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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."
12:00 midnight: Let there be light, motherfuckers! How you like this TIME AND SPACE, haters?
12:31 a.m.: Galaxies and stars forming. Yep, let's get this party STARTED!!
4:00 a.m.: All work and no play
8:00 a.m.: Makes God
1:00 p.m.: A dull boy
5:00 p.m.: Earth forms. Great, another rock. Boooooorrrring.
5:20 p.m.: Life on earth. Well, this has potential.
11:53:12 p.m.: Hah, suck on THAT, dinosaurs!
11:59:59 p.m.: Humans evolve! Hey, looks like this "life" thing is finally going somewhere.
11:59:59:59:46 p.m.: Reality television? *That's* where you took it? Really?
12:00 midnight: Hope you losers read those Mayan calendars I sent.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
... Facebook sues the University of California for patent infringement.
Check your premises.
Here's another decent open source timeline I've used. It's not immediately scalable, but with a little db knowledge, I think it could be modified. http://www.simile-widgets.org/timeline/
There's a glitch in this timeline: it shows dates billions of years before God actually created the universe!
http://alternatives.rzero.com/
This is still cooler: http://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap120312.html
Now all we need is an open editable resource for chronicling all of history, in the same way that OpenStreetMap does for geography.
Ydco co
Mostly useable - zooming out is not easy (is there any way of just zooming out? The only way I found in a quick browse was to scroll to something bigger and click on it). Aside from that, it's pretty nice. Once they add more data to it, I expect it will be really nice. Not totally revolutionary - I've seen interfaces vaguely like this before, in CD-based teaching tools and museums - but definitely nice.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
You need to click the Source Code tab on Codeplex, not the Downloads tab.
English is not this
I love exploring timelines. Nearly thirty years ago, I wanted to implement a general timeline visualization tool like this. I've dabbled now and then but not gotten serious about it. Finding Best Tag Sets for Timeline Browsing
That said, I think a key feature will be to offer timelines on different continua. Fiction is one reason: A timeline of Frank Herbert's Dune universe or Tolkien's LotR Middle Earth should not be matched to our objective understanding of Earth's history. Another reason is an exemplar of a generic time sequence. There is a whole chapter in Tom Clancy's Sum of All Fears (I think) which describes, nanosecond by nanosecond, the stages of a thermonuclear explosion. Being able to relate such generic sequences is useful, even if they aren't pinned to a specific historical mark on the greater timeline of years.
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This is exactly what I was thinking. It's just a timeline. You may be able to have lots of data, but that isn't going to revolutionize anything. Not even time lines. Doing X, but with HTML5!!!, doesn't make it revolutionary. It's just X with HTML5.
Love sees no species.
Copious amounts of magical scrolls containing the spells "Speak with Dead" and "Discern Lies".
"Kill 'em all and let Root sort 'em out"
Perhaps they could scrape all dates from wikipedia and will the timeline with links to millions of articles.
Great. Another page taking forever to load :)