Archive for September, 2009
Sunday, September 13th, 2009
Awesome data visualization short story
Robin Sloan’s great short story “Mr. Penumbra’s Twenty-Four-Hour Book Store” opens up the science-fiction/data visualization genre. I just wish there was a 24-hour bookstore around here. Link via BoingBoing.
No Comments » - Posted in Visualization by Michael Galloy
Saturday, September 12th, 2009
Another great Hans Rosling TED talk
Hans Rosling has another engaging TED presentation, “Let my dataset change your mindset”. Rosling uses Gapminder to tell compelling stories about world health. Never are scatter plots so fascinating as in a Rosling presentation!
No Comments » - Posted in Visualization by Michael Galloy
Friday, September 11th, 2009
PySide: Qt for Python
Early this year, Nokia/Trolltech changed the Qt license from a dual-licensed model (GPL/proprietary) to the more permissive LGPL. But the existing Python bindings for Qt are made by a small company named Riverbank Computing who decided to stick with Qt’s original license. To fix this, Nokia has launched PySide to make Python bindings available with [...]
1 Comment » - Posted in IDL,Python by Michael Galloy
Thursday, September 10th, 2009
Slither 1.0 released
Jacquette Consulting announced Slither 1.0 today: Announcing the first official release of Slither, the IDL to Python bridge. Slither allows Python modules to be used in IDL as IDL objects, so you can use the large number of publicly available Python modules, and your own Python code, directly within your IDL application. In particular, this [...]
No Comments » - Posted in IDL,Python by Michael Galloy
Wednesday, September 9th, 2009
“What to demand from a Scientific Computing Language”
Peter Norvig, Director of Research at Google, gave the keynote at SciPy 2009, “What to demand from a Scientific Computing Language—Even if you don’t care about computing or languages”, a conference about scientific programming in Python. His requirements were: Batteries included means the standard distribution of the language gives all the tools to do standard [...]
2 Comments » - Posted in IDL,Python by Michael Galloy
Tuesday, September 8th, 2009
Information Visualization manifesto
Manuel Lima at VisualComplexity outlined a Information Visualization manifesto (with later comments) last week. The basic points are: Form follows function Start with a question Interactivity is key Cite your source The power of narrative Do not glorify aesthetics Look for relevancy Embrace time Aspire for knowledge Avoid gratuitious visualizations Only the first point seems [...]
No Comments » - Posted in Visualization by Michael Galloy
Saturday, September 5th, 2009
FITS QuickLook plugin
AstroBetter has an article on on a FITS QuickLook plugin for Mac OS X by the author of the plugin. Looks incredibly useful if you use a Mac and FITS files. QuickLook plugins for more scientific data file formats would be really nice. Any one have an HDF 5 plugin?
No Comments » - Posted in Mac by Michael Galloy
Friday, September 4th, 2009
Problems with filenames
While FILEPATH, FILE_DIRNAME, and FILE_BASENAME are quite useful, the rules they follow don’t match the way I think about filenames. There are several small issues that together make them painful for me to use. In this article, I will present my problems with these routines and I’ll show the routine I use to deal with [...]
No Comments » - Posted in IDL by Michael Galloy
Thursday, September 3rd, 2009
Top Science Visualization Videos of 2009
Wired recently posted “Best Science Visualization Videos of 2009″. It honors the top 10 entries of this year’s SciDAC visualization contest (last year, Tech-X‘s entry was in the top 10). From the article: Some of the most impressive images in science are produced when researchers take numerical data and represent it visually through modeling and [...]
No Comments » - Posted in Visualization by Michael Galloy
Wednesday, September 2nd, 2009
Good Magazine
Information is Beautiful has a round up of some of the great visualizations available in the Transparency section of Good Magazine. They also have a full gallery of the infographics on Flickr (there are currently 85 images in the set going back to December 2006). I liked the idea of a Flickr set of visualizations [...]
