I was talking with astronomer Ron Marzke the other day about "looking". After all, who is better at taking in massive amounts of visual data and making sense of it than the people trying to understand the structure of the universe? The ONLY input they have available to them is light, and from understanding the nuances of light alone have they been able to figure out the age of the universe (13.7 Billion years), its shape (flat) and where we sit in it (not in the center).
Ron's particular area of interest is in "large structures", which to the layperson means "galaxies". They are large: Galaxy M31 (a.k.a. Andromeda) is about 110,000 light years across. The spaces between galaxies are even larger: Andromeda is our nearest neighbor, and it still took the light we see of it more than 2 million years to reach us.
An interesting aspect of galaxies is that they travel in families: galaxies come in clusters with mama galaxies, papa galaxies, sister galaxies... and like many families, there's the occasional weird uncle galaxy. Such is the case with Andromeda. See that bright spot just below the main disk? That's M32.
What makes M32 unique is that it is a "Compact Elliptical Galaxy", relatively small, tightly compact and structurally unique. Although M32 was the first CEG to be discovered, many have been found since. But here's what makes M32 truly odd: M32 is the ONLY Compact Elliptical Galaxy known that is a companion to a spiral galaxy. Meet the Uncle Fester of the cosmos.
And this is what kind of pisses off astronomers: since the Cosmological Principle states that the universe has no center, why is it that the ONLY spiral companion CEG is right next to us!?
This is one of Ron's burning questions, and he's now looking for other CEGs. Talk about needing to be good at "looking": out of his initial sample size of about 100,000,000 celestial objects, he's hypothesizing that he might be able to find about 20.
Talk about looking for a needle in a haystack.
July 20, 1969, Mission Time: 102:45:40. One hundred and twenty feet
above the surface of the moon and with less than thirty seconds of fuel
remaining in the tanks, Neil Armstrong sees a sea of boulders covering the
Lunar Module
Next time we land on the moon,
1960’s era Apollo astronauts’ eyes had to jump repeatedly
across many instruments to get this sense of situational awareness. They had to
burn several “cognitive cycles” merging these multiple visual inputs and
mentally making the calculations they needed to land. Eliminating such
time-consuming 

Although he can’t openly cite either most of his TMS sources
or clients, Dan says it’s not really all that hard to construct insightful
social network diagrams from commonly available information. “Give me a copy of
your Outlook
In particular, I was curious about the role of visualization in Tibetan (or 
For Tatsu, creating the diagrams was a breakthrough. "Coming up with visual explanations for something complex doesn't just help your audience 'get it' -- it helps you understand it better yourself."
Easy to use, cognitively immediate and highly scannable, these little open and closed iconlets provide a
rapid way to assess an otherwise unreadable set of table data. Talk to anyone in consulting and they'll know all about these ubiquitous little symbols. Except for one thing: nobody knows why they're called "Harvey Balls".
Mr. Poppel was known as the go-to guy when it came to increasing office productivity, and these balls struck him as a time saver. They were such a hit that quickly all Booz consultants were using them, and the rest is history.