Two provocative reports:

news.com on Google

NY Times on Google

The New York Times report, by Randall Stross, is alas very damaging to the once-pristine image of Google.

Science (July 15, 2005) has several website picks of the week including a very good flying snake in silhouette, in the last video under snake "take-off". The still photographs are also very good.

I have completed a new series of fine art prints. The signed and numbered prints are based on my books, including Beautiful Evidence. "Max Diving 1, 2, 3, and 4" are photographs I took several years ago. In much smaller reproductions, the Max Diving series will be the jacket for Beautiful Evidence. All 16 bookprints.

Here's the pdf of a 16-page interview that appeared in the Technical Communication Quarterly:

Technical Communication Quarterly

I need a 3-D image of a saddle, a hyperbolic paraboloid, the shape of which is defined by a rough scatter of data points lying on its surfaces. In turn the 3-D scatter should be projected on the 3 surrounding 2-dimensional planes making up the box around the saddle. Then the points lying in the 3 2-spaces should be projected to univariate sparklines, those sparklines folded to link the plane-pairs will also serve as the tripod axes of the 3-space.

The 3-D saddle (made from data points, not too many I hope) floats within this box.

The idea is that the 2-D and 1-D projections fail to provide sufficient information to identify the 3-D hyperbolic paraboloid! Note that our saddle is not a surface, it consists of just enough scattered data points over the surface to suggest a saddle shape. So this is not about mathematical surfaces but rather about data scatters.

Has this or similar been done and where can I pick up such an illustration? I recall an example of a 3-D letter made from dots surrounded by 3 2-D planes whose projected points from the 3-D object don't give away the 3-D shape.

Surely this has been done already in MacSpin or Statview or a similar 3-D data analysis tool. After all, this is the fundamental logic about why we should do multiviariate analysis. If necessary we can construct the sparkline axes.

Might a Kindly Contributor find a good example or perhaps construct one? This is for the sparkline chapter but I'd like also to slip in the idea about n-1 dimensional projections of data points not giving full information n-space data point activities, exactly the problem of A. Square living in Abbott's Flatland.

Thanks, ET

The National Weather Service is proposing to replace its excellent pictoral symbols with some corny icons: https://www.weather.gov/icon_comments/ This link solicits comments about the new icons. The worst are:

Lyn McDaniel, design editor of the Huntsville Times, reports the use of sparklines in their sports section on March 21, 2005: "Here is a modest first use of sparklines that appeared in The Huntsville Times March 21. The graph lines seem fatter because of the process of making a pdf. In reality they are about half-point, and could have been far thinner. Even 85-line presses can reproduce a hairline easily; we have not tried to find the minimum printable thickness on our 110-line press. They were created to the same scale with Adobe Illustrator's graphing function and imported onto the page individually to give me some flexibility in placement. Actually making the charts took only a few minutes. Freehand has a similar graphing function."