I found a face in the Beacon Ave. alley.

A nice graphic by Craig Robinson of Flip Flop Fly Ball. Check it out full-sized and with short explanations. I’d love to see it expanded into all professional sports.

The site has a full series of these infographics, visualizing the shape of balls and ballparks, the records of World Series winning teams, the direction of home plates, and more.

• Wired considers how much everyone is writing these days. “Paradigm shift” alert.
• Karl Pilkington, Ricky Gervais’ laconic friend, radio partner, and perhaps the only person who can put up with him for extended periods, “reviews” Gervais’ new film The Invention of Lying: Parts 1 and 2.
• A 1000 km long dust storm swept across Australia yesterday. The Big Picture collected images of the storm, all of which have a post-apocalyptic feeling with all the red dust in the air.

In June, Google released a Labs project called Fusion Tables which at first looks a lot like a spreadsheet app, but there are some exciting differences. In the words of the developers:

Fusion Tables is a service for managing large collections of tabular data in the cloud. You can upload tables of up to 100MB and share them with collaborators, or make them public. You can apply filters and aggregation to your data, visualize it on maps and other charts, merge data from multiple tables, and export it to the Web or csv files. You can also conduct discussions about the data at several levels of granularity, such as rows, columns and individual cells.

It seems perfect for large datasets that need crunching, aggregating and visualizing, as opposed to a a spreadsheet that needs editing. To test out some of its features, I pulled ridership data from the CTA website. Unfortunately they only provide PDFs, and I couldn’t format the data as automatically as I would’ve liked, so I limited the set to the Red Line on the North Side. I made the file public, so you can see the imported file and explore here.

Even with a small dataset, the visualization features were impressive. You can do bar graphs, pie charts, and all the tools typical of a spreadsheet, except they are more useful because they are clickable and optimized for the screen. What you can’t do with a spreadsheet is the map visualization. With a single click, I get this:

To be fair, I ensured an accurate map display by adding the station addresses in a separate column before I uploaded it. But it really was that easy.

While very cool, if I started using Fusion Tables heavily, there are a number of features that are probably more useful. You can create virtual copies of files that show only the columns that you need. You can filter rows from a simple but effective set of rules. You can merge datasets by simply selecting columns. And you can collaborate and leave comments exactly where they need to be.

Fusion Tables is a new tool, and even in my small test I found some things wanting. Unless you have national or global data, the intensity map is useless. I’d like to see a more granular map that allows for city or regional data, like my demo set. I’d also like to be able to sort the axes of the different graphs, be it alphabetically or low to high. Currently, the line graph sorts alphabetically, and the bar graph keeps the imported order. Finally I hope we will see some improvements to the way aggregation is presented—maybe an option to add an aggregated row or column to the table itself.

Anyway, small points for tool that I’m excited to see improve.

Released five days ago, the Beatles’ remastered albums are as good as everyone says. To get excited, I highly recommend Howard Goodall’s sixty-minute documentary on the Beatles, embedded above.

He is a respected composer and so is able to give all the context you could ever want, getting into the nitty-gritty of their compositions without losing a novice. On top of that, he is able to hit a perfect tone that emphasizes their intuitive musical genius as well as their absolutely perfect timing in the zeitgeist.

This is part of the first crop of photos since the Hubble was refurbished last May. The above shot is from the star cluster Omega Centauri. The Times has some coverage.

• How U.S. sanctions blocking Google ads from being used in Iran could be hurting more than it helps. The state-run media is well funded, and it’s the alternatives who are getting squeezed.
• Wired takes a look at the oddity that is Craigslist.
• Hundred-year-old stunning color photos from pre-revolutionary Russia.

• Although the whole show is good, act one of this episode of This American Life is particularly great. It’s about people going through life wrongly thinking something, often since childhood, and never really considering how ridiculous it is.
• Lots of interesting people talk about their top 10 Criterion Collection movies. Where is “watch instantly” when I need it?
• Ernst Haeckel was a 19th century German zoologist and painter. He was one of the first strong proponents of evolution, and while some of his theories are now out of date, his influence is considerable. And he painted beautifully. He collected single-cell radiolaria specimens and illustrated them in ornate detail. Here are some scans from his 1862 book.