A comparison of the Linux call graph hierarchy with the E. coli regulatory network. Researchers at Yale discovered that the Linux control structure is top-heavy, with a few common modules reused often. E coli, by contrast, has limited central control with many specialized “workers” at the bottom of the hierarchy.
A great talk about Christopher Alexander’s Notes on the Synthesis of Form.
In the tradition of Notes on the Synthesis of Form, Frederick Brooks takes aim at the problem facing every engineer and designer: how do you architect and build a complex system? The question is especially pertinent to computer scientists and programmers. Included here are a few notes and observations from the book.
The most recent release of Cartographer.js supports county-level choropleth maps. This was the number one requested feature for Cartographer and I am delighted to finally be able to offer it in an official package. Counties are stored with efficient polygon encoding, and are easily referenced by name.
Our popular Walk or Bus chart is now an iPhone application. The app allows you to enter a travel distance as well as the time until the next bus, and the application will estimate whether you could travel faster by walking or by waiting for the bus. All estimates can be tweaked to match your walking speed, your city’s average block size, and bus speeds.
I have had several requests for the Color Sorting code I used to create these images. The pixel-based color sorting uses linear and Hilbert sorting techniques in RGB, YIQ, and HSV color spaces. ColorSorting is now on Github.
“Comics are juxtaposed pictorial and other images in a deliberate sequence, intended to convey information and/or produce an aesthetic response in the viewer.” These are my notes from Scott McCloud’s excellent book Understanding Comics.
Choosing colors for maps, charts, and infographics can be a difficult task. Standard software packages like Excel and Matlab have tended to offer substandard color schemes (though this is getting better) so it’s up to the designer to learn about color and apply the appropriate techniques. This post will focus on understanding color schemes for maps.
A few quick notes regarding the latest release of Cartographer.js. Cartographer has an official Twitter channel. Follow @cartographerjs for updates. The latest version has full support for Internet Explorer (tested in IE 6+). The latest version also sports substantial speed improvements and should be easier to extend in the future.
Cartographer.js is a thematic mapping library for Google Maps that simplifies the development process and provides instant access to proven visualization techniques. Developers are freed from worrying about how to tweak the Google Maps API to build the thematic elements they need, and can focus on more important problems like data collection and normalization. Cartographer.js supports custom styling so it can integrate seamlessly into existing web applications.
