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visualization + design
`\pi` Day 2015 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.
Not a circle in sight in the 2015 `\pi` day art. Try to figure out how up to 612,330 digits are encoded before reading about the method. `\pi`'s transcendental friends `\phi` and `e` are there too—golden and natural. Get it?
This year's `\pi` day is particularly special. The digits of time specify a precise time if the date is encoded in North American day-month-year convention: 3-14-15 9:26:53.
The art has been featured in Ana Swanson's Wonkblog article at the Washington Post—10 Stunning Images Show The Beauty Hidden in `\pi`.
We begin with a square and progressively divide it. At each stage, the digit in `pi` is used to determine how many lines are used in the division. The thickness of the lines used for the divisions can be attenuated for higher levels to give the treemap some texture.
This method of encoding data is known as treemapping. Typically, it is used to encode hierarchical information, such as hard disk spac usage, where the divisions correspond to the total size of files within directories.
This kind of treemap can be made from any number. Below I show 6 level maps for `pi`, `phi` (Golden ratio) and `e` (base of natural logarithm).
The number of digits per level, `n_i` and total digits, `N_i` in the tree map for `pi`, `phi` and `e` is shown below for levels `i = 1 .. 6`.
PI PHI e
i n_i N_i n_i N_i n_i N_i
1 1 1 1 1 1 1
2 4 5 2 3 3 4
3 15 20 9 12 19 23
4 98 118 59 71 96 119
5 548 666 330 401 574 693
6 2962 3628 1857 2258 3162 3855
7 16616 20244 10041 12299 17541 21396
8 91225 111469
9 500861 612330
Dividing the map
In all the treemaps above, the divisions were made uniformly for each rectangle. With uniform division, the lines that divide a shape are evenly spaced. With randomized division, the placement of lines is randomized, while still ensuring that lines do not coincide.
A multiplier, such as `phi` (Golden Ratio), can be used to control the division. In this case, the first division is made at 1/`phi` (0.62/0.38 split) and the remaining rectangle (0.38) is further divided at `/`phi` (0.24/0.14 split).
Using a non-uniform multipler is one way to embed another number in the art.
When a multiplier like `phi` is used, divisions at the top levels create very large rectangles. To attenuate this, the effect of the multiplier can be weighted by the level. Regardless of what multiplier is used, the first level is always uniformly divided. Division at subsequent levels incorporates more of the multiplier effect.
The orientation of the division can be uniform (same for a layer and alternating across layers), alternating (alternating across and within a layer) or random. This modification has an effect only if the divisions are not uniform.
Adjusting line thickness
To emphasize the layers, a different line thickness can be used. When lines are drawn progressively thinner with each layer, detail is controlled and the map has more texture.
When all lines have the same thickness, it is harder to distinguish levels.
You could see this as a challenge! Below I show the treemaps for `pi`, `phi` and `e` with and without stroke modulation.
When displayed at a low resolution (the image below is 620 pixels across), shapes at higher levels appear darker because the distance between the lines within is close to (or smaller) than a pixel. By matching the line thickness to the image resolution, you can control how dark the smallest divisions appear.
Adding color
Adding color can make things better, or worse. Dropping color randomly, without respect for the level structure of the treemap, creates a mess.
We can rescue things by increasing the probability that a given rectangle will be made transparent—this will allow the color of the rectangle below to show through. Additionally, by drawing the layers in increasing order, smaller rectangles are drawn on top of bigger ones, giving a sense of recursive subdivision.
Because the color is assigned randomly, various instances of the treemap can be made. The maps below have the same proportion of colors and transparency (same as the first image in second row in the figure above) and vary only by the random seed to pick colors.
Coloring using adjacency graph
The color assignments above were random. For each shape the probability of choosing a given color (transparent, white, yellow, red, blue) was the same.
Color choice for a shape can also be influenced by the color of neighbouring shapes. To do this, we need to create a graph that captures the adjacency relationship between all the shapes at each level. Below I show the first 4 levels of the `pi` treemap and their adjacency graphs. In each graph, the node corresponds to a shape and an edge between nodes indicates that the shapes share a part of their edge. Shapes that touch only at a corner are not considered adjacent.
One way in which the graphs can be used is to attempt to color each layer using at most 4 colors. The 4 color theorem tells us that only 4 unique colors are required to color maps such as these in a way that no two neighbouring shapes have the same color.
It turns out that the full algorithm of coloring a map with only 4 colors is complicated, but reasonably simple options exist.. For the maps here, I used the DSATUR (maximum degree of saturation) approach.
The DSATUR algorithm works well, but does not guarantee a 4-color solution. It performs no backtracking. If you look carefully, one of the rectangles in the 4th layer (top right quadrant in the graph) required a 5th color (shown black).
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
