How to Make a Heatmap – a Quick and Easy Solution | FlowingData
How to Make a Heatmap – a Quick and Easy Solution | FlowingData.
Collection: How to take insects in-flight
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.
The Making of Vesper | i love typography, the typography and fonts blog
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.
Timelines: sources from history from the British Library
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.
With Copyright Protectors Like These, who Needs Enemies? - Brand New
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!
R creators win prestigious Statistical Computing and Graphics Award - Revolutions
“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
[ The Flying Lizards](http://www.lizardms.com) 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.
Paleontologist discovers 3-D secrets of Middle Age designs of Kells' 'angels' [Medieval News]
I still don’t quite understand it, but, according to John Cisne, a paleontologist who studied the Book of Kells, the medieval scribes who illustrated this amazing manuscript employed “free-fusion stereocomparison” to generate the intricate scrollwork that can be found throughout the pages. With detail to the point of “submillimeter precision”, Cisne, in the journal Perception (Vol. 38, No. 7), argues that the medieval monks uses this method to create the wonderful artwork in the Book of Kells and other beautiful manuscripts.
Bad Survey Design. Please Stop! -- All This ChittahChattah
At work, I’m developing a new survey to ask our new hires how the on-boarding process went. Because of all the terribly constructed surveys I’ve taken in the past, I decided to take the process of building it seriously. I searched on the web for any guides to building a good survey. One that I found concise and useful was Steve Portigal’s “Bad Survey Design. Please Stop!” on his blog “All This ChittahChattah”.
"Seven Ages Of Britain": BBC's New Multi-Part History of Britain
BBC presents a new series called “Seven Ages Of Britain” starting on 1/31/2010. Each of the seven episodes represents an era in British history, narrated by David Dimbleby. I’m particularly interested in the first age: Programme 1: Age Of Conquest (AD 43-1066) - For a thousand years, from Emperor Claudius to William the Conqueror, the British Isles were defined by invasion, each successive wave bringing something new to the mix.