Distractions and amusements, with a sandwich and coffee.
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.
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`.
I find this image deeply beautiful and deeply troubling, and I’ll try to explain why. —Max Cooper
The 7-level tree map was used for the Transcendental Tree Map track on Max Cooper's Yearning for the Infinite album. The album is an “audio/visual rendering with our obsession with the unobtainable”.
The video for the track was a collaboration between myself and Nick Cobby. The music contains layered loops whose lengths are based on prime numbers—as the track plays, some loops individually come in and out of phase with others, forming a longer loop. The full set never synchronizes though.
The transcendental tree map encodes the first 20,244 digits of `\pi` = 3.1415...7012.
The video constructs and then chaotically deconstructs a 7 level tree map of the digits of `\pi`. This map is shown below and is similar to other images I made for 2015 Pi Day, except that here the map is formatted for a 16:9 screen.
The video starts with an explicit construction of the map. This process begins with dividing the canvas with 3 vertical lines, which forms 4 rectangles. Each of the four rectangles formed by this process is divided with 1, 4, 1 and 5 horizontal lines, respectively. This forms 2 + 5 + 2 + 6 = 15 rectangles. Each of the 15 rectangles is divided by vertical lines according to the next 15 digits of Pi. This process repeats until we have performed the loop 7 times.
The division of each rectangle is not even—the positions of the lines are slightly jittered. This gives the map a more organic feel.
The number of digits encoded in each loop is 1, 4, 15, 98, 548, 2,962 and 16,616. In total, 17,180 vertical and 3,064 horizontal lines are drawn and these form the backbone of the map.
The video is created by layering numerous animations of the construction of the map, in which the rate and order of line growth is varied. Blinking rectangles indicate that the lines for a digit have completed drawing.
Love's the only engine of survival. —L. Cohen
We begin a series on survival analysis in the context of its two key complications: skew (which calls for the use of probability distributions, such as the Weibull, that can accomodate skew) and censoring (required because we almost always fail to observe the event in question for all subjects).
We discuss right, left and interval censoring and how mishandling censoring can lead to bias and loss of sensitivity in tests that probe for differences in survival times.
Dey, T., Lipsitz, S.R., Cooper, Z., Trinh, Q., Krzywinski, M & Altman, N. (2022) Points of significance: Survival analysis—time-to-event data and censoring. Nature Methods 19:906–908.
See How Scientists Put Together the Complete Human Genome.
My graphic in Scientific American's Graphic Science section in the August 2022 issue shows the full history of the human genome assembly — from its humble shotgun beginnings to the gapless telomere-to-telomere assembly.
Read about the process and methods behind the creation of the graphic.
See all my Scientific American Graphic Science visualizations.
My poster showing the genome structure and position of mutations on all SARS-CoV-2 variants appears in the March/April 2022 issue of American Scientist.
An accompanying piece breaks down the anatomy of each genome — by gene and ORF, oriented to emphasize relative differences that are caused by mutations.
My cover design on the 11 April 2022 Cancer Cell issue depicts depicts cellular heterogeneity as a kaleidoscope generated from immunofluorescence staining of the glial and neuronal markers MBP and NeuN (respectively) in a GBM patient-derived explant.
LeBlanc VG et al. Single-cell landscapes of primary glioblastomas and matched explants and cell lines show variable retention of inter- and intratumor heterogeneity (2022) Cancer Cell 40:379–392.E9.
Browse my gallery of cover designs.
My cover design on the 4 April 2022 Nature Biotechnology issue is an impression of a phylogenetic tree of over 200 million sequences.
Konno N et al. Deep distributed computing to reconstruct extremely large lineage trees (2022) Nature Biotechnology 40:566–575.
Browse my gallery of cover designs.
My cover design on the 17 March 2022 Nature issue depicts the evolutionary properties of sequences at the extremes of the evolvability spectrum.
Vaishnav ED et al. The evolution, evolvability and engineering of gene regulatory DNA (2022) Nature 603:455–463.
Browse my gallery of cover designs.