I love simplicty and you don’t get much simpler than this visual depiction showing How Genetics Works | FlowingData. Thanks, Nathan, for another excellent post! Short and sweet.
How to Make a Heatmap – a Quick and Easy Solution | FlowingData
February 23rd, 2010 by John No comments »Collection: How to take insects in-flight
February 8th, 2010 by John No comments »
fotoopa rig in use (from flickr)
fotoopa has posted photographs and schematics showing his hardware design for taking pictures of insects in flight. While the depth-of-field is very thin (credit card thickness), the pictures he has posted are astounding.
Focus distance can by adjusted to every value. The focus range of the detector is very narrow. 1 to 2 mm at a distance of 700 mm form the camera. Objects of 2 mm diameter can by easily detected. Detector works also on full black insects. 4 lasers are used, 2 IR 5 mw lasers at 850 nm and 2 x 10 mw green lasers. The green lasers are only for visual position to the insects.
The Making of Vesper | i love typography, the typography and fonts blog
February 8th, 2010 by John No comments »
Vesper's two phases (from ilovetypography.com)
How are fonts designed? What are the steps and decisions a font designer must make to create a really vibrant and successful font? As someone who recently started enjoying fonts, I’ve never really considered these questions, until now. On the i love typography website (one of my favorite blogs and websites), Rob Keller, of Mota Italic, describes The Making of Vesper, broken down into two phases of his design process as he created a new font, Vesper: The first phase, comprising the Regular, Devanagari, Heavy, and Italic, was completed during his stint at the Masters in Arts, Typographic Design, at the University of Reading. After completing the MA, Rob completed the font’s remaining weights and revised the existing weights.
He provided some interesting details about the process and how he made some design decisions throughout, all of which have a real bearing on the final result.
» Read more: The Making of Vesper | i love typography, the typography and fonts blog
Timelines: sources from history from the British Library
February 5th, 2010 by John No comments »
BL Timelines screenshot
The British Library has released a new website, Timelines: sources from history, where users can traverse history “from Magna Carta to Obama.” From to the website:
The interactive timeline allows you to explore British Library collection items chronologically, from medieval times to the present day. It includes a diverse combination of texts: those that allow glimpses of everyday life (handbills, posters, letters, diaries), remnants of political events (charters, speeches, campaign leaflets), and the writings of some of our best known historical and literary figures.
» Read more: Timelines: sources from history from the British Library
With Copyright Protectors Like These, who Needs Enemies? – Brand New
February 5th, 2010 by John No comments »
Hadopi Logo (via underconsideration.com)
One of my favorite blogs is Brand New. Each post is informative and enjoyable. Recently, they posted an incredible story displaying the dangers of protectors failing to live up to their own standards. Hadopi, the French agency responsible for policing copyright violations and protecting creators from intellectual property theft is guilty of the same. Here’s the short story:
- The government hires an agency to design the logo
- The agency (Plan Créatif) mocks up a logo
- The logo was found to include 2 unlicensed fonts (Bienvenue, which was designed by Jean François Porchez exclusively for France Télécom and only available via websites hosting illegal materials, and Bliss, designed by Jeremy Tankard)
- The agency quickly licenses Bliss and replaces Bienvenue with FS Lola (designed for FontSmith by Phil Garnham)
- A new, properly licensed logo is released (though the fonts were licensed on the day the logo was released to the public!)
Pretty amazing. For the first post exposing the problem, written by Jean-Baptiste Levée, read his post on graphism.fr. See Le Point’s post (1/11/2010) for a French perspective, or Font Feed’s post. BoingBoing and Torrentfreak also have coverage. It even garnered TV coverage (LCI; in french).
R creators win prestigious Statistical Computing and Graphics Award – Revolutions
February 3rd, 2010 by John No comments »“The American Statistical Association recently created a new, bi-annual award to to recognize an individual or team for innovation in computing, software, or graphics that has had a great impact on statistical practice or research. The committee has just announced the winner (or in this, joint winners) of the first award: Robert Gentleman and Ross Ihaka, for their work in initiating the R Project for Statistical Computing.”
via Revolutions: R creators win prestigious Statistical Computing and Graphics Award.
Rolex 24 Hours at Daytona: TRG/Flying Lizards finish 2nd in GT Category
January 31st, 2010 by John No comments »
Podium finish (#2) for the Lizards at Daytona (Rolex 24; source: lizardms.com)
The Flying Lizards paired with TRG (see their announcement) in the 2010 Rolex 24 at Daytona. Their Porsche 911 GT3 came in 2nd at this year’s Rolex 24 hour race at Daytona. (See the Flying Lizards’ press release and the TRG press release.)
Glad to see the podium finish for the Lizards! I look forward to seeing them in their next race (Sebring on 3/20) and the rest of the 2010 schedule. Go Lizards!
