parsimonious

For some time now, I’ve had a problem with using mathematica for producing images. When exporting certain graphic types such as contour plots to pdf, the result is a nasty mess:

As Mathematica stores the graphic as a collection of polygons, these are also used to create the pdf file - and they’re visible as thin white lines all over the plot. 

Up until now, I’ve not bothered to find a solution to this problem because I didn’t really need the graphs I had for anyone but myself. They help me understand things but would’nt go into a paper or presentation. Now I’m working on a project where contour plots most likely will make it into the final document so I need a fix for this image. Luckily, I found one here.

The FixPolygons module for Mathematica joins together polygons that have the same value, thus eliminating all those irritating little white lines. The result of applying this to the above plot is:

Much better, I think you’ll agree!

Thought of You from Ryan J Woodward on Vimeo.

original site: http://conteanimated.com/

via: http://www.onecoolthingaday.com/

More tea - less coffee this year

Cake:

That is all.

In 2002, a Hungarian physicist called Albert-László Barabási published a book called Linked: The New Science of Networks. In the third chapter of this book is the following passage:

“Our first goal was to obtain a map of the Web, essentially an inventory of all Webpages and the links connecting them. The information contained in such a map would be truly unparalleled. If we were to construct a similar map for society, it would have to include each person’s professional and personal interests and chart everyone she or he knew. It would make Milgram’s experiment seem clumsy and obsolete by allowing us to find, in seconds, the shortest path to any person in the world. It would be a must-use tool for everyone from politicians to salespeople and epidemiologists. Of course, such a social search engine is impossible to build, since it would take a lifetime to interrogate all 6 billion people on the earth to learn about their friends and acquaintances.”

I do believe this little nugget contains the genius behind social networks like Facebook and Myspace (and bear in mind that this is in 2002, a year before the launch of Friendster and several years before Facebook). What Barabási describes in this passage, and dismisses as impossible, is precisely what Facebook has achieved: a map of the social connections of over 500 million people all over the world. In simple terms, the key to this is to create a tool that enables and encourages people to communicate through a platform. They will then happily hand over the details of their social connections and the platform has but to collect them.

Barabási grasped in 2002 the potential value of the social network data that Facebook now holds. What he missed entirely was the methodology for collecting that data and that’s what has made Mark Zuckerberg a billionaire. 

These are a couple of great videos about the science of networks. The first is a talk given at Google by Albert-Laslo Barabasi about his new book Bursts: The Hidden Pattern Behind Everything We Do (which I will soon get around to reading)

The second, is a documentary called ‘A documentary on networks, social and otherwise’ which quite nicely gives some of the history of this science and where it might be going. It includes segments where Barabasi, Watts and Strogatz all talk about their work.

Enjoy! I did.