The Moon’s a Looking-Glass by Trent Gilliss, senior editor Wired Science has posted some incredible images from NASA of the first complete topographic map of the moon. These magical images also serve a practical function. They create a way of seeing and analyzing the formation and development of our solar system by way of its craters. Our planet has a shared history of the moon: “Among other things, the map confirms theories of an onslaught of massive asteroids around 3.9 billion years ago that likely evaporated any water present on Earth at the time.” There’s a lesson here too. If we point our lens at something a bit nearer to us — whether it’s an interstellar object or the neighbor next door — we just may learn something about ourselves, and our future. Or at least we’ll see new beauty in the familiar, both near and far. In the image above, the blue area in the upper right is Oceanus Procellarum, a relatively young and less-cratered area flooded by lunar lava flows. The lunar highlands to the left are heavily cratered in comparison and the oldest region on the moon. (courtesy of NASA/LRO/LOLA/GSFC/MIT/Brown)
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The Moon’s a Looking-Glass

by Trent Gilliss, senior editor

Wired Science has posted some incredible images from NASA of the first complete topographic map of the moon. These magical images also serve a practical function. They create a way of seeing and analyzing the formation and development of our solar system by way of its craters. Our planet has a shared history of the moon: “Among other things, the map confirms theories of an onslaught of massive asteroids around 3.9 billion years ago that likely evaporated any water present on Earth at the time.”

There’s a lesson here too. If we point our lens at something a bit nearer to us — whether it’s an interstellar object or the neighbor next door — we just may learn something about ourselves, and our future. Or at least we’ll see new beauty in the familiar, both near and far.

In the image above, the blue area in the upper right is Oceanus Procellarum, a relatively young and less-cratered area flooded by lunar lava flows. The lunar highlands to the left are heavily cratered in comparison and the oldest region on the moon. (courtesy of NASA/LRO/LOLA/GSFC/MIT/Brown)

Mapping Religion in Online Realms (or Maps of Irreverence that Tell Us Something about Our Online Selves)

Trent Gilliss, online editor

Over at Floatingsheep, Mark Graham has been rendering some superb data sets about religion as it manifests itself in various ways on the Internet. There’s some good learning to be had but they are also a lot of fun so I’m taking it a bit further by pulling maps from two discrete entries and pairing them for a bit of play.

First, my sub-dollar 2-liter bottle of soda to get you in the door — a visual analysis of “the comparative prevalence of churches (blue), bowling alleys (red), guns (green) and strip clubs (yellow)” (in-depth analysis here) in the United States as indexed on Google Maps.

us_church_bowl_guns_strip_100113

A rather tongue-in-cheek way of weaving a good dose of humor into some disparate social activities that perhaps tells us something, in the context of our blog, about the online presence of churches in the South running through the Buffalo Commons in the Midwest to the Canadian border.

Now — and I realize this is a stretch, but since it’s Saturday… — compare this granular map below of Christianity in the U.S. with the one you just saw. In cyberspace, churches and Protestants seem to go hand-in-hand, dominating the landscape. What other non-scientific speculations and conclusions might you draw?

world_christiandenoms_usa_100305

As seen in the following map, let’s zoom out and take a look at the larger world by comparing the relative number of search terms of four types of Christianity: Catholic (green), Orthodox (red), Pentecostal (gold), and Protestant (blue). Graham notes:

“Most interesting is the fact that references to “Pentecostal” are more visible than references to “Catholic” in most parts of Brazil (and large parts of South America) despite the fact that almost three-quarters of Brazilians identify as being Catholics. Part of the issue is likely down to the fact that we thus far have confined our searches to English-language terms and are therefore missing out on all the references to Catholicism in Spanish. However, it is intriguing that Pentecostalism is so visible in Brazil (perhaps because it is rapidly growing in popularity in the region).”

world_catholic_orthodox_protestant_pentecostal_100305

And then check out the next map from “Google’s Geography of Religion” that charts the relative concentration of search terms for Allah (green), Jesus (blue), Hindu (red), and Buddha (gold).

religion

When I saw the addition of the search term “sex” to the map, the dynamic of the map changed quite dramatically, particularly in North America. Refer back to the first map and you may arrive at other conclusions or insights. Share them in the comments section so we all can conjecture and chat.

religion_sex

The Association of Religion Data Archives

Trent Gilliss, Online Editor

I know, I know. The title of this post doesn’t necessarily grab you like a YouTube video labeled “puppies do backflips on spinning wheel in lake.” But if you look beneath the hood of this Dodge Dart, you’ll find an amazing amount of information and some telling graphics. And, you don’t have to be a researcher or a pollster to appreciate this data either.

Type in your zip code and see the religious makeup of your county (I had no idea how truly Catholic St. Paul is compared to Minneapolis, or that Assemblies of God membership has grown dramatically in the past 20 years.), and the change that’s taken place over the past 20 years. Or, I used the country comparisons tool to gain some perspective on the similarities and differences between the U.S. and the U.K. while producing the site for this week’s show.

But, for me, the dynamic mapping tool provides a color-coded flavor of the U.S. religious landscape, not to mention socio-economic demographic data. All of which can be tracked as a slideshow. Groovy.