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

Wow! ysabetwordsmith October 23 2008, 18:10:52 UTC
This is gorgeous ( ... )

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Re: Wow! corivax October 23 2008, 23:25:39 UTC
Whoa. I cannot wait to see what those look like. Thank you so much. Thank you! That's very inspiring!

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Re: Wow! ysabetwordsmith October 24 2008, 01:11:40 UTC
I'm glad to hear that. I really, really want to see the sestina "Geeks to the Rescue" because that form is totally based on word repetition. (I tried to do that one myself, and got the text pasted in, but I couldn't find an "enter" button or anything like that.) If you want samples of other types of writing, I also do nonfiction articles and so forth; much variety available. It might be interesting to look through my archives for other poetic forms that rely on word repetition, such as the rondeau.

This is such a lovely and informative style of art you've presented here. I linked to it from my blog.

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Anatomy of a sestina corivax October 29 2008, 05:22:56 UTC
Once I have a bunch more done, I'll collect them in another post, but I finally feel like this image of the sestina lets you follow the structure. :) I assigned each of your capstone words their own color, and then I let the circles switch off what side of the line they were on so it was easier to follow a repeating set with the eye - no corners. I love the way the capstone words braid like cord - I really wish I had some mizuhiki to make a 3d model of your sestina. :)


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hitchhiker October 23 2008, 21:32:38 UTC
that's absolutely delightful

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corivax October 23 2008, 23:26:29 UTC
Thanks!

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thewronghands October 23 2008, 22:05:22 UTC
This is fascinating and you are awesome for thinking of it; thanks! Whee.

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thewronghands October 23 2008, 22:06:04 UTC
Hah. I meant to use the icon below that one in my list (see above), but this one suits too. Freudian iconography.

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a rant, apparently corivax October 23 2008, 23:14:23 UTC
Ha! This from the woman who completely ignored the nude pictures I sent her! It's a good thing I know it was because I'm so hot the merest glimpse of me rendered you unable to type. :) Please note: I'm all the way over here and you can't whack me for that.

Seriously, though, it wasn't very hard to think of, and incredibly easy to code. The majority of the time I spent "coding" was trying to figure out why the help files for the arc-drawing routine weren't working. :) I just felt irked that Science had honored what seemed like a really mediocre visualization, when there were obviously much more interesting things you could do with it, despite the simplicity, given a few minutes' work ( ... )

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corivax October 29 2008, 05:46:51 UTC
Heh. I'll give 'em a go and let you know - I suspect I'll be making another post about this in a week or so.

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aquaeri October 25 2008, 04:56:49 UTC
I'm a grumpy geneticist, because my reaction to that biblical visualisation was: Ur doin it rong.

There are heaps of tools in genetics where we want to map regions of similarity (defined in various ways) along a stretch of chromosome, and all of them I know of use the equivalent of right-angled triangles instead of circles. So you can actually see the higher-order structural relationships, because the circles aren't all overlapping each other inconveniently (you put a little white dot in the tip of the triangle in this version to the get the full effect, or just switch to a proper 2D diagram).

This is more like patterns of similarity among repeats, so the next level up.

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corivax October 29 2008, 05:46:17 UTC
I really want to see it it sounds awesome and I love learning about new visualizations (and writing them up in my visualization blog) but the link is broken. :) Can you double-check it for me? Livejournal does stupid rich text formatting sometimes.

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