Belated Shark Week

Sharks seem to be a beach menace this summer from North Carolina beaches, South African surf competitions, to TV movies.

But for some perspective, above is a dramatic, graphic comparison of the number of people killed by sharks per year and number of sharks killed by people PER HOUR. About 12 people are killed by sharks each year, and over 11,000 sharks are killed PER HOUR by people. The image above is just the beginning of a long graphic scroll of shark death. Here is the bottom of the graphic:

Via: visualnews.

Of course some folks have devised their own shark protection.

Stepping Up 2

This is an another image of the checkout counter at a deli in Rockville, Maryland. We saw before the pattern of customers standing and awaiting completion of their purchases, and wearing away the floor tiles with their shuffling feet, revealing contours of their use.

Her we see the wear patten made by their purchases that are placed and slid across the counter to be totaled up on the register. The white of the counter top has been worn away to the brown board underneath. There is greater wear near the customer who perhaps sets down several items, but the wear patten narrows as the checker selects one at a time to ring up their prices on the register. What remains is the pattern of support for the joint distribution of purchase placement.

But there's more (as they say on TV commercials). Look along the front edge of the counter nearest the customer. Along this edge we see the bell-shaped marginal distribution of left/right item wear as the items are either placed on or slide off the counter.

Inside-Out Additive Effects

The new Pixar film Inside-Out has emotion-characters that inhabit the mind of an 11-year old girl, named Riley. All five of her selected emotion-characters are important, Anger, Fear, Disgust, Sadness, and Joy, and as the film progresses they combine together to create new emotions. Christopher Haubursin from Vox created the matrix above, showing the new emotions created. For example Joy and Anger, either top-right or bottom-left of the matrix, combine together to produce Righteousness. Riley has many more emotions to choose from with the resulting additive effects. A clever display.

Wearing of the Sphere

This is a kids' playground item at Wheaton Regional Park in Maryland. It's a toy/chair/apparatus that is basically a painted sphere on a pedestal. Children sit, slip off, or perhaps spin around, balancing on top of the sphere. This produces the wear pattern contours shown here. The central circular region has the most paint rubbed off, down to the metal interior. Around this is a ring of lesser wear. The circular nature of the contours indicates that the children don't seem favor one approach to sit, one method of sitting, or one direction of dismounting the sphere. No one direction of wear seems overly favored, or avoided, even though the light ring of lesser wear may not have exactly equal width around the contour. What remains are the circular contours of the frequency of use of a distribution defined on a sphere.