And whatever I do will become forever what I've done.don't rehearsemore quotes

pi day: curious

Scientific graphical abstracts — design guidelines

visualization + design

A $\pi$ day music video!: Transcendental Tree Map premieres on 2020 Pi Day from Max Cooper's Yearning for the Infinite. Animation by Nick Cobby and myself. Watch live from Barbican Centre.
Music video of the “Transcendental Tree Map” Max Cooper's Yearning for the Infinite album. This video premiered on 2020 Pi Day. Music by Max Cooper. Animation by Nick Cobby and myself.
The 2020 Pi Day art celebrates digits of $\pi$ with piku (パイク) —poetry inspired by haiku.
They serve as the form for The Outbreak Poems.
Tau Day tree map animation of 8,909 digits of $\tau = 2 \pi$ created with 40,015 lines. The video is 6:28 minutes long.

$pi$ Day 2013 Art Posters

2019 $\pi$ has hundreds of digits, hundreds of languages and a special kids' edition.
2018 $\pi$ day
2017 $\pi$ day
2016 $\pi$ approximation day
2016 $\pi$ day
2015 $\pi$ day
2014 $\pi$ approx day
2014 $\pi$ day
2013 $\pi$ day
Circular $\pi$ art

On March 14th celebrate $\pi$ Day. Hug $\pi$—find a way to do it.

For those who favour $\tau=2\pi$ will have to postpone celebrations until July 26th. That's what you get for thinking that $\pi$ is wrong. I sympathize with this position and have $\tau$ day art too!

If you're not into details, you may opt to party on July 22nd, which is $\pi$ approximation day ($\pi$ ≈ 22/7). It's 20% more accurate that the official $\pi$ day!

Finally, if you believe that $\pi = 3$, you should read why $\pi$ is not equal to 3.

All art posters are available for purchase.
I take custom requests.

2013 was the first year in which I made $\pi$ day art. It was a year of dots and love.

René Hansen has created an interactive version of this year's posters! Why not go to the Feynman point directly!

shimmering dots

Each digit is represented by a dot of a different color. The inner grey dots appear to glimmer—this is the luminance effect in action.

The posters explore the relationship between adjacent digits in $\pi$, which are encoded by color using the scheme shown above. The design appears to shimmer due to the luminance effect. In some versions of the poster, adjacent identical (or similar) digits are connected by lines.

The recipe for each poster is included in its figure legend. It gives the color of the $i$th outer and inner circles. $\pi_i$ is used to represent the $i$th digit of $\pi$. For example, the recipe

$\pi_i$ / $\pi_{i+1}$

corresponds to the case where outer circle color encodes the $i$th digit and the inner circle color encodes the next digit $i+1$th. In this scheme, inner and outer circles of adjacent positions have the same color.

Pi Day Art | March 14th is Pi Day. Celebrate with this post-modern poster. (PNG, BUY ARTWORK)
Pi Day Art | March 14th is Pi Day. Celebrate with this post-modern poster. (PNG, BUY ARTWORK)
Pi Day Art | March 14th is Pi Day. Celebrate with this post-modern poster. (PNG, BUY ARTWORK)

The posters were generated automatically with a Perl script that generated SVG files. Post processing and layout was done in Illustrator. If you are interested in depicting your favourite number this way, let me know.

The design was inspired by the beautiful AIDS posters by Elena Miska.

love in $\pi$—you can find it here

I calculated $pi$ to 13,099,586 digits and then I found love.

It's fun to look for digits or look for words in $\pi$.

Just don't get carried away. Because $\pi$ is likely normal in base 10, all words and all patterns appear in it, somewhere.

I wanted to know the first time that "love" appears in $\pi$. When encoded using the scheme a=0, b=1, ..., z=25, "love" is the digit sequence 1114214.

This sequence appears first at position 13,099,586 (...892199163111142148187311392...). And, of course, infinitely many times after that.

Curiously, "hate" (0700194) appears well before love, at digit 514,717. In the first 200,000,000 digit "hate" appears 23 times, 6 times more than "love".

Pi Day Art | March 14th is Pi Day. Celebrate with this post-modern poster. (PNG, BUY ARTWORK)
Pi Day Art | March 14th is Pi Day. Celebrate with this post-modern poster. (PNG, BUY ARTWORK)

If you use the scheme a=1, b=2, ..., z=26, then "love" becomes 1215225. This is first seen at 6,317,696 (...610311912912152256606850141...).

Graphical Abstract Design Guidelines

Fri 13-11-2020

Clear, concise, legible and compelling.

Making a scientific graphical abstract? Refer to my practical design guidelines and redesign examples to improve organization, design and clarity of your graphical abstracts.

Graphical Abstract Design Guidelines — Clear, concise, legible and compelling.

"This data might give you a migrane"

Tue 06-10-2020

An in-depth look at my process of reacting to a bad figure — how I design a poster and tell data stories.

A poster of high BMI and obesity prevalence for 185 countries.

He said, he said — a word analysis of the 2020 Presidential Debates

Thu 01-10-2020

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.

Analysis of word usage by parts of speech for Trump and Biden reveals insight into each candidate.

Points of Significance celebrates 50th column

Mon 24-08-2020

We are celebrating the publication of our 50th column!

To all our coauthors — thank you and see you in the next column!

Nature Methods Points of Significance: Celebrating 50 columns of clear explanations of statistics. (read)

Uncertainty and the management of epidemics

Mon 24-08-2020

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.

Nature Methods Points of Significance column: Uncertainty and the management of epidemics. (read)

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.

Nature Methods Points of Significance column: Uncertainty and the management of epidemics. (Interactive supplemental materials)

Bjørnstad, O.N., Shea, K., Krzywinski, M. & Altman, N. (2020) Points of significance: Uncertainty and the management of epidemics. Nature Methods 17.

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

Mon 03-08-2020

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.

Dichotomy of Chromatin in Color. Nature Genetics, August 2020 issue. (read more)

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.