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# biography · poster · CV

Martin Krzywinski
Staff Scientist, Bioinformatics
Genome Sciences Centre
BC Cancer Agency
570 W 7th Avenue
Vancouver BC V5Z 4S6

1.604.877.6000 x 673262
martink@bcgsc.ca
@mkrzywinski

# at a glance

In Silico Flurries: Computing a world of snow. Scientific American. 23 December 2017

# Choosing, naming and clustering colors—for everyone

## Resources

### Color summarizer

The color summarizer generates statistical color summaries of images.

It reports average RGB, HSV, LAB and LCH color components as well as histograms and individual pixel values for these color spaces. Comes with useful web API for all your automation needs.

Yes! I support LCH, which is extremely useful in generating color ramps and, in general, talking about perceptual aspects of color that are intuitive.

My color summarizer reports the representative colors in an image by grouping colors into clusters of similar colors and reporting the average color in each cluster. This is useful in image identification and comparison.

The color summarizer also identifies representative colors in the image by using k-means clustering to group colors into clusters. The centers of each cluster are also reported by name, using my large database of named colors.

Below is an example of a detailed color report of an image—an adorable Fiat 126p I found while it was screaming out its color against the fading background of Havana.

My color summarizer generates statistical color summaries of images, including a poetic list of words used to describe the colors.

### Adobe Swatches for Brewer Palettes

All the Brewer palettes at a glance.

The Brewer color palettes are an excellent source for perceptually uniform color palettes. I provide Adobe Swatches for all colors in the Brewer Palettes.

I also provide a short talk to help you understand why these palettes are important.

### Color Palettes for Color Blindness

Color blindness is a thing. You should worry about it when you're designing and especially when you're encoding information.

Sets of representative hues and tones that are indistinguishable to individuals with different kinds of color blindness. The rectangle below the each color pair shows how the colors appear to someone with color blindness.

I provide some background on color blindness and give options for choosing 7-, 12- and 15-color palettes that are colorblind safe.

(left) Colors grouped by equivalence of perception in deuteranopes. Each of the two hues is represented in six different brightness and chroma combinations. (right) One of the subsets of colors on the left that are reasonably distinct in both deuteranopia and protanopia. To tritanopes, three of the pairs are difficult to distinguish.

### List of Named Colors

Probably the world's largest list of named colors.

With more than 8,300 colors, even a mantis shrimp would be impressed. You can finally imagine a color you can't even imagine and name it!

Use my list of named colors to name the colors in the Google logo: dodger blue, cinnabar, amber and medium emerland green.

The color name list is hooked into the color summarizer's clustering. You can get a list of words, derived from the color names, that describes an image.

The color summarizer returns words that qualitatively describe the image.

### color proportions in country flags

A visual survey of the color proportions in flags of 256 countries.

(right) 256 country flags as concentric circles showing the proportions of each color in the flag. (left) Unique flags sorted by similarity.

Flags are depicted by concentric rings whose thickness is a function of the amount of that color in the flag.

I make the flag color catalog available, as well as similarity scores based on color proportions for each flag pair, so you can run your own analysis.

VIEW ALL

# Optimal experimental design

Tue 31-07-2018
Customize the experiment for the setting instead of adjusting the setting to fit a classical design.

The presence of constraints in experiments, such as sample size restrictions, awkward blocking or disallowed treatment combinations may make using classical designs very difficult or impossible.

Optimal design is a powerful, general purpose alternative for high quality, statistically grounded designs under nonstandard conditions.

Nature Methods Points of Significance column: Optimal experimental design. (read)

We discuss two types of optimal designs (D-optimal and I-optimal) and show how it can be applied to a scenario with sample size and blocking constraints.

Smucker, B., Krzywinski, M. & Altman, N. (2018) Points of significance: Optimal experimental design Nature Methods 15:599–600.

Krzywinski, M., Altman, N. (2014) Points of significance: Two factor designs. Nature Methods 11:1187–1188.

Krzywinski, M. & Altman, N. (2014) Points of significance: Analysis of variance (ANOVA) and blocking. Nature Methods 11:699–700.

Krzywinski, M. & Altman, N. (2014) Points of significance: Designing comparative experiments. Nature Methods 11:597–598.

# The Whole Earth Cataloguer

Mon 30-07-2018
All the living things.

An illustration of the Tree of Life, showing some of the key branches.

The tree is drawn as a DNA double helix, with bases colored to encode ribosomal RNA genes from various organisms on the tree.

The circle of life. (read, zoom)

All living things on earth descended from a single organism called LUCA (last universal common ancestor) and inherited LUCA’s genetic code for basic biological functions, such as translating DNA and creating proteins. Constant genetic mutations shuffled and altered this inheritance and added new genetic material—a process that created the diversity of life we see today. The “tree of life” organizes all organisms based on the extent of shuffling and alteration between them. The full tree has millions of branches and every living organism has its own place at one of the leaves in the tree. The simplified tree shown here depicts all three kingdoms of life: bacteria, archaebacteria and eukaryota. For some organisms a grey bar shows when they first appeared in the tree in millions of years (Ma). The double helix winding around the tree encodes highly conserved ribosomal RNA genes from various organisms.

Johnson, H.L. (2018) The Whole Earth Cataloguer, Sactown, Jun/Jul, p. 89

# Why we can't give up this odd way of typing

Mon 30-07-2018
All fingers report to home row.

An article about keyboard layouts and the history and persistence of QWERTY.

My Carpalx keyboard optimization software is mentioned along with my World's Most Difficult Layout: TNWMLC. True typing hell.

TNWMLC requires seriously flexible digits. It’s 87% more difficult than using a standard Qwerty keyboard, according to Martin Krzywinski, who created it (Credit: Ben Nelms). (read)

McDonald, T. (2018) Why we can't give up this odd way of typing, BBC, 25 May 2018.

# Molecular Case Studies Cover

Fri 06-07-2018

The theme of the April issue of Molecular Case Studies is precision oncogenomics. We have three papers in the issue based on work done in our Personalized Oncogenomics Program (POG).

The covers of Molecular Case Studies typically show microscopy images, with some shown in a more abstract fashion. There's also the occasional Circos plot.

I've previously taken a more fine-art approach to cover design, such for those of Nature, Genome Research and Trends in Genetics. I've used microscopy images to create a cover for PNAS—the one that made biology look like astrophysics—and thought that this is kind of material I'd start with for the MCS cover.

Cover design for Apr 2018 issue of Molecular Case Studies. (details)

# Happy 2018 $\tau$ Day—Art for everyone

Wed 27-06-2018
You know what day it is. (details)