Slashdot Mirror
Berkeley HTML5 Timeline Tool Can Show a Day, Or the Lifetime of the Universe
An anonymous reader writes "UC Berkeley Professor Walter Alvarez, most widely known for his theory that dinosaurs were killed by an asteroid impact, is developing an open source HTML5 timeline tool for visualizing all 13.7 billion years of the past called ChronoZoom. Originally conceived by one of his former students, Roland Saekow, ChronoZoom can zoom from a single day out to all of the Cosmos, passing Earth, Life, and Human Prehistory along the way. The idea and initial database was put together by students at UC Berkeley while students at Moscow State University in Russia wrote the code with guidance and support from researchers at Microsoft Research. The beta is available as of today, and the source code is available. The hope is that it will revolutionize teaching, study and research of the past."
MS Techfest research projects received vitriolic criticism and near universal scorn from Slashdot users the instant it was posted despite some pretty cool demonstrations of upcoming tools but this "Timeline Tool" so far has received some shrugs and some praise. WTF?? To me this tool is worthless and a waste of time and a waste of Slashdot headline space. My take is at best, this supplementary feature to normal education (FTFA: "ChronoZoom will not only be useful for students learning history"), at worst it is a mere novelty data mash-up that will NOT replace my normal history references, and anyways it's not a quality demonstration of HTML5 as a platform nor the web as a medium. Since it's got nothing to do with tech or utility, why are we reading about this?