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visualization + design
They serve as the form for The Outbreak Poems.
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 — One Hundred Billion Sparks, Max Cooper | Imagine a neuron firing. Now imagine 100,000,000,000 neurons firing. This is the music for it.
2 — 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?
3 — 99 luftbaloons, Nena | The numerical classic.
Hast du etwas Zeit für mich
Dann singe ich ein Lied für dich
Von 99 Luftballons
4 — 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.
5 — 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.
6 — 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
7 — Pt vs Ys, Yoshinori Sunahara | The first four numbers, in German, are this song's lyrics.
Eins, zwei, drei, vier.
8 — 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'
9 — 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.
10 — Straight to Number One, Touch and Go | Something to listen to after midnight.
Fingers, four, play, three, to number one.
11 — 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.
12 — 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.
13 — 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
14 — 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.
15 — 100 Billion Stars, Lux | Something to relax to while you ponder insignificance.
16 — 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
17 — 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
18 — 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.
19 — 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.
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news + thoughts
"This data might give you a migrane"
An in-depth look at my process of reacting to a bad figure — how I design a poster and tell data stories.
He said, he said — a word analysis of the 2020 Presidential Debates
Building on the method I used to analyze the 2008, 2012 and 2016 U.S. Presidential and Vice Presidential debates, I explore word usagein the 2020 Debates between Donald Trump and Joe Biden.
Points of Significance celebrates 50th column
We are celebrating the publication of our 50th column!
To all our coauthors — thank you and see you in the next column!
Uncertainty and the management of epidemics
When modelling epidemics, some uncertainties matter more than others.
Public health policy is always hampered by uncertainty. During a novel outbreak, nearly everything will be uncertain: the mode of transmission, the duration and population variability of latency, infection and protective immunity and, critically, whether the outbreak will fade out or turn into a major epidemic.
The uncertainty may be structural (which model?), parametric (what is `R_0`?), and/or operational (how well do masks work?).
This month, we continue our exploration of epidemiological models and look at how uncertainty affects forecasts of disease dynamics and optimization of intervention strategies.
We show how the impact of the uncertainty on any choice in strategy can be expressed using the Expected Value of Perfect Information (EVPI), which is the potential improvement in outcomes that could be obtained if the uncertainty is resolved before making a decision on the intervention strategy. In other words, by how much could we potentially increase effectiveness of our choice (e.g. lowering total disease burden) if we knew which model best reflects reality?
This column has an interactive supplemental component (download code) that allows you to explore the impact of uncertainty in `R_0` and immunity duration on timing and size of epidemic waves and the total burden of the outbreak and calculate EVPI for various outbreak models and scenarios.
Bjørnstad, O.N., Shea, K., Krzywinski, M. & Altman, N. (2020) Points of significance: Uncertainty and the management of epidemics. Nature Methods 17.
Background reading
Bjørnstad, O.N., Shea, K., Krzywinski, M. & Altman, N. (2020) Points of significance: Modeling infectious epidemics. Nature Methods 17:455–456.
Bjørnstad, O.N., Shea, K., Krzywinski, M. & Altman, N. (2020) Points of significance: The SEIRS model for infectious disease dynamics. Nature Methods 17:557–558.
Cover of Nature Genetics August 2020
Our design on the cover of Nature Genetics's August 2020 issue is “Dichotomy of Chromatin in Color” . Thanks to Dr. Andy Mungall for suggesting this terrific title.
The cover design accompanies our report in the issue Gagliardi, A., Porter, V.L., Zong, Z. et al. (2020) Analysis of Ugandan cervical carcinomas identifies human papillomavirus clade–specific epigenome and transcriptome landscapes. Nature Genetics 52:800–810.
Poster Design Guidelines
Clear, concise, legible and compelling.
The PDF template is a poster about making posters. It provides design, typography and data visualiation tips with minimum fuss. Follow its advice until you have developed enough design sobriety and experience to know when to go your own way.
