Major Arteries

This is my last day at the office before an extended Thanksgiving holiday. The new boss decided to close on Wednesday and Friday, instead of the usual Friday. She also decided to make Friday a paid holiday for full-time employees, and I happen to have enough vacation days left to make tomorrow a paid day as well. (Score!)

I was up super-late (or mondo-early, depending on your perspective) getting things together for my trek down 77 later today. I stupidly went to bed at 5 a.m. instead of dragging everything out to the car, so now I have to detour to my apartment after work before I can hit the road.

In honor of hitting the road . . . Check out GOOD » Street View».

Data visualization guru Ben Fry has created a unique map of the United States by displaying all of the nation’s 26 million roads—and nothing else. As he says:

“No other features (such as outlines or geographic features) have been added to this image, however they emerge as roads avoid mountains, and sparse areas convey low population.”

The resulting image of a transportation network sans substrate is very reminiscent of the plastinated human circulatory system pieces from Body Worlds. One was designed by governments. The other by natural selection. Discuss.

In the picture on the GOOD site, you can see the roads I'll be on — part of that dark mass in the general NE Ohio area. I like the rest of the images on Fry's site . . . but that's because I'm a total geek for maps.

And nice call on the reference to Body Worlds. I saw it when it was in Cleveland a few years ago. I used to have this image of the arteries in the hand as my desktop wallpaper, mostly because it freaked Cathy out. Heh.








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