How much space crap is circling the Earth?

This illustration created by Australia's Electro Optic Systems aerospace company shows a view of the Earth from geostationary height depicting swarms of space debris - approximately 50,000 of the half-million or more objects bigger than 1cm - in Low Earth Orbit. An Australian company said that it had developed a laser tracking system that will stop chunks of space debris colliding with spacecraft and satellites in the Earth's orbit. Electric Optic Systems said lasers fired from the ground would locate and track debris as small as ten centimetres (four inches) across, protecting astronauts and satellites. Debris on the eastern side of the image are in the Earth's shadow and so not visible to the eye.

via www.telegraph.co.uk

Mondrian

Mondrian is a general purpose statistical data-visualization system. It features outstanding visualization techniques for data of almost any kind, and has its particular strength compared to other tools when working with Categorical Data, Geographical Data and LARGE Data.

All plots in Mondrian are fully linked, and offer various interactions and queries. Any case selected in a plot in Mondrian is highlighted in all other plots.

Currently implemented plots comprise Mosaic Plot, Scatterplots and SPLOM, Maps, Barcharts, Histograms, Missing Value Plot, Parallel Coordinates/Boxplots and  Boxplots y by x.

Mondrian works with data in standard tab-delimited or comma-separated ASCII files and can load data from R workspaces. There is basic support for working directly on data in Databases (please contact me for further info).

Mondrian is written in JAVA and is distributed as native application (wrapper) for MacOS X and Windows. Linux users need to start the jar-file.

The latest version can be downloaded here.