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.

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 information about this type of thing, see Colin Ware’s Information Visualization.

Here’s a fun video for a Friday afternoon, a modern version of Powers of Ten, produced by The American Museum of Natural History.

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?”.

The NSF announced the 2009 winners of the Science & Engineering Visualization Challenge. There are definitely some awesome visualizations in the group. Surprisingly (to me), a web comic I read regularly, Piled Higher and Deeper, took the prize for “Information Posters and Graphics”.

Blaise Aguera y Arcas of Microsoft gave a fascinating TED talk about where Bing is going with their mapping services. Looks like they are integrating Photosynth into their 3-dimensional maps.

Of course, 3-dimensional viewing available on Bing was not supported for any of the browsers on my Mac (Firefox and Safari)…

I found this article fascinating. Basically, there are differences in color perception due to culture/language. Do I have to take into account the native language of the viewers of a visualization when choosing colors for it? Two colors that are easily distinguishable for me, may not be for someone else from a different culture (not to mention issues with color blindness).

Link via WeLoveDatavis.

Here is a catalog of the color tables from cpt-city that can be read into IDL with VIS_CPT2CT that I wrote about previously.

xkcd has another great science-related comic today.

Looking forward to the arrival of xkcd: volume 0 and mousepad for (a slightly late) Christmas!

The cpt-city website has a large collection of over 4,000 color tables (download of over 4,000 color tables). Unfortunately for us (i.e., me), they are all in the .cpt format used in GMT. Here’s a routine to read a .cpt file and return it as a 256 by 3 color table array:

IDL> rgb = vis_cpt2ct('gmt/GMT_copper.cpt')
IDL> help, rgb
RGB BYTE = Array[256, 3]
IDL> tvlct, rgb

Now I need a catalog that I can scan through to find a color table.