I love working from my kitchen table where I can see the tide go in and out during the course of the day. Buried in a Google paper about data analysis using map/reduce was the modern-day equivalent: this hypnotic view of a day of Google traffic on a map. It’s intriguing how a lot of the world (Japan, East Coast US, some of Europe) never goes dark, even during night-time. Now, a real-time view of this would be a fantastic desktop background or wall image: an ambient display of the distribution of the world’s melatonin, shifting as the day progresses.
