in which there are too many circles

Oct 22, 2008 12:33

Science yearly gives out awards for the best science images and visualizations. Here is one of this year's runners up:


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Comments 59

twoeleven October 22 2008, 21:37:00 UTC
It seemed like you could get a lot more interesting information with this technique.
yeah, i was really unimpressed; we already know about probability distributions and markov walks -- not a legit tech term, but ykwim -- in writing.

Does anyone have a writing sample they wouldn't mind me playing with and posting, of a type I don't have yet?
i'll send you a link to a huge corpus i wrote. :)

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corivax October 23 2008, 03:31:14 UTC
I'm kind of offended someone decided that was one of the year's best visualizations. I thought maybe it was part of an interactive application or something that picked more pattern out, but it doesn't seem to be. It's a simple, obvious technique that's been done better by others years earlier in ways that display more information, and interesting, nonobvious information at that.

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ratatosk October 22 2008, 21:46:25 UTC
This is amazing. Thank you.

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gement October 22 2008, 21:50:32 UTC
I wonder, somewhat guiltily, how much less beautifully bubbly it would look if you didn't link all the instances of their proper names. But thank you for making my words look so pretty.

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corivax October 23 2008, 03:40:40 UTC
Even if that's a contributing factor (I will go down and rerun it stripped of names tonight and post the new image), it is an important characteristic of your story and your writing style that there are only two objects of importance.

In my "normal" story there are lots of different nouns: doorways and crows (each with his own name) and horses and bosses and the tropical plant greenhouse and jeans and busses and the virus lab. In your story, the only context each character needs is the other, and that's most of the nouns we (that aren't being spoken)It's not "cheating" and you shouldn't feel guilty - it's how your story is put together, and it reflects the uniqueness and strength of your writing style. :)

I did strip both "he" and "said," so you may actually have a bubble handicap. :)

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ratatosk October 22 2008, 21:55:35 UTC
You are welcome to use my one complete and posted short story, which has almost no dialog and is not stream of consciousness. Actually it would be really fun to see. It's broken across two posts:

http://ratatosk.livejournal.com/69446.html
http://ratatosk.livejournal.com/69641.html

I wish I had things to say in rhyming poetry that took up that many words. :)

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corivax October 23 2008, 03:42:00 UTC
Awesome! I will definitely do that, thanks. :)

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perspicuity October 22 2008, 22:14:04 UTC
neat. will have to refer to this later when i have more time.

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