NSF Visualization Challenge 2008

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Another year, another NSF/AAAS Science and Engineering Visualization Challenge. With the opening of my institution mere days away (tonight’s the gala), I’ll limit my comments to short and snarky.

As usual, the quick and dirty way of catching up on the challenge winners is to enjoy the Science magazine interactive thingie: you can browse the images, listen to the podcast, etc. The one thing you can’t do unless you subscribe to the magazine is actually read the article. Bummer. The NSF provides a fairly thorough description of the winners with plenty of links, so you can still get a good sense of who did what.

Most of the winners are truly impressive, and thus unworthy of comment (except I’ll note that I quite enjoyed the “Smarter than the Worm” video). Instead, I’ll of course mention the one I didn’t much care for… The “squidsuckers” image above. We’re looking at tiny suction cups (each less than half a millimeter in diameter, with chitin “fangs”) on the arm of a Loligo pealei squid.

First off, I find the garish colors a bit of a turn-off, and the mediocre alignment of the color to the underlying image doesn’t help. Jessica Schiffman, the doctoral student at Drexel University who created the picture, claims that the film Little Shop of Horrors inspired the color scheme (presumably the Frank Oz version, not the original black-and-white movie). That’s cute and all, but I wonder if a novice viewer would interpret these tiny little maws as individual Audrey Juniors, waiting to consume the squid’s prey rather than simply latch onto it.

Polarized Colo(u)r

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Long time, no write, except for that silly link last week. I’m still working on that little project in San Francisco, which consumes an extraordinary amount of time.

At any rate, I saw the above image, which accompanies a press release from the European Southern Observatory (ESO), and I figured I could express my thoughts quickly enough not to feel too guilty about taking the time to write.

The press release bears the title “Accretion Discs Show Their True Colours,” which describes the different appearance of quasars in polarized light. The press release describes the research well: “‘The crucial observational difficulty here has been that the disc is surrounded by a much larger torus containing hot dust, whose light partly outshines that of the disc,’ says Kishimoto. ‘Because the light coming from the disc is scattered in the disc vicinity and thus polarised, by observing only polarised light from the quasars, one can uncover the buried light from the disc.’”

The image does pretty well, too, except I have some nagging issues with it. Of course, the little circles with vertical lines suggest polarization to the initiated (although they also remind me of those glasses Chris Lowe wore back in the late 80s that I wanted so much), but I fear that visual shorthand is lost on a large percentage of the audience. And even if you get it, why does the little circle moving over the image change the color of the entire image? It would be much better if only the part inside the circle changed color. A little Photoshop work would make this image much, much clearer.

So how’s that for succinct?

(BTW, in nosing around for a link to “polarized light,” I ran across Polarization.com, which suggests to me that there really is a website for just about everything.)

 

Hubble Space Kaleidoscope

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I’ll break my silence with a simple link… To The Onion article “Hubble Kaleidoscope Finds Evidence Of Space Looking All Crazy” that appears in this week’s issue. I don’t know how long that link will stay active but bwa-ha-ha-ha! Dang funny.

And there’s some truth to it, too. I’m inspired to round out my next column for the Communicating Astronomy with the Public Journal.

La viande robotique

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Just an unusual image I ran across in the Journal of the Centre Nationale de Recherche Scientifique (CNRS), in an article entitled “The Robot Butcher” (I can’t make these things up).

Why have a robot cut meat? Efficiency, it seems: the do-dad above can prep 250 kilograms of meat per hour versus the 100 kilograms per hour by its human competitor. And it does so with a smaller margin of error. No way to get a little extra from the butcher anymore. No special cut. And no one to flirt with, either (I’m thinking of Alice on the Brady Bunch here).

The oddness of the image, however, lies in the striking contrast between the mechanized butcher and the all-too fleshy substance of the meat. Somehow, it seems unfair to the cow, and moreover, seems like an intrusion of the mechanical into an utterly animalistic behavior—namely the consumption of one critter by another.

Hrm. Anyway…

There’s a kinda interesting diagram of the Sun, too, but I found the robot butcher more engaging, for whatever reason.

Clan Apis

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I just ran across Jay Hosler’s Clan Apis comic book. I’m not a bio kind of guy, so I can’t comment on the accuracy of either the drawings or the science embedded in the story, but both seem spot on. Hosler’s artwork treats the bees with loving detail, while maintaining a pleasant and readable style that hints at manga. The book follows the life of a single bee, Nyuki, touching on her life cycle and the structure of the hive as a whole. A story brilliantly told, with an admirable blend of science and humor.

Clan Apis also receives extensive treatment on Hosler’s website, including a section-by section treatment of the story and the science. Really nice stuff.

This also reminds me of the nascent work of the Small Science Collective, a group of folks (some of whom I happen to know) who create downloadable “mini-zines” with science stories. The idea here is much more of a guerilla tactic: make the comics available for free! (Much like the reprehensible Chick tracts that litter far too many of our nation’s public transportation systems.

As a long-time reader of comics and comic books, I love seeing them used like this!

Ionosphere in 4D

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Space Environment Technologies’ Communication Alert and Prediction System has announced Earth Space 4-D, a collection of layers in Google Earth.

Unfortunately, the ES4D site offers basically no information about the layers themselves. For that, you need to go to the press release from which I learned about the whole thing: “ ‘Colors represent electron content,’ Tobiska explains. “Bright red is high density; that’s where radio communications are restricted to few or no frequencies. Blue is low density; no problem there.’ ” Okay, not bad, but why can’t we link to come kind of explanatory text on the page that serves up the data layers?

Another gripe. The ionosphere extends up to about 200 kilometers, but the KML layer seems to hover above that. It just seems like you could represent the electron density and such at its actual altitude.

And another. Unfortunately, you evidently need to download new KML files from the aforementioned site every time you want to take a look at the data. Hrm. Less than elegant. Isn’t there a way to offer KML layer that update automatically…?

So, I dunno. I guess this is a good start, but I think the offering could make better use of the available tools and technologies, the data should be represented to scale, and for heaven’s sake, we should be told what we’re looking at.

Seeing Red

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A personal post today… I’m color blind, and admitting to that often results in people asking how a color blind person can be a “science visualizer” or (as is the case now) a “director of science visualization.” My reply usually has to do with experiencing the subjectivity of seeing early on and blah, blah, blah. I won’t subject you to that right now.

Instead I simply want to quote a couple of sentences from an interview with Arno Motulsky that appears in today’s Science Times: “Our laboratory found that one-half of males with normal color vision had the amino acid alanine in their red pigment, while the other half all carried the amino acid serine, at the same site. This finding means that the same exact red color is perceived as a different type of red, depending on a person’s genetic makeup.”

Ha! So there, you “color seeing” people! You “normal color vision” types! You don’t see an absolute “red” any more than I do.

(Thanks, BTW, to Declan McCullagh, who doesn’t know I cribbed his image above. I need to write and ask him for permission…)

Phobos in Stereo

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Sometimes I just want to post a kewl image, and this qualifies! The above image of Mars’s moon Phobos stopped me in my tracks this morning, for a multitude of reasons’

First off, it’s color. I don’t recall any earlier color images of Phobos, although I’m too lazy to go check.

Secondly, it’s available in stereo! Which is to say, stereoscopic, not stereophonic. What the rest of the world calls “3D.” This happens to be on my mind, since I’m involved with this crazy construction project, which will eventually house a gorgeous planetarium (of course) as well as a stereoscopic theater. I’m keenly interested in finding content for it, particularly real-world content that isn’t computer-generated. (If you want to watch a video of me from the recent CineGrid conference, you can learn more about my vision for media in the new California Academy of Sciences.)

But lastly, I was especially surprised because the image was taken by the HiRISE camera aboard NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO). HiRISE has taken all kinds of spiffy images of the surface of Mars, but I can only attribute it to a lack of imagination on my part that HiRISE snapping a picture of one of Mars’s moons never occurred to me.

Visualizing Subjectivity

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An article in today’s Science Times describes the artwork of Anne Adams, who suffered from frontotemporal dementia (FTD), which effectively rewires the brain in a way that can produce compulsive behaviors ranging from shoplifting to increased creativity. Adams, as you may guess, exhibited signs of the latter, increasing her output (and some might say her innovativeness) as an artist.

Some of her drawings and paintings appear on a web page from the UCSF Medical Center (“UCSF” refers to the University of California, San Francisco, BTW, so this is a shout out to my new homies) as part of the Patient Art Gallery of their Memory and Aging Center. The title of the above image is “Migrane,” which got me to thinking…

While it might be a little overblown to equate Adams’s drawings with a totally different condition, I nonetheless immediately thought of the effects of Charles Bonnet syndrome, when a person’s increasing blindness can occasionally result in vivid hallucinations—resulting from brain stimuli “bleeding over” into the visual cortex, if I can be forgiven for such a slapdash description.

I first read about Charles Bonnet syndrome in V S Ramachandran’s brilliant Phantoms in the Brain, which has much to recommend it if you’re at all interested in brain physiology—hateful as it is to think of one’s grey matter as, well, matter. As I recall, Ramachandran suggests that some of James Thurber’s later drawings may have been partly inspired by the hallucinations he experienced. Of course, I read the book about nine years ago (and it currently sits, unpacked and unavailable for review, in a box until I get my new office), so my recollection may have suffered.

The folks at Damn Interesting had a damn interesting entry about the syndrome earlier this year.

At any rate, I often like to talk about the subjectivity of science visualization, but these examples take subjectivity to the ultimate level: the completely subjective experience of an individual’s brain state.

(Oh, and happy birthday, Mom!)

Theorems as Decoration

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An article in this week’s Science News describes mathematical decorations known as sangakus—visual representations of geometric proofs that appear in Japanese temples. The article shows a sample theorem, but I find particularly striking is the use of mathematical representations for their aesthetic impact—presumably both visual and intellectual.

Tony Rothman presents several high-resolution images of sangaku on his web page, and he has also coauthored the forthcoming Sacred Mathematics with Hidetoshi Fukagawa. With any luck, that volume will shed additional light on the topic and offer a much more complete perspective on the intersection of mathematics and aesthetics in a seemingly unusual venue.

(Rothman, BTW, has authored several books: including The provocative Doubt and Certainty, which looks at epistemological questions in science from both Eastern and Western perspectives, and
the more light-hearted Everything’s Relative: And Other Fables from Science and Technology, which presents a laundry-list of oddities from the history of science. At least, those are two of his that happen to grace my shelves.)