I move that all people who refer to the expand preferences icon as the "hamburger button" must also describe the wifi symbol as the "polar coordinates hamburger."
| Homepage | https://benschmidt.org |
Ben Schmidt
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VP Information Design at Nomic; NYC resident; onetime history/digital humanities prof
I fiddled a bit with constructing a minimal spanning tree on the data and agglomerating out from random seed points with progressively higher distance thresholds... This feels close to something pretty useful, but the breaks between clusters aren't quite right--I feel like there's a way to use the Delaunay triangulation to merge clusters that share long borders, and maybe a way to split up non-spherical clusters? Work-in-progress here.
One hard problem that's still nagging at me from our pubmed explorer is: what's a good algorithm to automatically infer all these pretty little cluster nodules that clearly exist in the 2d clustering? Some spherical agglomerative method would probably work, but I'm hitting performance issues > 1m points... https://static.nomic.ai/pubmed.html
Check out this work of interactive scrollership we just released with Rita Gonzalez-Marquez, Dmitry Kobak, Philipp Berens and others at Tübingen presenting their gorgeous T-SNE embedding and several other views of 20 MILLION abstracts from PubMed.
https://static.nomic.ai/pubmed.html
https://static.nomic.ai/pubmed.html
Right now it's only released on Chrome, but it's not an only-Google thing forever. It's an honest-to-goodness W3C standard like HTML, CSS, or SVG. All the browsers have been working on it; Chrome is just shipping first because they're insanely well funded compared to Safari and Firefox. (One of my favorite parts about reading the minutes of the WebGPU committee--yes, that's how insanely interested I am in this--is seeing the other browsers get jealous of Chrome's money.) https://github.com/gpuweb/gpuweb/wiki/Minutes-2022-08-10
OK folks, what clever entrepreneur snapped up the domain name 'kissinger.rip?' And are you willing to add a subdomain redirect off it?
Here's a little deepscatter notebook in @observablehq showing all the 2015 New York Tree Census. Filter by species, etc. Lots of real geographical patterns--e.g., lots of ginkgos in Manhattan and maples in Queens, but not vice versa. https://observablehq.com/@bmschmidt/trees
177,293 trees grow in Brooklyn
Data from the 2015 New York Trees census. The goal is to test out two new-ish features in deepscatter side by side: Ingesting an arrow table (here as the output of a duckdb query on a parquet file). Setting foreground and background colors dynamically. Try zooming around the map to your neighborhood, or filtering by tree species in the search box below the map.
I got curious about why Marymount University is cutting its humanities majors, so took a look at its underlying numbers. At a first glance, there's no compelling reason, except to make the school more like Oral Roberts University. Writeup: https://benschmidt.org/post/2023-03-04-marymount/
This (below) is also factually inaccurate. History of science *is* included in the statistics about enrollments quoted from Rob Townsend earlier in the article.
This New Yorker article about the decline of the humanities makes some huge factual errors about the humanities' history. Saying that humanities degrees hovered at "around fifteen per cent nationally" for "decades" is *completely wrong*; it was only an extremely anomalous period around 1970 that anything like that was true. https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2023/03/06/the-end-of-the-english-major