Humans have gotten a lot done in 300,000 years: We invented agriculture, developed writing systems, built cities, created the internet, and shrugged off gravity to land on the moon. These innovations make our past seem long—and stuffed with significance. But in the brief history of life, everything we’ve ever accomplished fits into a tiny sliver of time—just 0.008 percent of the entire continuum shown below. This is how the rise of the animal kingdom stretches out compared with our relatively insignificant existence.

A web-based notebook that enables interactive data analytics. You can make beautiful data-driven, interactive and collaborative documents with SQL, Scala and more.

Profiling data can be thousands of lines long, and difficult to comprehend. Flame graphs are a visualization for sampled stack traces, which data allows hot code-paths to be identified quickly. See the Flame Graphs main page for uses of this visualization other than CPU profiling.

Flame Graphs can work with any CPU profiler on any operating system. My examples here use Linux perf_events, DTrace, SystemTap, and ktap. See the Updates list for other profiler examples, and github for the flame graph software.

The LedBorg provides a tri-colour LED controllable from the Raspberry Pis GPIO header. Using simple on / off logic it can provide a total of seven colours as well as off. Using software based pulse width modulation (PWM) it is capable of many more colours, around a million in fact.

In this article we'll explore a neat way of visualizing your MP3 music collection. The end result will be a hexagonal map of all your songs, with similar sounding tracks located next to each other. The color of different regions corresponds to different genres of music (e.g. classical, hip hop, hard rock). As an example, here's a map of three albums from my music collection: Paganini's Violin Caprices, Eminem's The Eminem Show, and Coldplay's X&Y.

In very simple terms, the POV globe is a ring of RGB LEDs that is rotated axially at high-speed (300 rpm). Due to this high-speed and the phenomenon of persistence of vision (POV), our brains interprets this moving ring of light as a solid, spherical surface. By changing the colours of the LEDs very quickly, we can display images on this spherical surface. Mounted inside the ring is a Raspberry Pi (RasPi), a small, single-board computer that has become popular in the last couple of years. Its small-size and lightweight design make it ideal for this application. The RasPi has an HDMI output and therefore a custom FPGA-based HDMI decoder was designed and implemented for this project. The decoder takes the HDMI signal and converts it into a form suitable to be displayed on the ring of LEDs.

Visualise your data in different ways. Each of them animated, fully customisable and look great, even on retina displays.

Explore analyses of popular songs, or contribute an analysis of your own.