[bwooce]

Neat. I've often thought about setting up an installation with one pixel per person...in the world.

With HDTV's it's not too extravagant either - about 3345 panels. A lot (of drivers too) but doable.

Any support for it? I was thinking that a circular dome ring of panels would be an amazing visualization tool.

Ideas: 1. current age of every person, represented by color 2. Language 3. Religion 4. State (health, nourishment, etc)

But then I run out - but I think it would be an incredible tool for a variety of data sets.

You could start smaller too (country level)

Has anyone done this yet? I'm aware there are no new ideas on the Internet.

[leephillips]

"I've often thought about setting up an installation with one pixel per person"

The problem with this kind of simple scatterplot is that there is an maximum density that you can represent, when the dots start to overlap. And you can't tell what that maximum density is by looking at the map, so it in effect misrepresents the data. The example in the article compensates for this by allowing zooming, but the problem is still there at most zoom levels. To avoid this you need to use one of the techniques that tessellates the plane and colors each tile according to the average value in the tile.

[Thrymr]

I read bwooce's comment to mean one pixel per person literally (not in map projection). If you're not trying to represent geography at the same time you don't have that problem. You could still sort the data representing individuals by two variables if you want, e.g. latitude and longitude, and map them to x and y, but it wouldn't be a map.

[leephillips]

You're right, I should have read the comment more carefully. An interesting idea! So please take my comment as applying to the article rather than bwooce's comment.

[reddit_clone]

Yep. That's what I thought too. The more number on a pixel, the darker (or brighter) it gets. But I don't know how far that can be pushed.

[ctdonath]

Facing a similar problem, there is an art exhibit somewhere that shows the complete contents of a hard drive (1TB as I recall), every single 1 and 0 (yes, at bit level, written as 1s and 0s). Details escape me, but I did see it in the last year. It was surprisingly readable, printed on the walls.