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visualization + design
#hitchens
Christopher Hitchens—Out of Letters
ASCII Art
The images shown here were created as part of my ASCII Art project, which extends ASCII art to include
- proportionally spaced fonts
- a variety of font weights in a single image
- both tone and structure of the image to select characters
- fixed strings to render an image in legible text
Applying the code to images of Hitchens was motivated by my own deep love of Hitchens and a typographic portrait of Christopher Hitchens, created out of Gill Sans letters by Miles Chic at Capilano University.
This adds to my growing shrines to Hitchens, including Merry Hitchmas! and hitchslap t-shirts.
Christopher Hitchens in Letters and Words
All images are generated using Gotham, with up to 8 weights (Extra Light to Ultra). Each image includes size and characters used for the image. I give the absolute type size, though only useful to know in relative terms to the size of the image and other images drawn with the same method. The color of text in each layer is the same—black— but font weight may vary.
Some images are generated using more than one layer of ASCII. In some cases the characters used in each layer are different.
basic ascii
As the font size is reduced, greater detail and contrast can be achieved.
By setting the image with a fixed string, such as a short quote or longer body of text, detail is lost but the ASCII representation takes on more meaning.
multi-layered ascii art
Images take on detail when multiple rotated layers of text is used. Each of the images below is composed of more than one layer, starting with a 2-layer image which uses the uppercase alphabet at 0 and 90 degrees.
Meaning can be added to the image by using different text in each layer. In the examples below, I set the same image using the pair "Godisnotgreat" (at 0 degrees) and "religionpoisonseverything" (at 90 degrees). In the second example, I use the unlikely combination of "Jesus" and "Mohammad"—inspired by Jesus and Mo.
When rotated layers contain punctuation, very high level of detail can be achieved.
The image below is made out of layers that contain only forward (/) and back (\) slashes.
The image below is made using only the period character in three layers rotated at -45, 0 and 45 degrees. Although the image looks like a pixelated version of the original—it is more than that. It is a typeset representation that uses 8 weights of Gotham. Character spacing between periods is informed by font metrics.
hitchens at the podium
The three images below show the difference between using a variety of punctuation characters and setting an image using a block of text. The first image uses "8 X x" and common punctuation.
I use hitchslap 9 for the first image below, and all the hitchslaps for the second image. When setting an image in using a block of text, the choice of character at any position is fixed and only the font weight is allowed to vary. When the text is relatively short (e.g. hitchslap 9 is 544 characters and is repeated 50 times in the image), rivers of space appear in the image.
In both cases, the image is very recognizable.
recursive ascii art
When an image of text is set with the text itself, you have recursive ASCII art. Below is hitchslap 2, set with itself. In the image, the font is Gotham and the text used to asciify the image is also Gotham.
It makes ordinary moral people, compels them, forces them, in some cases orders them do disgusting wicked unforgivable things. There's no expiation for the generations of misery and suffering that religion has inflicted in this way and continues to inflict. And I still haven't heard enough apology for it. — Christopher Hitchens
The quote is 307 characters long and is repeated 391 times in the image.
In principle, the process of asciifying text with text can be repeated, by using the asciified image as input for asciification with progressively smaller text.
news + thoughts
Predicting with confidence and tolerance
I abhor averages. I like the individual case. —J.D. Brandeis.We focus on the important distinction between confidence intervals, typically used to express uncertainty of a sampling statistic such as the mean and, prediction and tolerance intervals, used to make statements about the next value to be drawn from the population.
Confidence intervals provide coverage of a single point—the population mean—with the assurance that the probability of non-coverage is some acceptable value (e.g. 0.05). On the other hand, prediction and tolerance intervals both give information about typical values from the population and the percentage of the population expected to be in the interval. For example, a tolerance interval can be configured to tell us what fraction of sampled values (e.g. 95%) will fall into an interval some fraction of the time (e.g. 95%).
Altman, N. & Krzywinski, M. (2018) Points of significance: Predicting with confidence and tolerance Nature Methods 15:843–844.
Background reading
Krzywinski, M. & Altman, N. (2013) Points of significance: Importance of being uncertain. Nature Methods 10:809–810.
4-day Circos course
A 4-day introductory course on genome data parsing and visualization using Circos. Prepared for the Bioinformatics and Genome Analysis course in Institut Pasteur Tunis, Tunis, Tunisia.
Oryza longistaminata genome cake
Data visualization should be informative and, where possible, tasty.
Stefan Reuscher from Bioscience and Biotechnology Center at Nagoya University celebrates a publication with a Circos cake.
The cake shows an overview of a de-novo assembled genome of a wild rice species Oryza longistaminata.
Optimal experimental design
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.
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.
Background reading
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.