2026-11-12 16:27:49
When your city doesn’t support a proper infrastructure for bicycles, it can be unsafe to ride among vehicles. BikeNetKit, led by Michael Szell from the IT University of Copenhagen, is an open-source toolkit to help cities fill in the gaps and design a complete and useful network.
Developed over the past eight years, the project links bicycle network research with city planning. The software is available on GitHub and provides tools to grow a network, connect existing pieces, and plan what order to build.
On the BikeNetKit site, the researchers provide analyses for over 400 European cities, but you can use the Python tools with your city’s data.
This seems useful and a nice alternative to cyclists getting hit by cars.
2026-11-11 17:36:22
Word Tree got a refresh by Jason Davies. It works more smoothly and better supports non-English languages. The visualization tool lets you load a body of text and see it as a tree network, which is especially useful for text with recurring patterns or themes.
The original version of this tool, by Martin Wattenberg and Fernanda Viégas, came in 2007 on a data exploration and collaborative analysis site called Many Eyes. It was the best of times for visualization on the internet.
Tags: Jason Davies, text
2026-11-11 16:26:33
Text Time-Lapse by Lev Manovich is a tool that shows the additions, deletions, and edits to a document as a time-lapse. Load a Word document or text files with version numbers, and you get an animation of text.
It is a lot like a generalized tool version of Ben Fry’s piece from 2009 that visualized the evolution of Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species.
Tags: Lev Manovich, text, time-lapse
2026-11-10 18:02:16
Apparently inaudible background noise from airplanes in a blurry video clip is enough to reveal your location within a hundred meters.
2026-11-10 08:39:16
For CT Insider, Philip Bump made a racetrack-like graphic to show the timeline of Democrat and Republican senators for New England. Each track represents a state and time swings back and forth, shifting from all red to all blue.
Tags: CT Insider, New England, Philip Bump, Senate, timeline
2026-11-09 16:24:29
Aatish Bhatia and Arkarup Banerjee use a visual explainer for how a few neurons can orchestrate seemingly complex and surprising behaviors.
If you squint very hard at this, you might be able to see the rudiments of how our brains encode preferences, such as a love for spicy food or an aversion to smelly cheese.
Of course, biology is far more complex than these simplified sparks. We intentionally gave them very simple brains, so that we can understand how every part works.
Their brains are also frozen in time. In reality, brains can learn: They alter their wiring to gain new skills such as learning to walk, ride a bicycle, or play a piano.
This is the first part in a series they call Myriad.
I like the spark characters with different wirings. I got lost in joy for a second making them chase the light.
Tags: Aatish Bhatia, Arkarup Banerjee, brain, Myriad, neurons
