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lunch break
Distractions and amusements, with a sandwich and coffee.
visualization + design
The art of Pi (`\pi`), Phi (`\phi`) and `e`
Like music with numbers? Here's a short list of some of my favourite songs that have numbers in their lyrics. Absolutely none of them is about bottles of beer.
music with numbers
1 — Numbers, Smoke City | This song is entirely composed of references to different numbers. The bonus? It's both in English and Portuguese. I love the way it ends—"Isn't it beautiful out here?".
Un
Un
Four
Five
Fifteen
Quinze
Seventeen
Seven
...
Tres
forty nine
Isn't it beautiful out here?
Isn't it beautiful out here?
Isn't it beautiful out here?
2 — 99 luftbaloons, Nena | The numerical classic.
Hast du etwas Zeit für mich
Dann singe ich ein Lied für dich
Von 99 Luftballons
3 — One, Aimee Mann | Beautiful mathematics of relationships using small numbers.
One is the lonliest number that you'll ever do. Two can be as bad as one, it's the lonliest number since the number one.
4 — Angels at My Door, Una | Long sequences of numbers.
58, 56, 54 angels at my door.
63, 62, 61, 60, 59, 58 angels at my gate.
5 — Tricky, Tricky, Royksopp | Number words about the fearful six from Norway.
Six afraid of seven 'cause seven, eight, nine
I'm about to lose it the second time
6 — Pt vs Ys, Yoshinori Sunahara | The first four numbers, in German, are this song's lyrics.
Eins, zwei, drei, vier.
7 — Der Kommissar, Falco | Unlike the previous song, this one starts with a German count (doesn't get to vier, though) and just gets better from there.
Two, three, four
Eins, zwei, drei
Na, es is nix dabei
Na, wenn ich euch erzähl' die G'schicht'
8 — 2wicky, Hooverphonic | The numbers likely reference the Prophet-600 and SH-101 synthesizers.
Prophet 60091.
Before we start you should know that you're not the only one who can hurt me.
SH10151.
This is the serial number of our orbital gun.
SH10151.
You better be sure before you leave me for another one.
9 — Straight to Number One, Touch and Go | Something to listen to after midnight.
Fingers, four, play, three, to number one.
10 — The Beat Experience, Pepe Deluxe | I am reminded of this song at too many academic seminars.
Here we are now, at the middle, of the fourth large part of this talk.
More and more I have the feeling that we are getting nowhere.
Slowly, as the talk goes on, we are getting nowhere.
And that is a pleasure.
It is not irritating where one is.
It is only irritating to think one would like to be somewhere else.
Here we are now, a little bit after the middle, of the fourth large part of this talk.
11 — Thousand Kisses Deep, Leonard Cohen | A list of songs that doesn't include one by Cohen is not worth reading. The sentiment of a thousand kisses is as old as lips existed. Catullus wrote to Lesbia "da mi basia mille, deinde centum, dein mille altera, dein secunda centum, deinde usque altera mille, deinde centum" [Give me a thousand kisses, then a hundred, then another thousand, then a second hundred, then yet another thousand, then a hundred.] Well, you get the idea.
And sometimes when the night is slow,
The wretched and the meek,
We gather up our hearts and go,
A Thousand Kisses Deep.
12 — Six Seven Times, Flunk | Curiously the product here is 42. This song is the answer to life.
You've got it all
Six seven times
You've got it all
Makes me feel so fine
And it's all there is
13 — 7 seconds, Youssou N'Dour | Dreamy references to a short period of time.
7 seconds away. Just as long as I stay. I'll be waiting.
14 — 100 Billion Stars, Lux | Something to relax to while you ponder insignificance.
15 — First Picture, Nikolaj Grandjean | First is the most memorable number.
I remember
The first picture
One million different shadows
Where we've been around the willows
16 — Millions of Millions, Music for a French Elevator | Very desirable. And I can't believe I transcribed the whole thing.
5.50 million dollars, 2.6775 and very desirable 8 million dollars 5.6 million and 2.4 million 3.4 million and 2.9 million 1.2 would've amounted to 4 million 1.2 million 19.4 million 6.6 million 5.275 million 1.2 million 3-and-a-half million dollars 6.453 million 8 million 5.050 million 1.4 million close to a million dollars 933.5 million 3.8 million 5 million dollars 2-and-a-half million 600 million dollars can you shut the door? 3-and-a-half million dollars 2.5 million .050 million 572,750 thousand 5.050 million 3.8 million 3 million 150 thousand 8 million 419.5 million
17 — Love Potion #9, The Searchers | I started kissing everythying in sight.
It smelled like turpentine, it looked like Indian ink
I held my nose, I closed my eyes, I took a drink.
18 — 93 Million Miles, Luan Santana feat. John Kip | A little sticky, a little sweet but it makes up for the fact that much of it is in Portuguese.
But the absence of the light is a necessary part.
news + thoughts
`k` index: a weightlighting and Crossfit performance measure
Similar to the `h` index in publishing, the `k` index is a measure of fitness performance.
To achieve a `k` index for a movement you must perform `k` unbroken reps at `k`% 1RM.
The expected value for the `k` index is probably somewhere in the range of `k = 26` to `k=35`, with higher values progressively more difficult to achieve.
In my `k` index introduction article I provide detailed explanation, rep scheme table and WOD example.
Dark Matter of the English Language—the unwords
I've applied the char-rnn recurrent neural network to generate new words, names of drugs and countries.
The effect is intriguing and facetious—yes, those are real words.
But these are not: necronology, abobionalism, gabdologist, and nonerify.
These places only exist in the mind: Conchar and Pobacia, Hzuuland, New Kain, Rabibus and Megee Islands, Sentip and Sitina, Sinistan and Urzenia.
And these are the imaginary afflictions of the imagination: ictophobia, myconomascophobia, and talmatomania.
And these, of the body: ophalosis, icabulosis, mediatopathy and bellotalgia.
Want to name your baby? Or someone else's baby? Try Ginavietta Xilly Anganelel or Ferandulde Hommanloco Kictortick.
When taking new therapeutics, never mix salivac and labromine. And don't forget that abadarone is best taken on an empty stomach.
And nothing increases the chance of getting that grant funded than proposing the study of a new –ome! We really need someone to looking into the femome and manome.
Dark Matter of the Genome—the nullomers
An exploration of things that are missing in the human genome. The nullomers.
Julia Herold, Stefan Kurtz and Robert Giegerich. Efficient computation of absent words in genomic sequences. BMC Bioinformatics (2008) 9:167
Clustering
Clustering finds patterns in data—whether they are there or not.We've already seen how data can be grouped into classes in our series on classifiers. In this column, we look at how data can be grouped by similarity in an unsupervised way.
We look at two common clustering approaches: `k`-means and hierarchical clustering. All clustering methods share the same approach: they first calculate similarity and then use it to group objects into clusters. The details of the methods, and outputs, vary widely.
Altman, N. & Krzywinski, M. (2017) Points of Significance: Clustering. Nature Methods 14:545–546.
Background reading
Lever, J., Krzywinski, M. & Altman, N. (2016) Points of Significance: Logistic regression. Nature Methods 13:541-542.
Lever, J., Krzywinski, M. & Altman, N. (2016) Points of Significance: Classifier evaluation. Nature Methods 13:603-604.
What's wrong with pie charts?
In this redesign of a pie chart figure from a Nature Medicine article [1], I look at how to organize and present a large number of categories.
I first discuss some of the benefits of a pie chart—there are few and specific—and its shortcomings—there are few but fundamental.
I then walk through the redesign process by showing how the tumor categories can be shown more clearly if they are first aggregated into a small number groups.
(bottom left) Figure 2b from Zehir et al. Mutational landscape of metastatic cancer revealed from prospective clinical sequencing of 10,000 patients. (2017) Nature Medicine doi:10.1038/nm.4333
Tabular Data
Tabulating the number of objects in categories of interest dates back to the earliest records of commerce and population censuses.After 30 columns, this is our first one without a single figure. Sometimes a table is all you need.
In this column, we discuss nominal categorical data, in which data points are assigned to categories in which there is no implied order. We introduce one-way and two-way tables and the `\chi^2` and Fisher's exact tests.
Altman, N. & Krzywinski, M. (2017) Points of Significance: Tabular data. Nature Methods 14:329–330.