Scientific graphical abstracts — design guidelines
Scientific posters — design guidelines
The Outbreak Poems — artistic emissions in a pandemic
Nature Cancer cover of Mutation spectra
2020 `\pi` day art and the piku
The deadly genomes — run away!
Second infinity `\aleph_2` and beyond — music and mathematics
DNA on 10th — street art, wayfinding and font
The tree of emotional life — phylogenetics of emoticons
The largest map of absolutely nothing: Universe — voids and superclusters
Pixels in space — Ultra-high resolution maps of the Moon, Solary System and Sky
Nature Methods Points of View visualization column
Nature Methods Points of Significance statistics column
In the late 90’s I started (a good decade for starts) a daily quotation server project at www.quoteserver.ca. The domain is now defunct—some pages are partially viewable at the Way Back Machine.
Below is the list of quotes I had collected by the end of the life of the project. Most are about love—duh—and a few are jolly jests from funny trenches. You know, that place where mustard gas makes your eyes water.
The quotes weren’t scraped from quote archives—each is meaningful and hand-picked.
the quote archive
And now for full list of 1,700+ other things worth reading. Such as everything Dorothy Parker has written and ... yes, even the Pinky and Brain quotes, which are a special kind of special.
Little fly, thy summer’s play My careless hand hath brushed away. Am not I a fly like thee, Or art not thou a man like me. For I dance, and drink, and sing Till some blind hand doth brush my wing. If that is life, and strength, and breath And the word of thought is death Then am I a happy fly? If I live, or if I die.
William Blake
45
Sleep is a death, O make me try By sleeping, what it is to die, And as gently lay my head On my grave, as now my bed.
Sir Thomas Browne
Religio Medici, part II
48
I love thee with the love I seemed to lose With my lost saints,—I love thee with the breath Smiles, tears, of all my life!—and, if God choose, I shall but love thee better after death.
Elizabeth Barrett Browning
Sonnets from the Portuguese
132
To-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow, Creeps in this petty pace from day to day To the last syllable of recorded time, And all our yesterdays have lighted fools The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle! Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player That struts and frets his hour upon the stage And then is heard no more: it is a tale Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, Signifying nothing.
William Shakespeare
Macbeth, V. i. 19.
140
Half a league, half a league, Half a league onward, All in the valley of Death Rode the six hundred.
Alfred Tennyson
Charge of the Light Brigade
154
Sleep—Death without dying—living, but not life.
Edwin Arnold
156
Death is sometimes a punishment, sometimes a gift; To many it has come as a favor.
Seneca
157
The prince who kept the world in awe, The judge whose dictate fix’d the law; The rich, the poor, the great, the small, Are levelled; death confounds ’em all.
Gay
158
Because I could not stop for Death, He kindly stopped for me, The carriage held but just ourselves And Immortality.
Emily Dickinson
266
Life without a friend is like death without a witness.
299
Death comes with a crawl, or comes with a pounce, And whether he’s slow or spry, It isn’t the fact that you’re dead that counts, But only, how did you die?
Edmund Vance Cooke
How Did You Die?
337
Windows NT crashed. I am the Blue Screen of Death. No one hears your screams.
A Haiku computer error message.
340
Three things are certain: Death, taxes and lost data. Guess which has occurred.
A Haiku computer error message.
417
Death is nature’s way of telling you to slow down.
431
Don’t be afraid of death so much as an inadequate life.
Bertolt Brecht
466
He is one of those people who would be enormously improved by death.
H.H. Munro
475
Those who fear death most are those who enjoy life least.
502
Marriage is the death of hope.
Woody Allen
524
At six o’clock we cleaned our cells, At seven all was still, But the sough and swing of a mighty wing The prison seemed to fill, For the Lord of Death with icy breath Had entered in to kill.
Oscar Wilde
The Ballad of Reading Gaol
595
The smallest sprout shows there is really no death. And if ever there was it led forward life, and does not wait at the end to arrest it.
Walt Whitman
Song of Myself
645
I do not believe that any man fears to be dead, but only the stroke of death.
Francis Bacon
An Essay on Death
712
All tragedies are finish’d by a death, All comedies are ended by a marriage.
Lord Byron
Don Juan, c.iii, st. 9
729
Vivre est un maladie dont le sommeil nous soulage toutes les 16 heures. C’est un pallatif. La mort est le remede. [Living is an illness to which sleep provides relief every sixteen hours. It’s a palliative. The remedy is death.]
Nicolas-Sebastien Chamfort
Maximes et Pensees, ch. 2
812
Death hath so many doors to let out life.
John Fletcher
The Custom of the Country, II.ii
885
Then, with no throbs of fiery pain, No cold gradations of decay, Death broke at once the vital chain, And freed his soul the nearest way.
Samuel Johnson
Of Gray’s Odes
963
O death! I know it—’tis my famulus— Thus turns to naught my fairest bliss! That visions in abundance such as this Must be disturbed by that dry prowler thus!
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Faust
1092
For the crown of our life as it closes Is darkness, the fruit there of dust; No thorns go as deep as the rose’s, And love is more cruel than lust. Time turns the old days to derision, Our loves into corpses or wives; And marriage and death and division Make barren our lives.
Algernon Charles Swinburne
Dolores
1130
Though they go mad they shall be sane. Though they sink through the sea, they shall rise again. Though lovers be lost, love shall not, And death shall have no dominion.
Dylan Thomas
1138
My life is light, waiting for the death wind, Like a feather on the back of my hand.
T.S. Eliot
1141
Death be not proud, though some have called thee Mighty and dreadful, for, thou art not so, For, those, whom thou think’st, thou dost overthrow, Die not, poor death, nor yet canst thou kill me.
John Donne
Holy Sonnets X
1142
Don’t strew me with roses after I’m dead. When Death claims the light of my brow No flowers of life will cheer me: instead You may give me my roses now!
Thomas F. Healey
1194
Suffer me to take your hand. Suffer me to cherish you Till the dawn is in the sky. Whether I be false or true, Death comes in a day or two.
Edna St. Vincent Millay
Mariposa
1311
Show me a love was done and through, Tell me a kiss escaped its debt! Son, to your death you’ll pay your due— Women and elephants never forget.
Dorothy Parker
Ballade of Unfortunate Mammals
1319
Oh, it is sure as it is sad That any lad is every lad, And what’s a girl, to dare impore Her dear be hers forevermore? Though he be tried and he be bold, And swearing death should he be cold, He’ll run the path the others went.... But you, my sweet, are different.
Dorothy Parker
Incurable
1446
In every parting there is an image of death.
George Eliot
1472
For the Angel of Death spread his wings on the blast, And breathed in the face of the foe as he pass’d; And the eyes of the sleepers wax’d deadly and chill, And their hearts but once heaved, and for ever grew still!
Lord Byron
The Destruction of Sennacherib
1476
To die, to sleep— To sleep, perchance to dream, ay there’s the rub, For in that sleep of death what dreams may come When we have shuffled off this mortal coil, Must give us pause; there’s the respect That makes calamity of so long life.
William Shakespeare
Hamlet
1485
The harder the conflict, the more glorious the triumph. What we obtain too cheap, we esteem too lightly; it is dearness only that gives everything its value. I love the man that can smile in trouble, that can gather strength from distress and grow brave by reflection. ’Tis the business of little minds to shrink; but he whose heart is firm, and whose conscience approves his conduct, will pursue his principles unto death.
Thomas Paine
1596
I do not want to believe that death is the gateway to another life. For me, it is a closed door. I do not say it is a step we must all take, but that it is a horrible and dirty adventure.
▲ The 26th tree in the digit forest of `\pi`. Why is there a flower on the ground?.
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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.
▲ The first 46 digits of `\pi` in 8 trees. There are so many more.
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And things can get crazy in the forest.
▲ A forest of the digits of '\pi`, by ecosystem.
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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.
▲ Nature Methods Points of Significance column: Testing for rare conditions.
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We demand rigidly defined areas of doubt and uncertainty! âD. 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.
▲ Nature Methods Points of Significance column: Standardization fallacy.
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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.
Making a scientific graphical abstract? Refer to my practical design guidelines and redesign examples to improve organization, design and clarity of your graphical abstracts.