Information Madness

Just stumbled upon this amazing video simulation of all the flights on earth. Scientists from the Zurich School of Applied Sciences have built a video simulation that displays the flight path of every commercial flight in the world over a 24-hour period.

The simulation was compiled using the data collected from FlightStats.com, a commercial website which provides global flight and schedule information. The scientists team mined FlightStats for the departure and arrival times of every commercial flight in the world, then plugged it all into a computer to assemble their simulation.

For the sake of simplicity, they assumed every plane traveled at the same speed and every flight took the most direct route to its destination. Then every flight was assigned a position on a Miller cylindrical projection, which is similar to a Mercator Projection but doesn't distort the poles so much.

There is an interesting article on this at Wired.com