Where the Germanwings Plane Crashed

A passenger plane carrying 150 people from Barcelona to Düsseldorf, Germany, crashed in the French Alps on Tuesday.  The French authorities said no one survived. 

The plane went down in a remote part of the Alpes-de-Haute-Provence department, and search teams struggled to get to the area.  When French air traffic controllers lost contact with the aircraft, it was flying at approximately 6,000 feet; the elevations in the search area range between 2,000 and 9,000 feet. 

No helicopters have been able to land because of the rugged terrain around the crash site.  Searchers had to be lowered, further slowing recovery efforts.  The size of the debris area, which was about the size of three to four football fields, suggests the plane hit the ground at a very high speed, according to the French interior minister, Bernard Cazeneuve. 

It’s one of those things that you’ve perhaps never explicitly thought about, but it may have tickled the back of your mind a few times as you make airplane reservations or stare at a departure screen.  Where do the three letter codes used to delineate between airports actually come from?  What’s the deal with the “X” in LAX?  Why EWR for Newark? 

Called International Air Transport Association (IATA) codes, the clean, visually appealing site lets you click on a number of different codes (laid over an image of the airport’s location), which delivers provides a simple, concise explanation of its origin. 

The mysterious X is finally understood: it’s simply the letter that’s plugged in if the necessary letter is already taken by another airport.  The site also points out that up until the 1930s, airports only used two letter codes.  That’s how you get LAX for Los Angeles International Airport, which was previously just LA.  The strange Newark code EWR is also revealed.  After switching the three letter codes, the Navy reserved all codes beginning with N. Thus, Newark was forced to begin with their second letter. 

The Graduate Athens – From Hotel Directory

Chad Skelton – Income Calculator (White Male vs Black Women) – Inequality in Earning Income for the Same Job

More Catherine Madden (#catmule) Sketches

RJ Andrews, Info We Trust, Creative Routines

“We all have the same 24 hours that Beyoncé has” and its various iterations took the web by storm in late 2013 as the megastar became the figurehead of not only having it all, but being able to somehow do it all too. 

How do creatives – composers, painters, writers, scientists, philosophers – find the time to produce their opus?  Mason Currey investigated the rigid Daily Rituals that hundreds of creatives practiced in order to carve out time, every day, to work their craft.  Some kept to the same disciplined regimen for decades while others locked in patterns only while working on specific works. 

The Internet erupted in an energetic debate a few days ago about whether an ugly dress was blue and black or white and gold, with celebrities from Anna Kendrick (white) to Taylor Swift (black) weighing in. ( For the record, I saw blue and black).It sounds inane, but the dress question was actually tricky: Some declared themselves firmly in the blue and black camp, only to have the dress appear white and gold when they looked back a few hours later. Wired had the best explanation of the science behind the dress’ shifting colors.  When your brain tries to figure out what color something is, it essentially subtracts the lighting and background colors around it, or as the neuroscientist interviewed by Wired says, tries to “discount the chromatic bias of the daylight axis.”  This is why you can identify an apple as red whether you see it at noon or at dusk. The dress is on some kind of perceptual boundary, with a pretty even mix of blue, red and green.  So for those who see it as white, your eyes may be subtracting the wrong background and lighting. Changing a color’s appearance by changing the background or lighting is one of the most common techniques in optical illusions.  As the examples below show, colors can change dramatically against different backgrounds. ( If you’ve ever held a sock up to something black to see whether it was black or navy, you understand the concept.) 

If you want a dog of a different color, just set it against a different background (via BrainDen):

There are actually only two colors in this image — red and green (sorry, color blind people).  Also via BrainDen. 

The blue and yellow border around this image by Jochen Burghardt creates the illusion that it is pale yellow, instead of white:

Contrasting colors can even give you the illusion of motion, as in this trippy graphic by Paul Nasca:

The same principle is at work here, in Akiyoshi Kitaoka’s “autumn color swap.”  If you move the page up and down, the inset square will appear to move. 

If you stare at the center of this illusion by Jeremy Hinton, you will eventually see a revolving green circle.  When the lilac disappears, the adaptation of rods and cones in the retina leaves a green afterimage. 

Click on Image to Read the Report

Tableau’s intuitive, visual-based data discovery capabilities have transformed business users’ expectations about what they can discover in data and share without extensive skills or training with a BI platform.  Tableau’s revenue growth during the past few years has very rapidly passed through the $100 million, $200 million and $300 million revenue thresholds at an extraordinary rate compared with other software and technology companies. 

Tableau has a strong position on the Ability to Execute axis of the Leaders quadrant, because of the company’s successful “land and expand” strategy that has driven much of its growth momentum.  Many of Gartner’s BI and analytics clients are seeing Tableau usage expand in their organizations and have had to adapt their strategy.  They have had to adjust to incorporate the requirements that new users/usage of Tableau bring into the existing deployment and information governance models and information infrastructures.  Despite its exceptional growth, which can cause growing pains, Tableau has continued to deliver stellar customer experience and business value.  We expect that Tableau will continue to rapidly expand its partner network and to improve international presence during the coming years.