennon missed his soon-to-be wife, Yoko Ono, and was plagued by insomnia that inspired the song. Lennon later said of it: "One of my favourite tracks. I just like the sound of it, and I sing it well".

The song includes the following couple of lines



I'm so tired, I'm feeling so upset
Although I'm so tired I'll have another cigarette
And curse Sir Walter Raleigh
He was such a stupid get.

This couplet includes the immortal Liverpudlian rhyming of Cigarette with stupid get. When sung by Lennon he lets rip with his full and pronounced scouse accent.  

This song is also one of the sources of the Paul is Dead conspiracy. At the end of the song there is some mumbling in the background that when played backward sounds like "Paul is a dead man. Miss him. Miss him. Miss him."

You can hear the fragment both forwards and backwards HERE.

There is a great article by Michael Shermer in Scientific American that uses the idea of Paul being dead as an exemplar of anecdotal thinking coming naturally and  science requiring training HERE.





Thursday 17 November 2011

The surface of the Moon as you have never seen it before.

HERE is a set of beautiful topographic images of the surface of the moon. They are of unprecedented height resolution and lovely to look at.

The mapping is colour coded to reveal the surface shape of the Moon. The different colours are used to represent the elevations of the craters, mountains and ridges of the moons surface (White highest, down red, orange, green, blue and violet lowest). Each pixel is about 100 metres across.









Design Challenge

Over at his blog Information is Beautiful David McCandless has hooked up with the Guardian to give away a $5000 prize for the best infographic designs. 

They point out that designing an infographic is as much about ideas as it is about using fancy software.

To illustrate this they include some of McCandless' own "back of an envelope" design ideas that ended up in his book HERE


Wednesday 16 November 2011

Before Wikipedia

When I was growing up there was no Wikipedia. 

In order to learn about anything you needed to get your encyclopedia out. Posh people and the library had the Encyclopedia Britannica, which was enormous, was bought from a door-to-door salesman, cost almost as much as a three bedroomed semi-detached house and took more than 10 years to buy on a bespoke form of HP.

We were the proud owners of a battered set of Newnes Pictorial Knowledge. The edition we had was complete and was from the late 1950's or early 1960's - the covers were a quilted effect maroon. 

I was a strange child and would spend hours flicking through this set of Pictorial Knowledge volumes at random to learn about how a cricket ball was made. Or look at a colour cut away of an early passenger aircraft. Or the latest in mechanical looms. On the basis of this form of self-education I can remember even to this day how to use a straw filled pit to slow cook a meal, the deep sea explorations of the Bathyscaphe Trieste and how pioneering engineers had laid telegraph cables on the ocean floor. 


But the stuff in Pictorial Knowledge that I can remember the clearest were the photos and text that described the Bell X1 experimental plane that was flown by Chuck Yeager. This plane looked like a slightly modified rocket and it was dropped from the bomb bay of a modified B29 bomber. In this modified rocket Yeager reached Mach 1.06 (361 m/s, 1,299 km/h, 807.2 mph) on October 14th 1947.

Happy days.






Grapes to Raisins in electron Microscopy


The following paper includes a Figure (shown below) that is used to highlight what happens to a biological sample when it is prepared for electron microscopy.


The processes involved in classic preparation steps for electron microscopy involve chemical cross linking, dehydration, extraction and relocation of both microstructure and chemical composition. These steps are  comparable to the dramatic metamorphosis that grapes undergo while being dried into raisins.


Monday 14 November 2011

A new Geologic era

The Anthropocene is a proposed way of naming our current geologic era.  Here is the definition:

 
"A period marked by a regime change in the activity of industrial societies which began at the turn of the nineteenth century and which has caused global disruptions in the Earth System on a scale unprecedented in human history: climate change, biodiversity loss, pollution of the sea, land and air, resources depredation, land cover denudation, radical transformation of the ecumene, among others. These changes command a major realignment of our consciousness and worldviews, and call for different ways to inhabit the Earth."

A cartography of the Anthropocene is HERE.


Saturday 12 November 2011

If you know what you are doing...


Richard Hamming: The Art of Doing Science and Engineering.

"In science, if you know what you are doing, you should not be doing it. In engineering, if you do not know what you are doing, you should not be doing it."




Darwins Emotions

You can now help a team at Cambridge University who are studying the images used by Charles Darwin in his book on facial expressions of motion. The Experiment is HERE. The blurb reads;


Between March and November 1868, while Darwin was researching his book The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals, he showed a succession of visitors a set of photographs of human faces, some with the muscles artificially contracted by electric probes, and asked them what emotion they thought the photographs conveyed. Darwin’s research has striking parallels with contemporary facial recognition experiments. 

We have recreated Darwin’s expression experiment online, using 21st century techniques to study many of the same problems that Darwin was interested in, using the same photographs Darwin used more than 100 years ago. There are eleven photographs and the experiment can be completed in under one minute. We will collect the (completely anonymous) responses and report on the findings here in due course.


There is also a recently published book by Phillip Prodger on how Darwin came to write his book and its impact HERE



Driftwood Images

Some pictures of a big lump of driftwood from Red Rocks. Played with in PhotoFiltre.






13pt - NYT Standard Infographics

13pt are an outstanding design studio specialising in infographics, maps and other graphic material, often for the New York Times.


There are numerous examples on their site but here is an outstanding example;


The New York Times

September 29, 2009
Winner of a silver medal in mapping from the Society for News Design and a bronze medal from the international Malofiej competition

SNDMalofiej 18
”This is really impressive: It’s a complex subject, to describe how water moves. It’s amazing how they handle the big challenge. The graphic stays with you even at its most difficult parts. There are so few highly involved graphics like this that let us walk away feeling like we’re an expert in the subject. Now we understand flow dynamics.”
— The Best of Newspaper Design, 31st Edition