Slog

News & Arts

Line Out

Music & the City
at Night

« The Whisky Bar Is Moving | Socialist Alternative Candidate Ksh… »

Friday, August 24, 2012

Science The Most Beautiful Thing You Will See Today

Posted by Charles Mudede on Fri, Aug 24, 2012 at 8:55 AM

It's over here. It's a map of every documented hurricane since 1851. These words get to the core of the map's beauty:

The results are absolutely spooky. It doesn’t take a meteorologist’s degree to spot the obvious: The storms converge to form a larger entity that looks strikingly akin to a hurricane, as if hurricanes are just fractals for larger hurricanes. Come to think about it, if you keep zooming out, you eventually arrive at our own galaxy, the Milky Way, which also spirals like a hurricane.

FacebookShare

Comments (7) RSS

Oldest First Unregistered On Registered On Add a comment

Of course the micro matches the macro. They are all one and the same process.

Posted by Pope Peabrain on August 24, 2012 at 9:14 AM

Strange part is the way South America (and Antarctica) are completely protected from hurricanes. In the "eye" ...

Posted by Supreme Ruler Of The Universe

on August 24, 2012 at 9:26 AM

#2, look a little closer, no landmasses are touched by hurricanes. This is partly obscured by the perspective and size of the graphic, but it's the case. Amazing that ocean-borne storms don't go onto continents very much, huh?

Posted by LMcGuff

on August 24, 2012 at 10:56 AM

mind. blown.

Posted by longball on August 24, 2012 at 11:51 AM

Maximillian Cohen: Restate my assumptions: One, Mathematics is the language of nature. Two, Everything around us can be represented and understood through numbers. Three: If you graph the numbers of any system, patterns emerge. Therefore, there are patterns everywhere in nature.

Posted by Kaleb Gubernick on August 24, 2012 at 3:04 PM

This would be a lot more impressive if I didn't understand the rather unorthodox map projection. It's no coincidence he he picked the south pole for the center, rather than the north, which would have put the proponderance of land mass toward the middle of the map...

Posted by robotslave on August 24, 2012 at 3:44 PM

Yeah, if you think about it, looking up from the south pole, it's not a humongous shocker that stuff that happens at particular latitudes is going to be arranged in a big ring.

Posted by beef rallard on August 26, 2012 at 12:15 AM