As a kid, I remember being amazed at the way they grow; by adding rings of tissue and expanding year on year. Even more exciting, you can also tell good years from bad by studying the thickness of each band. I’m sure none of this comes as news to you Dear Reader.

So you can imagine how much I like the idea of mischer’traxler’s idea of taking this “recording quality” of a tree,  and using it to inform the design of products. Take a look at the infosthetics link below and tell me you don’t like it as well!

“The work consists of a solar-powered apparatus that pulls threads through a coloring device, a glue basin, and then finally winds them around a mould. The physical height of the resulting object depends on the number of sun hours of the day, as the machine starts at sunrise and stops at sunset. At any time of the day, the thickness of the thread layer and the color is depending on the amount of sun-energy: more sun results in thicker layers and a paler color.” Via infosthetics.com

Visit the artist’s website: mischertraxler.com

The tone of the blog is appropriately balanced between contrition and humour and if I’d heard no more about it, I wouldn’t have thought twice. So it was with real interest that I stumbled across the following graph at Wired’s Epicenter which illustrates just how much data stopped moving.

If you’ve got any interest in data-visualisation, you’ve just gotta love this graph! That’s a drop of 15Gbps in about a minute…

But when you think about it more, it does get a bit scary. And I’m afraid it’s the usual concern – just how much data does Google own? As Epicenter say:

the fact that Google’s slip-up causes such a stir in the media, on mailing lists and on Twitter, says much more about Google’s centrality to the internet than this graph does, even though its a really cool graph.