The Dangers of Aggregation

 What's wrong with this Visualisation?

Look at the top level geographical presentation (i.e. all of the USA).

Pretty shocking!

Now drill down by increasing the resolution, looking say at the quite big patch of "most hate" tweets just west of Wyoming.

The dangers of aggregation!

One could also look at the U.S. East Coast for a similar effect.

Creation Ex Nihilo?

This is quite a good puzzle.

From Random Polygon to Ellipse

Here is a fascinating and quite unexpected result from Shape Analysis.

I came across it at Matthen's blog which is great resource for visualising simple but intriguing mathematical results.

"Draw some random points on a piece of paper and join them up to make a random polygon. Find all the midpoints and connect them up to give a new shape, and repeat. The resulting shape will get smaller and smaller, and will tend towards an ellipse".

The visualisation is here and the paper demonstrating the result is here.