3-sphere two 3-balls. This construction is analogous to a construction of a 2-sphere, performed by gluing the boundaries of a pair of disks. A disk is a 2-ball, and the boundary of a disk is a circle (a 1-sphere). Let a pair of disks be of the same diameter. Superpose them and glue corresponding points on their boundaries. Again one may think of the third dimension as temperature. Likewise, we may inflate the 2-sphere, moving the pair of disks to become the northern and southern hemispheres. After removing a single point from the 2-sphere, what remains is homeomorphic to the Euclidean
Science On a Sphere runs on Linux. SOS was invented by Alexander E. MacDonald, the former director of the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) Earth System Research Laboratory in Boulder, CO, and OAR Deputy Assistant Administrator for the NOAA Research Laboratories and Cooperative Institutes. MacDonald devised the original idea for Science On a Sphere in 1995 as part of other data visualization work he oversaw in what was the former NOAA Forecast Systems Laboratory. A small but highly motivated and inventive team of NOAA staff led by chief designer David Himes wrote the SOS software and developed the SOS hardware and system architecture.