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lunch break
Distractions and amusements, with a sandwich and coffee.
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data visualization + art
Hola Mundo and Hello `\pi`
Art is science in love.
— E.F. Weisslitz
art and algorithms
Some algorithms connect us and some keep us apart—we need them to remind us what it is to be human and what it is to be a computer.
My cover design for Hannah Fry's Hello World: Being Human in the Age of Algorithms is based on my 2013 `\pi` Day art. The book is published by Blackie Books.
creating the cover
The cover begins with a 57 × 35 matrix of 1,995 colored circles. Each circle encodes a digit of `\pi`, starting with 3.1415.... Inside each circle is a smaller circle whose color is based on the next digit. The radius of the inner circle is `1/\phi^2` where `1/\phi = 0.618` is the Golden Ratio.
Once the circles are drawn, neighbouring circles that correspond to the same digit are connected with thick lines. The thickness of these lines is `t_0 = 3/(2\phi^2)`, relative to the outer circle radius. Circles that correspond to digits whose difference is `1` or `-1` are connected by a slightly thinner line with thickness `t_1 = t_0/\phi`.
More lines are drawn that connect digits with a larger difference, `|d| > 1`. The thickness for these lines is `t_d = t_0/\phi^{|d|}`. When all differences up to `|d| < 6` are accounted for, we get a pleasant jumble of lines.
To accommodate the title and other text on the cover, the design was generated by avoiding drawing any circles within a certain distance of the text.
This way, the network of digits wraps around the text. In the final design, the front page has 1,418 digits and the back has 878 digits.
cover remixes
just the lines
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news + thoughts
Survival analysis—time-to-event data and censoring
Love's the only engine of survival. —L. Cohen
We begin a series on survival analysis in the context of its two key complications: skew (which calls for the use of probability distributions, such as the Weibull, that can accomodate skew) and censoring (required because we almost always fail to observe the event in question for all subjects).
We discuss right, left and interval censoring and how mishandling censoring can lead to bias and loss of sensitivity in tests that probe for differences in survival times.
Dey, T., Lipsitz, S.R., Cooper, Z., Trinh, Q., Krzywinski, M & Altman, N. (2022) Points of significance: Survival analysis—time-to-event data and censoring. Nature Methods 19:906–908.
3,117,275,501 Bases, 0 Gaps
See How Scientists Put Together the Complete Human Genome.
My graphic in Scientific American's Graphic Science section in the August 2022 issue shows the full history of the human genome assembly — from its humble shotgun beginnings to the gapless telomere-to-telomere assembly.
Read about the process and methods behind the creation of the graphic.
See all my Scientific American Graphic Science visualizations.
Anatomy of SARS-Cov-2
My poster showing the genome structure and position of mutations on all SARS-CoV-2 variants appears in the March/April 2022 issue of American Scientist.
An accompanying piece breaks down the anatomy of each genome — by gene and ORF, oriented to emphasize relative differences that are caused by mutations.
Cancer Cell cover
My cover design on the 11 April 2022 Cancer Cell issue depicts depicts cellular heterogeneity as a kaleidoscope generated from immunofluorescence staining of the glial and neuronal markers MBP and NeuN (respectively) in a GBM patient-derived explant.
LeBlanc VG et al. Single-cell landscapes of primary glioblastomas and matched explants and cell lines show variable retention of inter- and intratumor heterogeneity (2022) Cancer Cell 40:379–392.E9.
Browse my gallery of cover designs.
Nature Biotechnology cover
My cover design on the 4 April 2022 Nature Biotechnology issue is an impression of a phylogenetic tree of over 200 million sequences.
Konno N et al. Deep distributed computing to reconstruct extremely large lineage trees (2022) Nature Biotechnology 40:566–575.
Browse my gallery of cover designs.
Nature cover — Gene Genie
My cover design on the 17 March 2022 Nature issue depicts the evolutionary properties of sequences at the extremes of the evolvability spectrum.
Vaishnav ED et al. The evolution, evolvability and engineering of gene regulatory DNA (2022) Nature 603:455–463.
Browse my gallery of cover designs.