resources
visualizations
presentations
lunch break
Distractions and amusements, with a sandwich and coffee.
visualization + design
Hilbert Curve Art, Hilbertonians and Monkeys
I collaborated with Scientific American to create a data graphic for the September 2014 issue. The graphic compared the genomes of the Denisovan, bonobo, chimp and gorilla, showing how our own genomes are almost identical to the Denisovan and closer to that of the bonobo and chimp than the gorilla.
Here you'll find Hilbert curve art, a introduction to Hilbertonians, the creatures that live on the curve, an explanation of the Scientific American graphic and downloadable SVG/EPS Hilbert curve files.
Hilbertonians—creatures on the Hilbert Curve
Take a look at the Hilbertonian Posters and perhaps buy one. I take custom requests.
Definition of a Hilbertonian
A Hilbertonian is created by overlapping pixels sampled on points of three Hilbert curves of orders `i`, `i+1` and `i+2`.
At each level the pixels are placed at each of the curve points. Pixels are sized `4^-i`, which is one-half of the length of a segment.
The pixels are filled or white randomly, except for one exception: pixels on the lowest order curve are always black.
Pixel patterns that are not contiguous create Hilbertonians that are not viable.
The requirement that the pixels be placed on points of the Hilbert curve means that you cannot produce a single Hilbertonian—they are produced in multiples of 4.
news + thoughts
Molecular Case Studies Cover
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.
Happy 2018 `\tau` Day—Art for everyone
Universe Superclusters and Voids
A map of the nearby superclusters and voids in the Unvierse.
By "nearby" I mean within 6,000 million light-years.
Datavis for your feet—the 178.75 lb socks
In the past, I've been tangentially involved in fashion design. I've also been more directly involved in fashion photography.
It was now time to design my first ... pair of socks.
In collaboration with Flux Socks, the design features the colors and relative thicknesses of Rogue olympic weightlifting plates. The first four plates in the stack are the 55, 45, 35, and 25 competition plates. The top 4 plates are the 10, 5, 2.5 and 1.25 lb change plates.
The perceived weight of each sock is 178.75 lb and 357.5 lb for the pair.
The actual weight is much less.
Genes Behind Psychiatric Disorders
Find patterns behind gene expression and disease.
Expression, correlation and network module membership of 11,000+ genes and 5 psychiatric disorders in about 6" x 7" on a single page.
Design tip: Stay calm.
More of my American Scientific Graphic Science designs
Gandal M.J. et al. Shared Molecular Neuropathology Across Major Psychiatric Disorders Parallels Polygenic Overlap Science 359 693–697 (2018)
Curse(s) of dimensionality
There is such a thing as too much of a good thing.We discuss the many ways in which analysis can be confounded when data has a large number of dimensions (variables). Collectively, these are called the "curses of dimensionality".
Some of these are unintuitive, such as the fact that the volume of the hypersphere increases and then shrinks beyond about 7 dimensions, while the volume of the hypercube always increases. This means that high-dimensional space is "mostly corners" and the distance between points increases greatly with dimension. This has consequences on correlation and classification.