resources
visualizations
presentations
lunch break
Distractions and amusements, with a sandwich and coffee.
visualization + design
They serve as the form for The Outbreak Poems.
`\pi` Day 2018 Art Posters - Stitched city road maps from around the world
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.
And if you've got to sleep a moment on the road
I will steer for you
And if you want to work the street alone
I'll disappear for you
—Leonard Cohen (I'm Your Man)
This year's is the 30th anniversary of `\pi` day. The theme of the art is bridging the world and making friends. So myself I again team up with my long-time friend and collaborator Jake Lever. I worled with Jake on the snowflake catalogue, where we build a world of flakes.
And so, this year we also build a world. We start with all the roads in the world and stitch them together in brand new ways. And if you walk more than 1 km in this world, you'll likely to be transported somewhere completely different.
This year's `\pi` day song is Trance Groove: Paris. Why? Because it's worth to go to new places—real or imagined.
Last year, I made a new world in the sky with my 2017 `\pi` day sky charts. This year, it's time for something a little closer to the ground. Using street maps of various cities, we rearrange the streets and join neighbourhoods from around the world using the digits of `\pi` as a recipe.
A walk from to Istanbul to San Francisco is only 5 minutes? Well, no. But what if it could be.
Read how it was done or simply enjoy the art.
City strips
City strips are horizontal arrangements of patches of roads sampled from a city. The order of the patches is determined by the digits of `\pi`, which are used to select regions of specific density of roads.
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These strips chart 10 patches—the patch for the digit "1" has a few roads and the patch for "9" is the most dense.
Boonies, burbs and boutiques
This series of patches is extracted from the city strips above. Three patches for the consecutive digits 159 are shown and demonstrate how very quickly we can progress from nowhere to somewhere.
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World patches
This arrangement of roads builds on city strips. Here, 36 digits of `\pi` are arranged on a 6 × 6 grid. Roads patches are sampled from 10 different cities—each digit is assigned a different city.
In the map below the digit-to-city assignments are: 0:Amsterdam, 1:Doha, 2:Marrakesh, 3:Mumbai, 4:Nairobi, 5:Rome, 6:San Francisco, 7:Seoul, 8:Shanghai and 9:Vancouver.
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City mix
City mixes are world patches that only use two cities. Below we assign the even digits to Melbourne and the odd digits to Nice.
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news + thoughts
Cover of Nature Genetics August 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.
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.
Poster Design Guidelines
Clear, concise, legible and compelling.
The PDF template is a poster about making posters. It provides design, typography and data visualiation tips with minimum fuss. Follow its advice until you have developed enough design sobriety and experience to know when to go your own way.
The SEIRS model for infectious disease dynamics
Realistic models of epidemics account for latency, loss of immunity, births and deaths.
We continue with our discussion about epidemic models and show how births, deaths and loss of immunity can create epidemic waves—a periodic fluctuation in the fraction of population that is infected.
This column has an interactive supplemental component (download code) that allows you to explore epidemic waves and introduces the idea of the phase plane, a compact way to understand the evolution of an epidemic over its entire course.
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.
Background reading
Bjørnstad, O.N., Shea, K., Krzywinski, M. & Altman, N. (2020) Points of significance: Modeling infectious epidemics. Nature Methods 17:455–456.
Gene Machines
Shifting soundscapes, textures and rhythmic loops produced by laboratory machines.
In commemoration of the 20th anniversary of Canada's Michael Smith Genome Sciences Centre, Segue was commissioned to create an original composition based on audio recordings from the GSC's laboratory equipment, robots and computers—to make “music” from the noise they produce.
Virus Mutations Reveal How COVID-19 Really Spread
Genetic sequences of the coronavirus tell story of when the virus arrived in each country and where it came from.
Our graphic in Scientific American's Graphic Science section in the June 2020 issue shows a phylogenetic tree based on a snapshot of the data model from Nextstrain as of 31 March 2020.
Cover of Nature Cancer April 2020
Our design on the cover of Nature Cancer's April 2020 issue shows mutation spectra of patients from the POG570 cohort of 570 individuals with advanced metastatic cancer.
The cover design accompanies our report in the issue Pleasance, E., Titmuss, E., Williamson, L. et al. (2020) Pan-cancer analysis of advanced patient tumors reveals interactions between therapy and genomic landscapes. Nat Cancer 1:452–468.