An animation of the Tweets from the 218th meeting of the American Astronomical Association Meeting

This is not-qute finished, but is being released now otherwise it'll never see the light of day. The help screen can be hidden via the h key; for other commands you'll have to actually read the text. Latest changes: Monday June 6, 2011 - added a display of the time scale used (i.e. the amount of time one screen represents) and noted that the z and Z keys can be used to change this value.

Rather than use the embedded version below you can try the following stand-alone versions: Linux or OS-X.

Credits: The animation as built with Processing, the extraction and analysis code is available via my BitBucket site, and the background image is used with permission of @johnamatson. Cheers!

Note: make sure to click in the java applet (e.g. the Boston sky line) otherwise your key presses may end up being ignored, and that would make them unhappy. If you still see the histogram overlapping the main display area you may have to re-start your browser (I am not sure how browsers react to updates to Java applets so I am falling-back on the standard tech response of "have you rebooted that").

Source code: aas218_anim; Tweet; histogram.