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Distractions and amusements, with a sandwich and coffee.
visualization + design
`\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
Cancer Cell cover
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.
Nature Biotechnology cover
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.
Nature cover — Gene Genie
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.
Happy 2022 `\pi` Day—
three one four: a number of notes
Celebrate `\pi` Day (March 14th) and finally hear what you've been missing.
“three one four: a number of notes” is a musical exploration of how we think about mathematics and how we feel about mathematics. It tells stories from the very beginning (314…) to the very (known) end of π (...264) as well as math (Wallis Product) and math jokes (Feynman Point), repetition (nn) and zeroes (null).
The album is scored for solo piano in the style of 20th century classical music – each piece has a distinct personality, drawn from styles of Boulez, Feldman, Glass, Ligeti, Monk, and Satie.
Each piece is accompanied by a piku (or πku), a poem whose syllable count is determined by a specific sequence of digits from π.
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, 2019 `\pi` Day, 2020 `\pi` Day and 2021 `\pi` Day.
PNAS Cover — Earth BioGenome Project
My design appears on the 25 January 2022 PNAS issue.
The cover shows a view of Earth that captures the vision of the Earth BioGenome Project — understanding and conserving genetic diversity on a global scale. Continents from the Authagraph projection, which preserves areas and shapes, are represented as a double helix of 32,111 bases. Short sequences of 806 unique species, sequenced as part of EBP-affiliated projects, are mapped onto the double helix of the continent (or ocean) where the species is commonly found. The length of the sequence is the same for each species on a continent (or ocean) and the sequences are separated by short gaps. Individual bases of the sequence are colored by dots. Species appear along the path in alphabetical order (by Latin name) and the first base of the first species is identified by a small black triangle.
Lewin HA et al. The Earth BioGenome Project 2020: Starting the clock. (2022) PNAS 119(4) e2115635118.
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.
