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Last login: 10 hours agoLaodan: laodan is a guy from Milford, Pennsylvania, USA.; Likes 1,599 pages, 24 videos, 8 photos • 228 fans • Received 65 reviews; Member since Aug 08, 2005

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Shedding Light on Life&&(May-June&2008): Apr 19, 1:27pm 2 reviews science, art, visualization, worldviews
http://harvardmagazine.com/2008/05/shedding-light-on-life.html; Shedding Light on Life in Harvard Magazine by Courtney Humphries
"The human brain is vision-focused," says professor of molecular and cellular biology Jeff Lichtman. "If we see things, then we think we know what they mean." To be able finally to see events that were known only in theory is incredibly satisfying for scientists. Even more important, this revolution also opens up the possibility of learning things about life that could never be studied before. \u201cWhat we hope to do at the end of the day,\u201d he says, \u201cis to understand biology as it unfolds in vivo rather than in snapshots.\u201d The resurgence in imaging excites biologists for two reasons: it allows them to see individuals, and it allows them to count the masses. Being able to watch and track a single molecule, cell, or process offers a much more complete picture of how life works. Tom Kirchhausen predicts that in the next few years, scientists will use imaging to better understand complex processes such as cell division and the paths that viruses take to cause infection. Shedding Light on Life via Harvard Magazine, Courtesy of Jeff Lichtman Laboratory Color-coded neural circuits in the brains of mice allow Jeff Lichtman to trace the fate of individual nerve cells over time and across distances.
via Harvard Magazine, Courtesy of Gene-Wei Li and Peter Sims, Harvard University Sunney Xie combines a transmission image of bacteria (blue) with a fluorescence image of molecules (yellow) binding to sites on the bacteria\u2019s DNA in order to create a complete picture of the interaction. This article is a useful follow-up on my post about Could Science and Art Become One and the Same? . The subject of my comment is thus visualization versus art. In recent years science has made a dramatic usage of visual imaging techniques to understand what is going on at the micro and macro levels. But the fact is that digital imaging are photos taken from various kinds of microscopes or telescopes that are then often reprocessed by pairing 2 or more of those initial cliches in order to try to catch the meaning of what is going on in those images. Those images are often stunning and offer a depth of meaning and beauty that puts to shame most modern art works. But for scientists it is only a question of making sense in what they observe. Visual imaging is no more than a tool. But what about the images they obtain? Are those art works? Those digital images are not art works in the traditional sense of the concept of art: the production of visual signs about the worldview of the men of knowledge of the day. Those images are tools for scientists to discover sense and they are only fragments of the ensemble of images and ideas that forms their worldview. Art should not be confused with scientific imaging. The mission of the artist is to illustrate the worldview of the men of knowledge of our days. And the men of knowledge in late modernity and early post-modernity are not the scientists. Those men of knowledge are the rare individuals who are succeeding to integrate scientific knowledge within the more globally encompassing realm of philosophy and history. Some are scientists, some are philosophers or historians and some are artists. The late-modern and early post-modern artist has thus to accumulate the widest possible knowledge-base in order to be able to pinpoint the rare true men of knowledge in his time. And his mission is then to render visual signs about their worldview for all to share.

Treemaps | EagerEyes.org: Apr 14, 11:53am 1 review science, art, visualization
http://eagereyes.org/Techniques/Treemaps.html; Treemaps in EagerEyes by Robert Kosara
Treemaps are the single most used 'real' InfoVis technique there is. Interestingly, they have proven to be even more useful for unstructured data than for the hierarchies which they were originally developed for. Here is a brief history, discussion of current practical uses, and of the importance of treemaps for the adoption and understanding of information visualization. Treemaps The history of treemaps Beyond Treemaps Visualization has long been used by scientists to get a better grasp of what happens at the micro and macro levels. This has been extended to the field of information in order to make sense of what is going on amidst the saturation and overload that assails us daily. It's all about detecting the trends, rhythms, tendencies and patterns that operate within a given complexity. We can then zoom on a trend or a pattern and pick the information that has been accessed by the most people for example. Visualization let's us use our eyes to see something that our eyes normally would not see. It helps expand our visual range to deeper levels of knowledge and helps us transmitting to the brain a visual picture that sheds light on something the brain left on itself would have to labor in order to abstract an idea out of the complexity at hand. Visualization simplifies and orders the perceived chaos of multiplicity and complexity in a way that is similar to what the brain does normally.

Oil Change International - Follow the Oil Money - Presidential Races: Jan 31, 10:38am 15 reviews petroleum, politics, visualization, free-tools
http://oilmoney.priceofoil.org/federalRaceGraph.php; Follow the Oil Money in the next US elections via Information aesthetics in http://oilmoney.priceofoil.org
Presidential Races 1. Choose what race you want to see by selecting the election year to the left. 2. Adjust the 'Filters' to change the number of candiates and relations shown. [?] 3. Click 'Find the Oil Money!' Follow the Oil Money in the next US elections Visualization of the political blogosphere Great free tool by the Center for Responsive Politics. Who receives the most money from the Oil Industry, what companies and what individuals representing them...

Pioneering research shows �Google Generation� is a myth: Jan 18, 8:33am 3 reviews culture, internet, visualization
http://www.bl.uk/news/2008/pressrelease20080116.html; "Google Generation" is a myth via KurzweilAI.net, in The British Library Online
A new study overturns the common assumption that the "oogle Generation' " youngsters born or brought up in the Internet age is the most web-literate. The first ever virtual longitudinal study carried out by the CIBER research team at University College London claims that, although young people demonstrate an apparent ease and familiarity with computers, they rely heavily on search engines, view rather than read and do not possess the critical and analytical skills to assess the information that they find on the web. The report Information Behaviour of the Researcher of the Future (PDF format; 1.67MB) also shows that research-behaviour traits that are commonly associated with younger users' impatience in search and navigation, and zero tolerance for any delay in satisfying their information needs are now becoming the norm for all age-groups, from younger pupils and undergraduates through to professors. "Google Generation" is a myth Information Behaviour of the Researcher of the Future FREE 35 pages study report - Sheer size of the mountain of information available. - We all zap and surf wildly losing track, it seems, of "the prize". - And from an incredibly rich tool at distributing information the web transforms into something more akin to a spider-web that immobilizes our capacity to understand and unleashes our frantically looking always further as if further contained the finality of our clicking. SU is highly symptomatic of such an attitude. But where does this "always further" bring us? Impressionism?

Technology Review: The Technicolor Brain: Nov 1, 2007 7:44am 2 reviews science, art, visualization
http://www.technologyreview.com/Biotech/19652/; The Technicolor Brain via KurzweilAI.net in MIT Technology Review by Emily Zinger
Genetically engineered "brainbow" mice express random combinations of cyan, yellow, and red fluorescent proteins in nerve cells. The ability to paint individual brain cells with such a broad palette will allow neuroscientists to explore neural circuits like never before. Jean Livet, Jeff Lichtman, and their collaborators at Harvard genetically engineered mice to carry numerous copies of genes that code for fluorescent proteins of three different colors--yellow, red, and cyan--as well as an enzyme that can randomly block any subset of these genes from producing their fluorescent tag. When the mice are fed a compound that activates the enzyme, each cell undergoes a random molecular process in which subsets of the color-coding genes are knocked out. The remaining genes produce the three colored fluorescent compounds in different amounts, which combine to form a unique new hue. The Technicolor Brain

This is a follow-up of a post on the same subject yesterday. Those visualizations are meant to help neuro-scientists have a better grasp of what's going on in the brain. They are first and foremost scientific tools. But how beautiful they are and how sensical! Those images are challenging the visual artists. Meaning is indeed always beautiful. It reproduces what evolution retained as the best of all possibilities that were present at any "bifurcation" on the road of change towards the future... I believe that the challenge of scientific visualizations to the visual arts first and foremost relates to sense. I mean visual images can no longer be stuck in the realm of the absurd or the irrational. I don't mean to say that visual arts have to illustrate science. Let that be done by scientific visualizations. But artists have to come up with images that integrate scientific knowledge with philosophic knowledge in order to give visual signs of the meaning of life of the meaning of us being in the universe and so on... The visual arts are at a turning point. Or visual artists succeed to produce such signs of us being stuck as micro particles in the whole and the meaning of it all or scientific visualizations will simply become the visual arts of the future. Humanity is no longer going to accept much further "artistic" non-sense. The time is approaching fast when art sense shall again impose itself as the essence of the visual arts.

The Science of Information Visualization: A Sketch | EagerEyes.org: Oct 31, 2007 1:36pm 1 review science, art, design, visualization
http://eagereyes.org/Theory/SketchOfInfoVisScience.html; The Science of Information Visualization: A Sketch via information aesthetics, in EagerEyes.org by Robert Kosara
According to one definition(ref), engineering is making things based on scientific principles - as opposed to the intuitive making that defines a craft. Information visualization (InfoVis) is practiced like a craft today, based mostly on practical examples, but not on theoretical basics. Here is a sketch of not only InfoVis as an engineering field, but InfoVis as a science. We could model the science of InfoVis after physics, a well-established science. If we assume that we already have the engineering part, then there's also theoretical physics, experimental physics, and computational physics. The Science of Information Visualization: A Sketch Visualization is at the center of my understanding of the visual arts. I approach visualization from an artistic perspective while Robert Kosara is more in tune with the definition given by Zachary Pousman, John T. Stasko and Michael Mateas in their paper "Casual Information Visualization: Depictions of Data in Everyday Life": "Information visualization has often focused on providing deep insight for expert user populations and on techniques for amplifying cognition through complicated interactive visual models". In my understanding visual arts have filled a societal function since their inception at the dawn of tribal culture till high modernity turned artistic productions into "commodities". That function was to illustrate the worldview of the men of knowledge of the day for all to share. The difference between my personal approach and the "scientific" approach of Kosara and others resides in the nature of what is visualized. Art in my understanding addresses a global vision of reality as it is understood at a given time while "scientific" visualization refers to the illustration of micro observations realized at the end of the vertical tunnel of observation by any given science. The distinction is thus between a visualization at the macro level of reality at the attention of all citizens of a society and a visualization at the micro level of reality at the attention of the specialists of all of those particular micro levels: the scientists. Zachary Pousman, John T. Stasko and Michael Mateas posit to expand the scope of scientific visualization from a specialist related field to the population at large. "Instead of work-related and analytically driven infovis, we propose Casual Information Visualization (or Casual Infovis) as a complement to more traditional infovis domains. Traditional infovis systems,techniques, and methods do not easily lend themselves to the broad range of user populations, from expert to novices, or from work tasks to more everyday situations. We propose definitions, perspectives, and research directions for further investigations of this emerging subfield. These perspectives build from ambient information visualization , social visualization, and also from artistic work that visualizes information". But that definition does nothing more than propose to vulgarize some aspects only, of micro observations realized at the end of the vertical tunnel of observation by any given science, towards "the masses". Let's remark that what would be vulgarized would be those aspects only that have a direct bearing upon the daily life of all. But how are those selections of scientific micro-observations reaching us all? I suspect that the capital invested initially in the researches at the micro level wants to find an outcome to that investment in the form of a surplus or to say this in a more common language in the form of a benefit. In that case "Casual Information Visualization" is no more than the designer form of commodities. Art does not operate at that level.

USGS Astrogeology: Digital Geologic Maps of the Planets: Oct 25, 2007 9:17am 1 review astronomy, science, visualization, reality
http://astrogeology.usgs.gov/Projects/PlanetaryMapping/DIGGEOL/index.html; Digital Geologic Maps of the Planets via info aesthetics, in astrogeology.usgs.gov
a collection of visually stunning maps of the geological composition of the lunar surface, based on data from lunar missions in the 1960's and 1970's. the contrasting colors & seemingly random shapes of the clusters of craters transform normally boring looking informational maps in objects of visual art. Digital Geologic Maps of the Planets Visualization, visualization! - The more complex the knowledge, about anything, the more we seem to transform it in visual terms in order to get a more instantaneous grasp of its usability. - This process of late-modern visualization is similar to the visualization offered by the visual arts in earlier periods (animism, religion, modernity). In other words the men of knowledge in each historical epoch produce knowledge about phenomena that are not directly accessible to the human retina. All knowledge that is not directly accessible to the retina is converted into visualizations. Such visualizations are transmitted by the retina to the brain for integration in the representation of reality operating in the brain of the observer. But one clear difference distinguishes late modern visualizations from its earlier artistic forms. In earlier epochs artistic visualizations were meant to unify the worldview of all citizens within any given society. Late modern visualizations are not concerned with this kind of societal unification they appear as mere tools for letting late modern men of knowledge gaining a more instantaneous grasp of the implications of the sum of knowings he has accumulated. This distinction between the societal functionality of artistic visualizations in earlier epochs from the late modern individual, or sectoral, functionality begs us to differentiate the nature of the knowledge in earlier epochs from its late modern version. In earlier periods knowledge had the societal function of unifying the individuals behind a common worldview. This kind of knowledge was holistic. It gave an interpretation of reality for all to share. The resulting sharing of a common worldview by the citizens of any society before high modernity assured the reproduction of those societies. Societal change was thus naturally slow as it privileged conservation of the societal order over the innovation spurred by individuals. In late modernity visualizations are meant to help those who research a particular segment or aspect of reality to make more instantaneous sense of the profusion of data their research returns. Such profusion of data should not be confused with knowledge (understanding of the whole of reality). It merely corresponds to an accumulation of knowings (one data added to another at the level of a particular segment of reality). This distinction between: - knowledge as an understanding of the whole of reality - and knowings as an accumulation of data at the level of a particular segment of reality is shaping the nature of the difference between: - art (as visual representation of the whole of reality) - and scientific visualization (as the visualization of an accumulation of data gained through the observation of a tiny segment of the whole). Art served societal reproduction but what do late modern scientific visualizations serve? Not the reproduction of societies for sure but what else could it be?

http://infosthetics.com/: Oct 24, 2007 10:22am 57 reviews visualization, reality
http://infosthetics.com/; Last weeks best on information aesthetics last visualization findings in information aesthetics by Andrew Vande Moere
inspired by Manovich's definition of information aesthetics, this weblog explores the symbiotic relationship between creative design and the field of information visualization, in an emergent multidisciplinary field what could be coined as 'creative information visualization'. information aesthetics comparing census data by zip
hand-drawing concept of time
memory landscape drawings A great blog that I don't miss to visit daily. Here are the best findings of the last 2 weeks. It's all about visualizing contemporary trends and concepts. The findings of Andrew Vande Moere often touch on my approach about art.

APOD: 2007 October 8 - Galaxy NGC 474: Cosmic Blender: Oct 8, 2007 1:48pm 1 review astronomy, visualization
http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/ap071008.html; Unexpectedly high complexity in Nasa's Astronomy Picture of the Day
Credit & Copyright: Mischa Schirmer Explanation: What's happening to galaxy NGC 474? The multiple layers of emission appear strangely complex and unexpected given the relatively featureless appearance of the elliptical galaxy in less deep images. The cause of the shells is currently unknown, but possibly tidal tails related to debris left over from absorbing numerous small galaxies in the past billion years. Alternatively the shells may be like ripples in a pond, where the ongoing collision with the spiral galaxy to the right of NGC 474 is causing density waves to ripple though the galactic giant. Regardless of the actual cause, the above image dramatically highlights the increasing consensus that the outer halos of most large galaxies are not really smooth but have complexities induced by frequent interactions with -- and accretions of -- smaller nearby galaxies. NGC 474 spans about 250,000 light years and lies about 100 million light years distant toward the constellation of the Fish Pisces. Galaxy NGC 474: Cosmic Blender
Two Million Galaxies Credit & Copyright: S. Maddox (Nottingham U.) et al. APM Survey, Astrophys. Dept. Oxford U. Explanation: Our universe is filled with galaxies. Galaxies -- huge conglomerations of stars, gas, dust -- and mysterious dark matter are the basic building blocks of the large-scale universe. Although distant galaxies move away from each other as the universe expands, gravity attracts neighboring galaxies to each other, forming galaxy groups, clusters of galaxies, and even larger expansive filaments. Some of these structures are visible on one of the most comprehensive maps of the sky ever made in galaxies: the APM galaxy survey map completed in the early 1990s. Over 2 million galaxies are depicted above in a region 100 degrees across centered toward our Milky Way Galaxy's south pole. Bright regions indicate more galaxies, while bluer colors denote larger average galaxies. Dark ellipses have been cut away where bright local stars dominate the sky. Those 2 images give us a good visualization of the utter complexity of our universe, or better, of our island universe in Villenkin's terminology.

APOD: 2007 September 28 - A Hole in Mars Close Up: Sep 29, 2007 8:23am 1 review astronomy, visualization
http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/ap070928.html; A Hole in Mars Close Up in Nasa's Astronomy Picture of the Day
Credit: HiRISE, MRO, LPL (U. Arizona), NASA Explanation: In a close-up from the HiRISE instrument onboard the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, this mysterious dark pit, about 150 meters across, lies on the north slope of ancient martian volcano Arsia Mons. Lacking raised rims and other impact crater characteristics, this pit and others like it were originally identified in visible light and infrared images from the Mars Odyssey and Mars Global Surveyor spacecraft. While the visible light images showed only darkness within, infrared thermal signatures indicated that the openings penetrated deep under the martian surface and perhaps were skylights to underground caverns. In this later image, the pit wall is partially illuminated by sunlight and seen to be nearly vertical, though the bottom, at least 78 meters below, is still not visible. The dark martian pits are thought to be related to collapse pits in the lava flow, similar to Hawaiian volcano pit craters. A Hole in Mars Close Up This picture comes as a follow-up on an earlier post when I wrote "Amazing how the unknown behind this image of a hole is driving our imagination... ".