My LEGO Shirt
I made a stencil of the basic LEGO brick and spray-painted it on a T-shirt. It’s pretty rad.
Posted on Thursday, May 7th, 2009.
Learning Statistics by Implemetation
Over the coming summer months, I’ll be writing code to implement a variety of tests of significance. I have a modicum of statistical literacy, but I don’t have the expertise to recognize which tests are appropriate for particular problems. Rather than just learn which buttons to click in SPSS, I want to understand each common test from the inside out. Teaching a subject is a great way to learn about it, so I plan to teach the dumbest pupil of all – the unimaginative computer. I’ll post my progress here.
Posted on Thursday, May 7th, 2009.
From Where She Stood
My sister’s semester animation project is complete. This has been many late nights in the making.
Great work, Rach!
Posted on Wednesday, May 6th, 2009.
The Easy Reader
What a great idea. Via Boing Boing, a chair that is a bookshelf and a wheelbarrow. It is designed by Nils Holger Moormann.
This goes on my list of things to build.
Posted on Monday, May 4th, 2009.
Ladies
Drawn wrong handed:
Black and white are my favorite colors:
Posted on Monday, November 24th, 2008.
Save PDF Pages as Images
Here is an Automator application to save each page of a PDF file as an image. You can do this with Preview, but it is tedious for documents with many pages.
Download “Save PDF Pages as Images.app” (219 KB; Mac OS X 10.5 required)
When you run the application, it begins by prompting you to select a PDF file. You can select any sort of file, but nothing much will happen if it’s not a PDF.
Next you can choose the output image format. 150 DPI PNG is the default format. I don’t think the compression setting applies to PNG images, but it does apply to JPEGs.
Rendering the images may take a moment. Then you’ll be asked to define how the output files should be named. I recommend the “Make Sequential” option. By default, page images from a three-page document will be named page-01.png, page-02.png, and page-03.png.
Lastly, you can choose where to save the results. Choose “Other…” from the menu to select a folder that doesn’t appear among the default locations.
Now you have an image of each page in the PDF.
Posted on Tuesday, November 18th, 2008.
Recent Things Dock Stack Revisited
I use the recent applications Dock stack more than I expected when I mentioned it a few weeks ago. So, for those wary of the command line, here’s a tiny application that adds a new “recent things” stack to your Dock.
Download “Add Recent Things Dock Stack.app” (208 KB)
Your Dock will be restarted, so any minimized windows will be revealed. It shows recent applications by default, but you can right-click its icon to choose to show recent documents or servers as well as favorite volumes or items. Mac OS X 10.5 is probably required.
Posted on Tuesday, November 18th, 2008.
Ink and Water
Emmanuel Guibert used an incredibly clever technique to illustrate Alan’s War, a graphic novel about his friend’s experience in WWII. Here’s an example (via Drawn):
I was perplexed at first, but it all becomes clear about fifty seconds into the video.
Posted on Thursday, October 30th, 2008.
MacBook Markerboard
It recently occurred to me that the exterior surface of my MacBook is quite similar to the surface of a markerboard. Tonight I purchased a package of small dry-erase markers and put the idea to the test. It works great!
Now I can’t wait to bring my notebook computer to a meeting so I can take notes on its lid.
Posted on Thursday, October 30th, 2008.
Cartograms
A cartogram is a map in which the area of each region is distorted to represent a value other than physical area, such as population.
It’s election season here in the US, which means we see many maps of red and blue states. To keep the political persuasion of the nation in perspective, take a look at Michael Gastner, Cosma Shalizi, and Mark Newman’s maps of the 2004 and 2006 elections.
One of my favorite web sites, Strange Maps, has occasionally featured cartograms, including a map of world population from another collection of global cartograms prepared by Newman.
Strange Maps also featured a cartogram of where news happens drawn from a seminal paper by Gastner and Newman. The paper presents a solution to the challenge of preserving recognizable shapes and adjacencies while manipulating area. Traditional techniques typically compromise contiguity or detail, as seen in these examples from Borden Dent’s excellent Cartography: Thematic Map Design:
Conveniently, various implementations of Gastner and Newman’s algorithm are available: cart, by Newman; cartogram, by Gastner; and Cartogram Generator, by Frank Hardisty. Hardisty’s program has a cross-platform interface and works directly with shapefiles and shapefile attributes. I used it to create a cartogram of block groups in Binghamton based on their year 2000 populations:
The distortion is not extreme, but there are some interesting changes.
In addition to the interactive comparison view shown above, Cartogram Generator allows you to save the results as a new shapefile. It is supposed to have the ability to apply the same transformation to other shapefiles, too – useful for creating reference layers – but I could not get that feature to work.
I think it is important to show an undistorted map next to a cartogram except in cases where the actual sizes are well known (as with maps of the world or your state or nation). Otherwise, changes in proportion might not be recognized, and the story they are meant to tell will not be heard.
Posted on Saturday, October 4th, 2008.