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`\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. 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.
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!
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E=-23 of 64 digits of Pi, sorted by aspect ratio. Start (3) and end (2) digits are highlighted.
(zoom, BUY ARTWORK )
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E=-23 of 64 digits of Pi, sorted by aspect ratio. Start (3) and end (2) digits are highlighted.
(zoom, BUY ARTWORK )
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E=-23 of 64 digits of Pi, sorted by aspect ratio. Prime (2 3 5 7) digits are are highlighted.
(zoom, BUY ARTWORK )
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E=-23 of 64 digits of Pi, sorted by aspect ratio. Digits are colored by prime/composite status.
(zoom, BUY ARTWORK )
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E=-223 to -220 of 768 digits of Pi, sorted by aspect ratio. Start (3) and end (999999) digits are highlighted.
(zoom, BUY ARTWORK )
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E=-223 to -220 of 768 digits of Pi, sorted by aspect ratio.. Start (3) and end (999999) digits are highlighted.
(zoom, BUY ARTWORK )
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E=-223 to -220 of 768 digits of Pi, sorted by aspect ratio.. Prime (2 3 5 7) digits are are highlighted.
(zoom, BUY ARTWORK )
buy artwork
E=-223 to -220 of 768 digits of Pi, sorted by aspect ratio. Digits are colored by prime/composite status.
(zoom, BUY ARTWORK )
E=-223 to -209 of 768 digits of Pi, sorted by distance between start and end points (2.2–7.0). Start (3) and end (999999) digits are highlighted.
(zoom)
E=-223 of 768 digits of Pi. Start (3) and end (999999) digits are highlighted, as well as all prime digits. This path took about 1 CPU year to find. (37x51, r=0.725, area=1887, cm=1.9/13.4, dend=24.4)
(zoom)
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news + thoughts
The COVID charts — hospitalization rates
As part of the COVID Charts series, I fix a muddled and storyless graphic tweeted by Adrian Dix, Canada's Health Minister.
I show you how to fix color schemes to make them colorblind-accessible and effective in revealing patters, how to reduce redundancy in labels (a key but overlooked part of many visualizations) and how to extract a story out of a table to frame the narrative.
Music for the Moon: Flunk's 'Down Here / Moon Above'
The Sanctuary Project is a Lunar vault of science and art. It includes two fully sequenced human genomes, sequenced and assembled by us at Canada's Michael Smith Genome Sciences Centre.
The first disc includes a song composed by Flunk for the (eventual) trip to the Moon.
But how do you send sound to space? I describe the inspiration, process and art behind the work.
Happy 2021 `\pi` Day—
A forest of digits
Celebrate `\pi` Day (March 14th) and finally see the digits through the forest.
This year is full of botanical whimsy. A Lindenmayer system forest – deterministic but always changing. Feel free to stop and pick the flowers from the ground.
And things can get crazy in the forest.
Check out art from previous years: 2013 `\pi` Day and 2014 `\pi` Day, 2015 `\pi` Day, 2016 `\pi` Day, 2017 `\pi` Day, 2018 `\pi` Day and 2019 `\pi` Day.
Testing for rare conditions
All that glitters is not gold. —W. Shakespeare
The sensitivity and specificity of a test do not necessarily correspond to its error rate. This becomes critically important when testing for a rare condition — a test with 99% sensitivity and specificity has an even chance of being wrong when the condition prevalence is 1%.
We discuss the positive predictive value (PPV) and how practices such as screen can increase it.
Altman, N. & Krzywinski, M. (2021) Points of significance: Testing for rare conditions. Nature Methods 18:224–225.
Standardization fallacy
We demand rigidly defined areas of doubt and uncertainty! —D. Adams
A popular notion about experiments is that it's good to keep variability in subjects low to limit the influence of confounding factors. This is called standardization.
Unfortunately, although standardization increases power, it can induce unrealistically low variability and lead to results that do not generalize to the population of interest. And, in fact, may be irreproducible.
Not paying attention to these details and thinking (or hoping) that standardization is always good is the "standardization fallacy". In this column, we look at how standardization can be balanced with heterogenization to avoid this thorny issue.
Voelkl, B., Würbel, H., Krzywinski, M. & Altman, N. (2021) Points of significance: Standardization fallacy. Nature Methods 18:5–6.
Graphical Abstract Design Guidelines
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.
