SciGraph

Science- and math-related visuals seen through graphic designer eyes. Celebrating the graphic design of non-designers.

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Color Blindness Tests

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Smale – Fomenko diagrams and rough topological invariants of the Kowalevski – Yehia case

Kharlamov and Ryabov introduce their paper by stating:

We present the complete analytical classification of the atoms arising at the critical points of rank 1 of the Kowalevski–Yehia gyrostat. To classify the Smale–Fomenko diagrams, all separating values of the gyrostatic momentum are found. We present a kind of constructor of the Fomenko graphs; its application gives the complete description of the rough topology of this integrable case. It is proved that there exists exactly nine groups of identical molecules (not considering the marks). These groups contain 22 stable types of graphs and 6 unstable ones with respect to the number of critical circles on the critical levels.

Assuming that went over your head like it went over mine, it has something to do with what CERN does (studying particle physics). Any simple explanation in the comments would be greatly appreciated.

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Eye Magazine Interview with Karsten Schmidt

JLW: Is coding design?

KS: It’s funny how the moment you start talking about code, you start being   into a technical role. Because so many people are alienated. They know they don’t understand … but they want to protect their status as a ‘creative’.

When you work with code, actually typing code is absolutely the last thing you think about … writing code becomes a background task, because you’re actually building a mental model of what you want to do. This is what makes code work. This is where you work as a designer. Mapping is what we all do automatically, but for code it has to become a conscious act.

JLW: When you’re designing something?

KS: Yes – even when you do a poster. You have a mental image and that image doesn’t pop into your head. You really focus on it, you have to analyse what happens and you have to break this process down into such small parts that it becomes encodable as code.

JLW: So is there an argument that some computer programs take away these mental tools?

KS: Well there’s something I said at Flash On The Beach in Brighton – that Kenneth Boulding quote: ‘We make our own tools, and then they shape us.’ If you depend too much upon any tool – Flash or whatever – sooner or later your idea will be channelled through that tool’s metaphors, and there goes your idea!

http://www.eyemagazine.com/feature/article/reputations-karsten-schmidt

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Anthropological Diagrams

Up until now, SciGraph has been focused almost entirely on images from the mathematical, life and physical sciences. This post, however, features diagrams from the field of anthropology. 

Flickr user runningafterantelope has created a group appropriately named Great Diagrams in Anthropology. The illustration at the top of this post represents the Tuamatuan Conception of the Cosmos, the Tuamatuan being a tribe of Central Polynesia.

A few more images from this collection:

The Critique of the Index. Alfred Gell (1998), Art and Agency: An Anthropological Theory.

The Critique of the Index. Alfred Gell (1998), Art and Agency: An Anthropological Theory.

Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL): stratification and functional diversification

The Maori meeting house as an object distributed in space and time

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Semiconductor between spin-polarized source and drain

A paper from A. Fert, J.-M. George, H. Jaffrès, and R. Mattana:

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Game Theory Diagrams

From Krishnendu Chatterjee and Rasmus Ibsen-Jensen, a paper titled "Strategy complexity of finite-horizon Markov decision processes and simple stochastic games."

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The World's Colonisation and Trade Routes Formation as Imitated by Slime Mould

Andrew Adamatzky, of the University of the West of England, just released a new paper [PDF] that compares the trade routes and migratory patterns of colonizing cultures with the growth of slime mould.

From the abstract:

The plasmodium of Physarum polycephalum is renowned for spanning sources of nutrients with networks of protoplasmic tubes. The networks transport nutrients and metabolites across the plasmodium's body. To imitate a hypothetical colonisation of the world and formation of major transportation routes we cut continents from agar plates arranged in Petri dishes or on the surface of a three-dimensional globe, represent positions of selected metropolitan areas with oatflakes and inoculate the plasmodium in one of the metropolitan areas. The plasmodium propagates towards the sources of nutrients, spans them with its network of protoplasmic tubes and even crosses bare substrate between the continents. From the laboratory experiments we derive weighted Physarum graphs, analyse their structure, compare them with the basic proximity graphs and generalised graphs derived from the Silk Road and the Asia Highway networks.

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Socolar & Taylor Aperiodic Tiles

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Geraldine Ondrizek

Geraldine Ondrizek, professor of Art at Reed College in Portland, creates works that combine visualizations of DNA sequences with textiles like silk. Says UWToday:

Since 2001, Ondrizek has worked with geneticists and biologists to gather images of human cellular tissue and genetic tests relating to disease, ethnic identity, and the depiction of genetically inherited conditions…Ondrizek meshes her chosen medium of cloth with the colorful and complex language of genetic data to create textile portraits of human chromosome maps.

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As yet, if a man has no feeling for art he is considered narrow-minded, but if he has no feeling for science this is considered quite normal. This is a fundamental weakness.

Isidor Isaac Rabi

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Mirrorbox

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David S. Goodsell

Zygote Quarterly has devoted a large portfolio section in their summer 2012 issue to David S Goodsell, Associate Professor of Molecular Biology at The Scripps Research Institute in La Jolla, California. Goodsell creates work that is intended as art, but utilizes software designed for studying objects at the molecular scale, combining it with traditional hand-rendered techniques.

Goodsell's section starts on page 64. More of his work behind the cut.

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Galileo's Sunspots

Albert Van Helden and Elizabeth Burr of Rice University, in their online Galileo Project, explain:

In 1612 during the summer months, Galileo made a series of sunspot observations which were published in Istoria e Dimostrazioni Intorno Alle Macchie Solari e Loro Accidenti Rome (History and Demonstrations Concerning Sunspots and their Properties, published 1613). Because these observations were made at appoximately the same time of day, the motion of the spots across the Sun can easily be seen.

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Clouds: beta

"Clouds is a computational documentary featuring hackers and media artists in dialogue about code, culture and the future of visualization."

Clouds: beta from DEEPSPEED media on Vimeo.

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Interactive artworks whose design philosophies are predicated on the ‘intrinsic beauty of mathematics’ are only rarely more interesting, personal, or provocative than the equations which generated them. At the same time, nearly all computational artwork inescapably involves, at some level, the implementation of mathematical relationships and equations; the medium itself is so deeply structured by these relationships that the entire field of computer art is often (and justly) regarded as cold or impersonal. The challenge in designing an interactive abstraction system is to overcome the mathematical materials which one must necessarily use, and surpass them in the service of some greater expression.

—Golan Levin

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DNA Origami

From Nature:

Rothemund wondered whether he could create the complicated stuff using a longer, naturally occurring piece of DNA, such as the genome of a virus, and folding it over on itself. So in 2004 and 2005 he spent months, he says, programming in his underpants, trying to work out a way to bend a 7,000-base-pair viral genome to his will. In his design he visualized how the genome could be folded into a predetermined, two-dimensional shape. Knowing the sequence of the virus at every twist and turn, he was able to write complementary DNA sequences, about 16-base-pairs long, that would essentially staple the folds in place. He ordered the 'staples' from a DNA-synthesis company, mixed them with his virus in a buffer that stabilized the DNA and then heated and cooled the mixture, allowing the single stranded viral DNA to bind with the staples (see 'Stapling a smiley'). The result, viewed using atomic-force microscopy, was the smiley face and several other shapes, created by what he called DNA origami.

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Part of the draw of computational design is you aren’t limited by the tools made available by others. Anything is possible. However, this comes with the caveat that in order for anything to be possible, you need to put in the effort to understand algorithms to the level that you can use them innovatively.

—Nervous System