resources
visualizations
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lunch break
Distractions and amusements, with a sandwich and coffee.
visualization + design
`\pi` Day 2014 Art Posters
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.
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.
For the 2014 `\pi` day, two styles of posters are available: folded paths and frequency circles.
The folded paths show `\pi` on a path that maximizes adjacent prime digits and were created using a protein-folding algorithm.
The frequency circles colourfully depict the ratio of digits in groupings of 3 or 6. Oh, look, there's the Feynman Point!
frequency circles of `pi`
Some of the posters for this year's Pi Day art expand on the work from last year, which showed Pi as colored circles on a grid.
For those of you who really liked this minimalist depiction of π , I've created something slightly more complicated, but still stylish: Pi digit frequency circles. These are pretty and easy to understand. If you like random distribution of colors (and circles), these are your thing.
Briefly, each set of concentric rings corresponds to a sequence of digits in
π
, such as 3 (314 159 265 ...) or 6 (314159 265358 ...). The number of times a given digit is seen within a sequence is encoded by the thickness of the ring. Rings are ordered outward in numerical order of their digits (i.e. 0 on the inside, 9 on the outside).
For some posters, the first digit (3) is offset from the rest of the groups. Look for the high count of 9s at the end of posters showing π up to the Feynman Point (6 9s at digit 762). For posters that show more digits, try to find the Feynman Point somewhere among the groups.
The Feynman point is at an extremely interesting location. If we group the digits of
π
into groups of 6, then the first 999999 falls exactly into the 128th group. But, if we group the digits by 3s, then the two groups 999 and 999 fall exactly into groups 255 and 256 (a power of 2!), which can be arranged into a perfect square of 16 x 16 groups.
The Feynman point is a specific case of the general case in which the digit d appears n times in a row. I call this the (d=7,n=6) and provide a list of all these points in the first 1,000,000 digits. Points with a large n value will contribute significantly to the frequency distribution of the digit group they fall in. If the sequence is split across groups, its impact is lower.
news + thoughts
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.
The Whole Earth Cataloguer
All the living things.An illustration of the Tree of Life, showing some of the key branches.
The tree is drawn as a DNA double helix, with bases colored to encode ribosomal RNA genes from various organisms on the tree.
All living things on earth descended from a single organism called LUCA (last universal common ancestor) and inherited LUCA’s genetic code for basic biological functions, such as translating DNA and creating proteins. Constant genetic mutations shuffled and altered this inheritance and added new genetic material—a process that created the diversity of life we see today. The “tree of life” organizes all organisms based on the extent of shuffling and alteration between them. The full tree has millions of branches and every living organism has its own place at one of the leaves in the tree. The simplified tree shown here depicts all three kingdoms of life: bacteria, archaebacteria and eukaryota. For some organisms a grey bar shows when they first appeared in the tree in millions of years (Ma). The double helix winding around the tree encodes highly conserved ribosomal RNA genes from various organisms.
Johnson, H.L. (2018) The Whole Earth Cataloguer, Sactown, Jun/Jul, p. 89
Why we can't give up this odd way of typing
All fingers report to home row.An article about keyboard layouts and the history and persistence of QWERTY.
My Carpalx keyboard optimization software is mentioned along with my World's Most Difficult Layout: TNWMLC. True typing hell.
McDonald, T. (2018) Why we can't give up this odd way of typing, BBC, 25 May 2018.
Molecular Case Studies Cover
The theme of the April issue of Molecular Case Studies is precision oncogenomics. We have three papers in the issue based on work done in our Personalized Oncogenomics Program (POG).
The covers of Molecular Case Studies typically show microscopy images, with some shown in a more abstract fashion. There's also the occasional Circos plot.
I've previously taken a more fine-art approach to cover design, such for those of Nature, Genome Research and Trends in Genetics. I've used microscopy images to create a cover for PNAS—the one that made biology look like astrophysics—and thought that this is kind of material I'd start with for the MCS cover.
Happy 2018 `\tau` Day—Art for everyone
