Lucky seven!


This blog began seven years ago today. And it’s still one of my favourite projects. I hope you enjoy reading it as much as I do writing it.

Picture by Lee Bryan on Flickr; used under a Creative Commons license.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Search engines for technical graphics

Image
How important are academic graphics? A new pre-print in arXiv argues, “Pretty damn important.” This news summary of the technical article says: (T)heir most remarkable discovery is that the most successful papers tend to have more figures. By plotting the number of diagrams in a paper against its impact, the team concludes that high impact ideas tend to be conveyed visually. Lee and co say there are two possible explanations for this: “That visual information improves the clarity of the paper, leading to more citations, and higher impact, or that high impact papers naturally tend to include new, complex ideas that require visual explanation.” The team has a search engine for scientific graphics called Viziometrics. My first pass, for “crayfish,” gave a mess on non-intuitive results (click to enlarge): Things improved markedly when I selected only for diagrams and photos, however. Speaking of searchable graphics databases, Atlas looks promising for some purposes. I tried searc...
Read more

Link round-up for December 2017

Image
One of the problems with free fonts is that they often don’t have special characters that are necessary for proper display of characters from other languages, or symbols. Google Noto is a series of fonts meant to have almost every character (and emoji!) in as many languages as possible. When I scrolled down the list and saw, “Canadian aboriginal,” I knew they were serious. I downloaded Noto Sans, and was impressed. Not only are there over 30 variations of Noto Sans, including thin, bold, condensed, extended, and combinations thereof, going into “Insert symbol” to see the individual characters is eye-opening. You think you’re a typographic sophisticate for recognizing and using an interrobang? Noto has that, and an inverted interrobang. There are combinations of letters and accents and umlauts and currency symbols I have never seen before. The range of options is, frankly, staggering. There is no font package that comes Windows standard with this many options. Buying a font package wi...
Read more

Critique: Epigenome reorganization

Image
Today’s poster comes from Corey Duke . His Neuroscience poster got lots of love when he posted it on Twitter . (In flagrant violation of Neuroscience meeting rules, I expect.) Click to enlarge! Corey generously shared a lot of commentary on creating this poster. He wrote: In the work we present here, we put a great deal of thought into determining exactly what stories we wanted to highlight. When dealing with large data sets, there is a delicate balancing act in trying not to overwhelm or detract from the larger broader story lines, while still presenting the interesting findings that are more “in the weeds”. With audiences at meetings like Neuroscience being so broad in background and knowledge, our general goal with this poster was to strike that balance, to give brief captivating broad overview presentations, particularly to those less familiar with the field, while still presenting the more detailed findings that experts would perhaps find most interesting. Although it is overwhel...
Read more