Quick update on Heathrow Tower

While there haven’t been any visible changes to my Heathrow Tower project in the past couple of weeks beyond my throwing in a few greetings in other languages to break things up a bit. Having put some of the statistical plans on hold as the snow last week prevented any data gathered from being anywhere close to representative, I’ve gradually been building up the database behind the scenes so I can start to do some of the more intricate things I’d like to do. ...

Selected Saturday links

For quite a while I used del.icio.us to post summaries of interesting links here on an almost daily basis. After a while I got a little tired of the aesthetics of that: the clunky titles, the way it inserted tags, the fact that sometimes there was just one link and sometimes many. And I realised that for the quick/transient linking twitter works better. So for now I’m going to try and post a digest every week or so, selecting the highlights. If you really want regular updates on what I’m keeping from what I’m reading, you can always follow me on delicious. ...

Tracking Heathrow with twitter

A few months back—while we were discussing the number of talking objects appearing on twitter— Jenny pointed out to me that all Heathrow airport arrivals and departures data is online. That set my mind racing, as if you know all the flights leaving that currently controversial airport, there are all manner of things you could begin to do. Working out miles travelled and carbon emitted, spotting delays, and so on. But at the time it all came down to a quick note in Things to some day set aside time to explore. ...