2024 π Daylatest newsbuy art
Safe, fallen down this way, I want to be just what I am.Cocteau Twinssafe at lastmore quotes
very clickable
Martin Krzywinski @MKrzywinski mkweb.bcgsc.ca
Martin Krzywinski @MKrzywinski mkweb.bcgsc.ca
Martin Krzywinski @MKrzywinski mkweb.bcgsc.ca
City Trees

The trees along this city street,
Save for the traffic and the trains,
Would make a sound as thin and sweet
As trees in country lanes.

And people standing in their shade
Out of a shower, undoubtedly
Would hear such music as is made
Upon a country tree.

Oh, little leaves that are so dumb
Against the shrieking city air,
I watch you when the wind has come,—
I know what sound is there.

— Edna St. Vincent Millay

data visualization + art

Nature Biotechnology Cover

11 April 2022, Issue 40, Volume 4

Konno, N. et al. Deep distributed computing to reconstruct extremely large lineage trees (2022) Nature Biotechnology 40:566–575.

The 2021 π Day art celebrates the digits of π with a forest! Visit the bat cave and underwater ecosystems for the full experience.
Who doesn't want more than just one tree?

1 · The cover

The cover design accompanies the paper by Konno et al., which presents a highly efficient distributed computing method for the reconstruction of evolutionary trees from very large datasets.

The cover is a rearrangement of the very large phylogenetic data set depicted in Figure 2a in the paper. You can browse this data set using the HiView server.

Martin Krzywinski @MKrzywinski mkweb.bcgsc.ca
Figure 2. Lineage reconstruction of over 235 million sequences. a. The whole distributed computing history of FRACTAL used to reconstruct the lineage of 235 million sequences generated by PRESUME. Each circle and its child circles in the circle packing diagram represent a parental FRACTAL iteration cycle and its child job cycles. d. A partial representation of the reconstructed lineage of 235,100,199 sequences. Each tree shows a partial lineage determined at each of the distributed computing cycles R2–R6 and B2–B6. The tree diagrams were visualized using Cytoscape 3.7.145. Interactive visualization for the whole distributed computing trajectories and lineage subgraphs reconstructed in corresponding FRACTAL cycles are available on the HiView server. Figure excerpt from Fig 2(a,d) in Konno et al.
Martin Krzywinski @MKrzywinski mkweb.bcgsc.ca
My rearrangement of the phylogenetic tree from Figure 2a in Konno et al.. The style is inspired by Sakura.

2 · Trees from data

The source of inspiration for the cover design came from previous work, where I drew trees from data.

2.1 · Plant data

I receive email. One day, I received this one.

I am a Norwegian biology student that has recently become a huge fan of your data art! It's beautiful, really!

What I wanted to ask you, if it's possible for you to help me a little bit on the way of a project I'm starting.

I have had the pleasure of working with a PhD-student here at the university in Bergen, she has taught me so much, and given me a lot of experience in the field, as well as opened up some big career "doors" for me.

She is supposed to deliver her PhD in November and I want to give here a gift to say thank you for all she has done for me.

My idea is this: some sort of visualization of the data she is using in here PhD. She is studying plant communities in Norway, and I have access to the data (plant heights, carbon in the air, thickness of leafs, number of individuals and so on), but i'm not sure how I can make it look beautiful.

So to clarify, I'm not looking for a diagram that is useful or anything, but just pretty to look at, and that is a memory of all the data she has collected, and worked with for the last 4 years. Maybe a diagram in different colors, depending on what the value is, in just a random order... or something...

So do you have any idea of how I can do this? What program do you use when you make your diagrams?

Understand if you dont have the time to answer this, but thank you anyway for reading, and for all you have created!

—Ruben Thormodsæter

I love Norway and I love people that love people who love science.

Since the dataset was a list of 376 individual plants, each annotated with species/genus and growth parameters such as height, mass and so on, and Ruben wanted something that is “not ... useful or anything” but rather “pretty to look at” based on “all the data she has collected and worked with for the last 4 years”.

I thought it would be both useful and pretty to represent the plant data by ... growing trees — in silico. One way to do this is to use an L-system.

So, here's the data

id,year,site,genus,species,height,mass,thick,plot,drought,plotmass,green
AA86T,2019,Lygra,Erica,tetralix,27,0.02115,0.166,1.3,0,,0.675
AA96C,2019,Lygra,Agrostis,capillaris,9,0.01477,0.107,3.3,90,186.39,0.7025
AA99C,2019,Lygra,Pedicularis,sylvatica,4,0.01806,0.064,2.3,50,80.92,0.695625
AB12C,2019,Lygra,Avenella,flexuosa,6.5,0.03173,0.154,3.3,90,186.39,0.7025
AB17C,2019,Lygra,Carex,pilulifera,10,0.04504,0.154,2.3,50,80.92,0.695625
AB30O,2019,Lygra,Vaccinium,myrtillus,9,0.02605,0.116,2.1,0,111.11,0.636875
...

and here's the final poster.

Martin Krzywinski @MKrzywinski mkweb.bcgsc.ca
376 individual plants across 8 plots.
Martin Krzywinski @MKrzywinski mkweb.bcgsc.ca
The back of the poster shows the species for each plant and its unique identifier.
Martin Krzywinski @MKrzywinski mkweb.bcgsc.ca
The legend explains the encoding, in which I represent height, thickness, mass, and plot drought level.

2.2 · Digits of `\pi`

I had such a great time with the L-systems that when Pi Day came around, I grew more trees. This time, using the digits of `\pi` to inform branching and sprouting.

So, for 2021 Pi Day, I tried to see the forest through the digits.

Martin Krzywinski @MKrzywinski mkweb.bcgsc.ca
768 digits of `\pi` depicted as a forest of trees grown with an L-system.

3 · Other covers

Browse my gallery of cover designs.

Martin Krzywinski @MKrzywinski mkweb.bcgsc.ca
A catalogue of my journal and magazine cover designs. (more)
news + thoughts

Propensity score matching

Mon 16-09-2024

I don’t have good luck in the match points. —Rafael Nadal, Spanish tennis player

In many experimental designs, we need to keep in mind the possibility of confounding variables, which may give rise to bias in the estimate of the treatment effect.

Martin Krzywinski @MKrzywinski mkweb.bcgsc.ca
Nature Methods Points of Significance column: Propensity score matching. (read)

If the control and experimental groups aren't matched (or, roughly, similar enough), this bias can arise.

Sometimes this can be dealt with by randomizing, which on average can balance this effect out. When randomization is not possible, propensity score matching is an excellent strategy to match control and experimental groups.

Kurz, C.F., Krzywinski, M. & Altman, N. (2024) Points of significance: Propensity score matching. Nat. Methods 21:1770–1772.

Nasa to send our human genome discs to the Moon

Sat 23-03-2024

We'd like to say a ‘cosmic hello’: mathematics, culture, palaeontology, art and science, and ... human genomes.

Martin Krzywinski @MKrzywinski mkweb.bcgsc.ca
SANCTUARY PROJECT | A cosmic hello of art, science, and genomes. (details)
Martin Krzywinski @MKrzywinski mkweb.bcgsc.ca
SANCTUARY PROJECT | Benoit Faiveley, founder of the Sanctuary project gives the Sanctuary disc a visual check at CEA LeQ Grenoble (image: Vincent Thomas). (details)
Martin Krzywinski @MKrzywinski mkweb.bcgsc.ca
SANCTUARY PROJECT | Sanctuary team examines the Life disc at INRIA Paris Saclay (image: Benedict Redgrove) (details)

Comparing classifier performance with baselines

Fri 22-03-2024

All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others. —George Orwell

This month, we will illustrate the importance of establishing a baseline performance level.

Baselines are typically generated independently for each dataset using very simple models. Their role is to set the minimum level of acceptable performance and help with comparing relative improvements in performance of other models.

Martin Krzywinski @MKrzywinski mkweb.bcgsc.ca
Nature Methods Points of Significance column: Comparing classifier performance with baselines. (read)

Unfortunately, baselines are often overlooked and, in the presence of a class imbalance, must be established with care.

Megahed, F.M, Chen, Y-J., Jones-Farmer, A., Rigdon, S.E., Krzywinski, M. & Altman, N. (2024) Points of significance: Comparing classifier performance with baselines. Nat. Methods 21:546–548.

Happy 2024 π Day—
sunflowers ho!

Sat 09-03-2024

Celebrate π Day (March 14th) and dig into the digit garden. Let's grow something.

Martin Krzywinski @MKrzywinski mkweb.bcgsc.ca
2024 π DAY | A garden of 1,000 digits of π. (details)

How Analyzing Cosmic Nothing Might Explain Everything

Thu 18-01-2024

Huge empty areas of the universe called voids could help solve the greatest mysteries in the cosmos.

My graphic accompanying How Analyzing Cosmic Nothing Might Explain Everything in the January 2024 issue of Scientific American depicts the entire Universe in a two-page spread — full of nothing.

Martin Krzywinski @MKrzywinski mkweb.bcgsc.ca
How Analyzing Cosmic Nothing Might Explain Everything. Text by Michael Lemonick (editor), art direction by Jen Christiansen (Senior Graphics Editor), source: SDSS

The graphic uses the latest data from SDSS 12 and is an update to my Superclusters and Voids poster.

Michael Lemonick (editor) explains on the graphic:

“Regions of relatively empty space called cosmic voids are everywhere in the universe, and scientists believe studying their size, shape and spread across the cosmos could help them understand dark matter, dark energy and other big mysteries.

To use voids in this way, astronomers must map these regions in detail—a project that is just beginning.

Shown here are voids discovered by the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS), along with a selection of 16 previously named voids. Scientists expect voids to be evenly distributed throughout space—the lack of voids in some regions on the globe simply reflects SDSS’s sky coverage.”

voids

Sofia Contarini, Alice Pisani, Nico Hamaus, Federico Marulli Lauro Moscardini & Marco Baldi (2023) Cosmological Constraints from the BOSS DR12 Void Size Function Astrophysical Journal 953:46.

Nico Hamaus, Alice Pisani, Jin-Ah Choi, Guilhem Lavaux, Benjamin D. Wandelt & Jochen Weller (2020) Journal of Cosmology and Astroparticle Physics 2020:023.

Sloan Digital Sky Survey Data Release 12

constellation figures

Alan MacRobert (Sky & Telescope), Paulina Rowicka/Martin Krzywinski (revisions & Microscopium)

stars

Hoffleit & Warren Jr. (1991) The Bright Star Catalog, 5th Revised Edition (Preliminary Version).

cosmology

H0 = 67.4 km/(Mpc·s), Ωm = 0.315, Ωv = 0.685. Planck collaboration Planck 2018 results. VI. Cosmological parameters (2018).

Martin Krzywinski | contact | Canada's Michael Smith Genome Sciences CentreBC Cancer Research CenterBC CancerPHSA
Google whack “vicissitudinal corporealization”
{ 10.9.234.152 }