The Anthropocene

Here's a fantastic example of visualization done right. This video does some panning and dancing (plus the obligatory "we stand at the edge of a new era" speech) around a very well done map of earth's urban centers and transport networks.

More views, and the sources that were used to generate them are available via Globaia here.

Hat tip: TechEBlog

Where did all the Meathead Stuff Go?

You've no doubt noticed that there is no longer any meathead content on 'parse, dammit!'. All the posts on long dismantled Soviet super-athlete programs, bar napkin barbell physics and my awful deadlift are nowhere to be found.

There are reasons for this. I carefully studied the information that Google's awesome surveillance apparatus was producing regarding you lot (Kru Pete, you should be ashamed of yourself).  I also re-read some of the posts and noted the somewhat jarring jumps between subject matter.

This has lead me to the conclusion that though meatheads and scientists share a lot of common ground, the kind of science I get paid to do does not mix elegantly with the land of chalk and iron.

The theoretical center of this Venn diagram can
deadlift poundages that only exist on the complex plane.

So, I've decided, in the interests of coherence and simplicity, to move those posts to a brand new blog. Raise your hands if you know your 1 Rep Max in anything. Anyone with your hand raised can go here now:

Those of you remaining, I've got a new and interesting way to explore biological pathway databases that I'll post just as soon as we're assured that no one can steal it from us.

The World Map of Metal?

A more literal map, illustrating the concentration of metal bands per capita. The source material is The Metal Archives, which is curated by a crack team of metalheads who ensure 'Bullet For My Valentine' never gets classified as heavy metal, ever. parse, dammit approved!

Unstartlingly, worldwide sales of white and black face paint look almost exactly the same. 

Hat tip: Neatorama

Standing on the Shoulders of Giants

Though technologically advanced, my Map of Rock is anemic in comparison to Pete Frame's Family of Rock.

I bow to You, O God,
Who appears in the astonishing form of Pete Frame

The curation task I took upon myself in mapping the various relationships between musicians is something that Pete has been doing for decades. 

For the obligatory bit of math here, the format used by Pete, though called a Family Tree, is not technically a tree. Trees, according to computer science, are graphs that have no direction, and are acyclic. Pete's trees are constrained by time and thus qualify as directed graphs. To illustrate, the Ozzy Ozbourne of 1985 can't loop back to join the Elf of 1967. Furthermore, this non-looping quality makes them a directed acyclic graph, a structure that has showed up regularly in my work. 

I'm both looking forward to, and dreading, trying to add all this data into my own map.

Hat tip to BoingBoing for pointing me to the Family of Rock. You've destroyed what little sleep I could have had over the next decade.

I am the God of Hellfire, and I give you...

Fire.
I'm led to believe this was period costume in 1968.

So it took some time, but I got my five comments, and the Gods of Rock have been appeased. So without further ado here's the location of the Map of Rock:

It's behind the freaky heads.

What I'm linking to is Many Eyes, which is an interesting visualization experiment put together by the people at IBM. Christophe Viau was kind enough to point me in its direction. The concept behind Many Eyes is simple: you upload data, and then everyone can have a go at visualizing it. If you've kept a log of the weight you've squatted for every workout in the past ten years (and who hasn't?), you can upload it, and the whole wide internet can turn it into a multitude of charts and diagrams. Here is the data behind my graph. Graphs, sadly, seem to have only one visualization, so you're pretty much stuck with the visualization I linked to above. I'm not going to complain too much though: until I can build a better engine for online visualizations, my readers (all five of them) can have a poke around my graph and see who's been playing with who.

If anyone has any submissions to add to the Map of Rock, or explanations as to how Deep Purple could have turned into the awful Whitesnake, please leave them in the comments. 

Rocket Science

This is what passes for swag in the bioinformatics world:

Confused?

My co-worker arrived from a product showcase wearing the above. I appreciate the sentiment only because no-one I've talked to knows what bioinformatics is. My spellchecker still thinks it's not a word. 

I disagree with the shirt, because if a bioinformatician designed a rocket, the bolts would all be in metric, the nuts in imperial, everything else in cubits, and the whole mess would probably turn into a pinwheel of flaming death if it ever got off the ground. We're working on that.

The Rumors of my Demise have been Greatly Exaggerated

I haven't abandoned my loyal readers (all three of you); there are more exciting things in the pipeline!

The Map of Rock is going to change format and illustrate some quirks of protein-protein interaction networks. By the way, if you haven't pitched in your two cents towards getting the Map of Rock released into the wild, you can still do so here. Get on that, by the way. It's expanded to Iced Earth, thanks to input from a knowledgeable coworker, a development I feel ill at ease with.

I'm counting on my readership to be either too lazy or too well informed
to go listen to Iced Earth.

Also, there's going to be some rumbling at Annex Fitness, the strength and conditioning group I help coach. It will include lots of grainy black and white photographs of the strongmen of yore, and a chunk of relatively obscure Toronto history.

In the meanwhile, I read things:

Why You Need Domain Knowledge

More Ricky Bruch

And something that fell into my lap a month late from the minds at Starting Strength.