Changing Tides

Pines on the lake
Originally uploaded by bmoon

The texture of the pine needles in the setting sun is amazing.

• Multicore and GPU Programming for Video Games
  This class provides the multicore and GPU programming skills needed to meet timely demands of the multimedia, visualization, and gaming industries. The course also bridges the gap between our current generic computer architecture courses and the video game design courses offered by the College of Computing.
  (tags: programming 3D)

I’ve been having a lot of fun recently collaborating with Eleanor Gates-Stuart and Barry Moon. We’ve setup a website for our project -  m o o n s t u a r t   - at moonstuart.net.

We’re showing an installation called boidSong in the “Inspired” art exhibition at The Front Gallery in Lyneham from the 20th-25th August as part of National Science Week.  

The opening is at 8pm on Wednesday 20th August. 

Today I reorganised my Processing source code directory. I had mixed lots of examples from other people in with my projects.

I thought that everything needed to be in the main Processing directory, but I’ve realised that the Processing IDE is clever enough to work with sub-directories. So I’ve moved all the sample code into some ‘examples’ directories.

I used the ‘Versions’ SVN client for Mac (http://versionsapp.com) to move everything around in my repository and then update my local copy. It was very easy - even though I can still only use my right hand.

‘Versions’ has the clearest user interface of the SVN clients that I’ve tried, it makes using SVN very easy and quick.

Thanks to everyone from CPAS for your support and the flowers!

My elbow with the screws holding it back together:

• Gerd Arntz - Isotype signs
  Gerd Arntz designed around 4000 signs, which symbolized key data from industry, demographics, politics and economy, for the visual language Isotype.
  (tags: visualization symbols)

The Gerd Arntz Web Archive has over 600 examples of Isotype symbols designed by him:

The International System Of TYpographic Picture Education was developed by the Viennese social scientist and philosopher Otto Neurath (1882-1945) as a method for visual statistics. Gerd Arntz was the designer tasked with making Isotype’s pictograms and visual signs. Eventually, Arntz designed around 4000 such signs, which symbolized keydata from industry, demographics, politics and economy.

This is his symbol for a scientist:

The Isotype visual dictionary was created using linocut images hand printed onto paper.  These have been scanned and the backgrounds corrected to white from the original brown or brownish paper.

(Found via Randy Krum writing about Gerd Arntz today).

• Wordle - Beautiful Word Clouds
  Wordle is a toy for generating “word clouds” from text that you provide. The clouds give greater prominence to words that appear more frequently in the source text. You can tweak your clouds with different fonts, layouts, and color schemes.
  (tags: visualization typography)

I had a play with it using the text from the Wikipedia page about Visualization (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Visualization_(graphic)):

Click on the image to go to the Wordle website for the full sized version.

It was fun to play with the presentation options, and the results are decorative, but I’m not sure how useful they are in conveying information.