So... can we do this automatically?

float and clear properties in CSS.

I love hypotheses about subtle effects like this -- in the same vein are the Seth Roberts self-testing-based hypotheses about things like "seeing a face in the morning" and "being exposed to light in the evening." But I'm not sure this particular question is phrased very well; I don't think "we remember" is a description of a unitary action. Like, "remembering" isn't the same kind of thing as "learning to shoot a free throw" -- it's probably a single word for a whole bunch of things, a lot of processes, all wrapped up into one. Personally, I've been working on memorizing as much of Book I of Paradise Lost as I can, from my phone (during commutes on the bus in the morning), and that's actually worked out pretty well for me. I think most of these "usability" studies are actually probably pretty worthless-- in that, I'd bet that their replication rate would be even lower than a lot of psych studies, were they published and reviewed in the same way. Can we get a "science of usability," please?

Kinda want to write a simulator of this.

The pop psychology of color choice in visualization. Love it.

Arrays of equal-brightness colors using the Lab and CSL color spaces.

Vertical layout, CSS float alternative.

Munzner's thesis, from 2000. T.M.'s papers on visualization are consistently some of the most interesting that I read.

Designing accessible websites.

The UIUC team's "pathway designer" interface. Built on top of Django.

The first in a series of posts from Rod Page, about reading scientific articles on smaller devices (iPads, other tablets) -- he's reviewing the presentation, interaction, UI, and visual tropes of a couple different readers, in preparation for talking about building an app to read phylogenetics papers on the same platforms. These are worth bookmarking and reading -- they're probably useful for thinking about how to read other media as well (magazines? newspapers? something else?). I've been intending to forward this to Sam when I get a chance...

Are the widths (lengths, whatevs) of the horizontal lines proportional to time? What other kinds of tasks could these diagrams be used for? Could we automatically generate these kinds of visualizations from (say) a protocol description? (I'm thinking of something like Biocoder here.)

"OpenSCAD is not an interactive modeller. Instead it is something like a 3D-compiler that reads in a script file that describes the object and renders the 3D model from this script file (see examples below). This gives you (the designer) full control over the modelling process and enables you to easily change any step in the modelling process or make designes that are defined by configurable parameters."

The origin of the REST-ful design/architecture in web-apps.

"You can come out when you can properly explain the differences between Modernist architecture and postmodern ornamentation."

Parallax-based interactive viewing of multiple layers. Javascript. Amazing. (It'd be cool to see this used for a multi-scale genomic visualizer, a la that old Ben Fry visualizer...)

TBL's 2006 design note.

"Of course, without operations research, which determines the correct times and coordinates it across the network, it would be a disaster all the time." -- A rather narrow counterfactual.

Using colored divs and tables and lists to visualize.. colored bars.

Awesome -- how do you design this? Could you design a series of bubbles that cause it to fold into something else when you sat on it? Or applied different kinds of pressure to it?

"I imagine art historians of the future looking back at the last 10 years of architectural design and excavating not tools, but scripts and codes. They'll be trying to figure out which version of Rhino or Grasshopper a designer might have access to in 2007 or 2013 in order to invent as they did. They'll be thinking about how space became something we understood in relation to the fly-through tool." -- You know, I'm not an expert on Rhinoscript as a language in and of itself -- but I would imagine that a properly designed scripting language would allow a historian to analyze a designer's thought in terms of types and abstractions. "Which abstractions, which higher-order functions, did she routinely use?" The thing is, the script *is* the designer's thought-process, made manifest in a manner that we haven't come to grips with, in any field. Today's methods of formal (algorithm) analysis will become tomorrow's historical tools.

Bryan's new project! Looks great... also, the 1968 picture of Fuller and his "Dymaxion Map" is pretty awesome.

"Skimming through these visual databases, he’s found, can be much more effective than complicated visualization; Cleveland is working on a protocol to share with others soon. Yet even as he advocates the use of visualization databases, he emphasizes that numerical tools — statistical tests of variance and significance — are just as important in assessing trends. Current enthusiasm for putting numbers into pictures sometimes obscures the fact that science is, after all, a quantitative pursuit, and an image alone cannot replace numbers." --- But what about images *of* numbers?? In all seriousness, this is the problem (tools for analysis, not just visualization) that is constantly at the back of my mind.

"ScenarioML" appears to be a structured language for expression "scenarios" about programs, or during design? (See also: Alspaugh's publications: http://www.cs.georgetown.edu/~alspaugh/pubs.html ). Not sure this is relevant to what I'm looking at right now, but I came across it while browsing some technical reports from Alspaugh about Allen's interval algebra, and wondered if it might be of interest to other people...

John saved this in Google Readera while ago... what's going on here, I guess, is that the tiles are defined, or constrained, by their interfaces? "Interface" here being, I guess, the location and number of points along their edges. Tiling with a fixed alphabet would probably be easy to write a search for. I can't get the sketch for the "magnetic tile" out of my head.

"In this paper we outline a specification language combining algebraic axioms and predicate transformers, present part of a non-trivial example (the specification of a high-level interface to a display), and finally discuss the analysis of this specification." Daniel Jackson cites this paper (which describes the "Z" system for specification and analysis of programs) as a early, and key, inspiration to his Alloy system (I'm paraphrasing this from Jackson's book, "Software Abstractions.")

"Deep Zoom: Enables unparalleled interactivity and navigation of ultra-high resolution imagery"

"Beverly St. Clair has originated a way of encoding genetic information in quilt designs." Well, I wouldn't say "originated," but this is a *particular* encoding that leads to particularly cool looking designs. Examples given mostly include genes, but we should consider that non-coding regions might be equally important (or beautiful) for design and aesthetic purposes. Really, *any* piece-by-piece encoding could be tiled in this way. It'd be neat to think about whether certain encodings make clear things like ... protein structure (functional domains), regulatory structure, etc. Also: automatic generation of these patterns at high densities...

"There are three key areas to V8's performance:

* Fast Property Access
* Dynamic Machine Code Generation
* Efficient Garbage Collection"

Honestly, all these people who are complaining about the del.icio.us redesign are completely missing the point. Sure, the layout is weird. Sure the colors need improvement. Sure, there are a whole host of other tweaks that could be made. But! Three things: (a) 1000 character comments, (b) working (and good!) search, and (c) better handling of tag bundles. "Good" web design pales in the face of real, useful features. If you spent your life studying web design instead of web programming -- well, sorry you wasted your life, guy.

Frank Atanassow comment at LtU -- "five questions to answer before you design a new programming language," but really these could be applied to almost any significant research task. "If you have only ever programmed in C/C++/Java and Lisp and scripting languages, you have been sitting in a corner your whole life. Perl, Python, Ruby, PHP, Tcl and Lisp are all the same language." But read the whole thing, because all of it is amazing.

My friend Ben is working for them this summer...

"As the old adage goes, normalize until it hurts, denormalize until it works."

The comments about RDF are illuminating.

How to drive in traffic that doesn't stop. I might have mentioned this to you before... I know I've talked about it, a lot.

Premature generalization of Tufte is the root of all evil.

Discussing the implementation of a particular interpreted language. (Closures, one-pass compiling.)

Presentation for an R-graphics package. Not quite fleshed out, but .. thinking along the right lines.

No touchy.

(Dennis -- same guys as the ones you just linked to, but this time a report on a color picking tool called "PRAVDA", which is *slightly* more formal.)

An IBM technical report. Describes the PRAVDA color selection system. Something like this should be more available in the biological sciences -- the use and abuse of "heat maps," for instance, with gene expression, is insane.

Do your tests work? (Are they complete?) How do you know? Can you prove it? Technically, we could play this game all day. (Which doesn't mitigate the practicality of some of the advice.)

The startup where Jason R. is working now. I should tell my sister about this site...

Online font-building tool? Free, I think.

Excellent run-down, from top to bottom, of rolling your own map solution for a dynamic website.

"Knot diagrams. Could we treat these as infrastructural blueprints and redesign the U.S. highway system to form a catalog of complex knots? You could then study experiential mathematics from behind the wheel of your car.."

Open-source page layout software.

Gilad Bracha on static state. "The bottom line, though, should be clear. Static state will disappear from modern programming languages, and should be eliminated from modern programming practice."

Nice pictures of the Muscles project!

"Snipplr is a public source code repository that gives you a place to store and organize all the little pieces of code that you use each day." Objective-C, but no Java? I guess this is a Mac-related community.

What's the difference between packing and stacking, John? Like, two letters and one dimension. If you haven't read this yet, you need to.

"An odd mix of ornamental numerologies in the city's high street..." (BLDGBLOG is essentially poetry, which is kinda why I love it.) John, this post reminds me of some of your work.

Different kinds of coffee-drinks, described in a simple diagrammatic way. I should probably print this on an index card and keep it in my wallet. (But what's a "macchiato?")

From Infovore, who calls it "very good."

20 slides, 20 seconds each. Get up, say it, and sit down. Presentation philosophies need catchy names, natch.

Expensive, but potentially beautiful.

Beautiful. I should just go through and bookmark *everything* from the SIMILE project. (These guys are just down the hall from me, btw.)

"A Free, High-Quality, and Portable Font Engine." Fonts, you say? Open-source, you say?

Notes on building Prototype-like Javascript interfaces.

Fitt's Law -- a relationship (involving a formula) between the distance to and size of a target for ease-of-selection, in user-interface design. Not sure why he says "corners have infinite dimension," but still.

(Dennis, I had saved this a while ago, but figured you should see it too.) Ah! Yes! Exactly what I needed to read about. Type to ... implement some of this in some of the code that we use to generate color-coded biological results.

Everyone loves the acronym "AIR", right? I assume you've seen this already, but if not -- cool, right? Modular, air-droppable condos. Pastiche from the *future*.

Multi-touch (two-finger) algorithmics. Reminds me of the old "three-fingered salute" jokes, but also: useful.

"Stop worrying about the fold."

One of the two blogs I was mentioning to you, yesterday. He 'reviews' a lot of charts from the NYT.

Structured text composition, with converters to other formats. An online editor, a repository for 'format' schemata, but also links to open-source tools to do the same (I think) locally. Nice.

"For creating AJAX-style prototypes..."

Via Lambda the Ultimate. A document-formatting library in Haskell.

Computational images, generated by Processing.

I did a half-assed version of the "Notae" tool in Java, at one point. These apps make me want to buy a Mac. Also, thinking about this makes me realize that integrating one of these tools with the OS is half the battle.