Michael Perkins

The result of putting the full text of Hamlet into Wordle.net.

A TextArc is a visual representation of a text. In a TextArc analysis, the full text of a work is drawn in a tiny, one pixel tall line in two concentric spirals. Each distinct word is also drawn in a readable font at a location that is the average of all the actual word locations. Each of the readable words is then attached to the tiny words that occur in the text by lines.  This provides a graphical representation of the word's distribution in the text.

For a more detailed explanation and additional examples, check out http://www.textarc.org.

Complexity kills. It sucks the life out of developers, it makes products difficult to plan, build and test, it introduces security challenges and it causes end-user and administrator frustration.
- Ray Ozzie

Controlling complexity is the essence of computer programming.
– Brian Kernigan

Increasingly, people seem to misinterpret complexity as sophistication, which is baffling - the incomprehensible should cause suspicion rather than admiration. Possibly this trend results from a mistaken belief that using a somewhat mysterious device confers an aura of power on the user.
– Niklaus Wirth

Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication.
– Leonardo da Vinci

The following video was created by Jonathan Brandel using the Processing programming language. The overlayed animation appears to be reacting to motion in the video. Brandel describes it as "new type of interactive visualization combining computer vision and audio analysis." Click here for more awesome videos by Brandel.

News Dots  is a cool new service on Slate.com that represents current topics in the news as nodes in an interactive visual network. The network graph shows the relationships between the topics in addition to the importance of each topic.

News Dots uses Calais to automatically tag news stories from major publications. Relationships are established by identifying tags that appear together in the same stories. The visualization tool was built using flare, an ActionScript library for building interactive flash visualizations.

Click here to check it out.

A study reported in the August 2009 issue of the Journal of Investigative Dermatology seems to show that patients with psoriasis have a diminished capacity to recognize facial expressions of disgust.

When male psoriasis patients were shown images of disgusted faces, fMRI data showed significantly reduced activity in the insula cortex compared to age-matched male controls. No significant differences in brain response were found when the psoriasis patients viewed neutral or fearful faces.

These results were corroborated by the test subjects' performance on the facial expression recognition task (FERT). Psoriasis patients were less able than controls to identify various intensities of disgusted facial expressions. They were, however, able to identify fearful and sad expressions as well as the control group.

The investigators hypothesize that the psoriasis patients' inability to process disgusted facial expressions protects them from stressful emotional responses.

This appears to be a striking example of what Cordelia Fine calls the "vain brain."

The vain brain presents a "softer, kinder reality" that preserves the individual's positive self-evaluation. While it troubles philosophers, for the rest of us it is vastly more comfortable that we can only know ourselves and the world through the distorting prism of our brains. Freud suggested that the ego "rejects the unbearable idea," and since then experimental psychologists have been peeling back the protective layers encasing our self-esteem to reveal the multitude of strategies our brains use to keep our egos plump and self-satisfied. (Cordelia Fine, A Mind of Its Own,  p. 6, emphasis mine)

Flightpattern is a cool audio-reactive animation programmed in ActionScript by Gwen Vanhee. The music is El Cargo by Amon Tobin.


Flightpattern from Gwen Vanhee on Vimeo.