Links for Tuesday, July 25, 2011

• The Big Picture: Space Shuttle Era Ends With Atlantis – “*When Atlantis touched down yesterday at Cape Canaveral, Fla., the high-flying era of the space shuttles came down to earth as well. After 30 years, the shuttle program, which began on April 12, 1981 with Colombia, has ended with the 135th mission. *“
• dygraphs JavaScript Visualization Library – “dygraphs is an open source JavaScript library that produces produces interactive, zoomable charts of time series. It is designed to display dense data sets and enable users to explore and interpret them.“
• New York Times: 3-D Art for All: Ready to Print – “For artists, it’s kind of like, imagine, you create something that’s a 3-D model, there’s 4,500 different locations in the world where it can seep out of the Internet into the real world and blow people’s minds.“
• Ponoko Blog: From Design to Powder to Product . How Color 3d Printing Really Works – “It uses a colorful robot design as the model and gets into things like how many layers it takes to build, how thick the layers are, how long it takes to print, and even the amounts of ink and binder.“