Archive for March, 2010
Saturday, March 27th, 2010
Bridging the gap between the command line and files
I recently added some commands to rIDL to view and manipulate the command history. This makes it easier to copy commands entered at the command line to a file. See the screencast below for a demo.
No Comments » - Posted in IDL,rIDL by Michael Galloy
Tuesday, March 23rd, 2010
Periodic table of periodic tables
My IDL Operators table was included in the Periodic Table of Periodic Tables. It’s Id, element 36, over on the right side. From the site: Marvel at the variety, giggle at the obscenity, revel in the geekery. Link via Information is Beautiful.
No Comments » - Posted in IDL,Visualization by Michael Galloy
Monday, March 22nd, 2010
Fundamentals of graphical perception
FlowingData has a great post about learning the fundamentals of graphical perception. In particular, the common techniques for encoding quantitative information are ordered by how accurately people can decode them according to William S. Cleveland and Robert McGill’s paper Graphical Perception: Theory, Experimentation, and Application to the Development of Graphical Methods. For a lot more [...]
No Comments » - Posted in Visualization by Michael Galloy
Friday, March 12th, 2010
The Known Universe by AMNH
Here’s a fun video for a Friday afternoon, a modern version of Powers of Ten, produced by The American Museum of Natural History.
No Comments » - Posted in Visualization by Michael Galloy
Tuesday, March 9th, 2010
Two data/visualization TED talks
While catching up on recent TED talks, I watched two on topics of interest to this website: one focused on data, Tim Berners-Lee’s “The year open data went worldwide”, and one demonstrating a novel visualization system, Gary Flake’s “Is Pivot a turning point for web exploration?”.
No Comments » - Posted in Data,Visualization by Michael Galloy
Tuesday, March 2nd, 2010
IDL User Group Meeting: Features needed in IDL
After the IDL 8.0 overview at the IDL User Group meeting last week, Bill Okubo also asked for a list of features IDL users needed. I think I have all the ideas people gave (along with some pertinent links to proof-of-concept ideas and background material): better map projections geo-browser export (i.e., to Google Earth, etc.) [...]
