Occasionally, things go exactly as I’d hoped. We’re discussing scaling in my Physics of Life class, starting with things like the scaling of volume and area with size. I mentioned in passing that this issue comes up in advertising, and since students seemed interested, I brought the following to the next class — an interactive … Continue reading How to lie with scaling
This week’s Economist has a fascinating map of the number of UFO sightings per capita, by state: When I saw this last Friday, it raised a few questions: What’s up with Washington? How well do UFO reports correlate with population density? (Do aliens have a fondness for sparsely settled, wide-open spaces?) Could I use any … Continue reading Sasquatch is an alien! (A proof in three graphs)
I spent the past week at a fascinating conference on teaching at the interface of physics and biology: a mix of biophysics research talks, education talks, and combinations of the two. I presented a poster on my ‘biophysics for non-science majors’ course, which went over well. Perhaps its biggest impact was superficial, though: everyone (including … Continue reading A soft, silky, scientific poster
Our Physics Department Colloquium this week is on a topic I’m fond of: the analysis of super-resolution microscopy images. This occurrence isn’t surprising, since I invited the speaker, Alex Small, with whom I co-wrote a recent review paper on the subject. The problem that superresolution microscopy confronts is that it’s hard to see tiny things. … Continue reading I should think of a title involving the words “Small” and “Microscopy”
How does a department recruit graduate students? Like many physics departments, ours brings accepted prospective students to visit, funneling most of them into two days during which we try to convey information about our research, the university, the area, etc. Faculty in different research areas think of ways to spend an hour or so describing … Continue reading Grabbing graduate students with graphs
I’ve been reading bits and pieces of Geometry of Design, by Kimberly Elam, which I found randomly on a shelf in our Art and Architecture library. The book has many great examples of design and composition, and thoughts on the wonders of golden rectangles, pentagrams, and other shapes. It devotes a few pages to this … Continue reading Konstructing a poster
This week’s bad graph* plots three-dimensional data with a squashed perspective, hiding any scatter of the points along the “out of plane” axis: The cognoscenti will recognize the plot as visualizing the outcome of principal component analysis (PCA), in this case applied to the microbial communities in mice fed dust from homes** with dogs (D) … Continue reading Bad Graph of the Week (in 3D!)
It is inherently challenging to use a model to make predictions beyond the range of data to which the model was fit — making predictions about the future, for example, based on the past and present. Or, as the Danish proverb more elegantly says, “It’s difficult to make predictions, especially about the future.” Still, there’s … Continue reading You can use any model you want, as long as it’s linear and has a positive slope
I like graphs. At their best they are useful, elegant, and thought-provoking. At their worst, they’re infuriating. Modern systems-ish biology seems to have an abundance of awful graphs, even in good papers (as noted earlier, for example), perhaps because the complex statistical procedures it often uses are hard to make sense of. There’s no excuse … Continue reading (Another) bad graph
Whales, apparently, learn from one another. That’s the message of this paper in Science last month on the transmission of feeding tactics among humpback whales. There are lots of fascinating things in the article, some of which are news to me but have been known for a long time to people who pay attention to … Continue reading Whales, culture, and graphs
The Eighteenth Elephant 