graphspergers - the graphs and quantitative visualization thread

http://b3ta.com/challenge/graphs/

http://www2.b3ta.com/host/creative/6686/1205356238/yourmum.GIF

in your face, positive terms:

http://i50.photobucket.com/albums/f325/caek/NGC_3957-neg.gif

lol postive

hey, dan m, why has AJ gone to IOP but not ApJ? What is up with that?

Still working on this paper by the way : (

http://i50.photobucket.com/albums/f325/caek/Picture1-6.png

http://i50.photobucket.com/albums/f325/caek/Picture2-3.png

Black circles = stars I mask out
Green ellipse = where everyone else says you find half the light
Red ellipse = where I say you find it

Curses.

Aren't those like exactly the same surface? What's the problem?

yeah, they're pretty much identical areas, but mine is narrower because my exposures were longer than they others are so I see more of the disk. This means that when I measure how flat the galaxy is it looks flatter than it does to everyone else. It's not a big deal at the end of the day, I just wish life was simpler.

Finished my poster for conference in Padua:

http://i50.photobucket.com/albums/f325/caek/padua-poster.gif

To be printed at A0

i was bored enough to make this quantitative visualisation

http://base58.com/images/lfmartistsnations.png

A _massive_ fuck you to this graph, which took me seven days to get right.

http://i50.photobucket.com/albums/f325/caek/Picture2-5.png

(Cause of the problem: a misprint in equation 7 of Nap0litano et al. 2003. If I ever see that mother fucker I am going to give him a slap.)

Everything in this blog to thread: http://infosthetics.com/

that is a beautiful poster, caek! did you do it in illustrator?

yes, I love Illustrator.

I asked for it to be installed on my new work machine and they told me I could get Inkscape. Hahahahahahahahaahahahhahhhahaa.

I didn't know you were working on there is no dark matter research until I read that poster. Hooray caek!! dark matter is some suspect shit.

its real ive seen it

listen man I am a lay person who reads magazines my opinions are informed

There is there is no dark matter research, but I wouldn't say I was part of that. I'm more, "OK, dark matter works well on large scales, but things get problematic when you throw some visible matter into the mix, and this is precisely how problematic...".

There's no question that there are discrepancies between the amount of visible mass and the speed with which we see things move (e.g. stars in galaxies). That is an empirical fact that everyone agrees on and it's the observational motivation for "invisible matter that makes things move fast", i.e. dark matter. (The other observational motivation is that time jhosh saw it.)

The other way to explain these disceprancies is Modified Newtonian Dynamics (MOND), which is modifications to Newtonian Gravity on very large scales. If you're interested then a good chatty introductions to the merits of the two is James Binney's 2003 address to the IAU in Sydney, which you can read here: http://arxiv.org/pdf/astro-ph/0310219v2.

Basically, my understanding is that both both dark matter and MOND are fits to data rather than predictions motivated by theories. E.g. Dark matter would probably not have dropped out of theories of particle physics or field theory unless cosmologists had told particle theory people to go looking for it. But dark matter in particular works very well in a lot of situations.

I confront the predictions of dark matter with observations of rotation in galaxies, and they don't match, so the question is what's the problem. Perhaps dark matter is just plain wrong. More likely, I think, is that the models of dark matter (which is simple stuff in itself) do not correctly incorporate "baryonic physics" (things like star formation, black holes, feedback, hydrodynamics, etc. which are all terribly complicated). So on scales where these processes are important, like individual galaxies, things break down.

Dark energy is another matter though. That's some bullshit right there.

http://i50.photobucket.com/albums/f325/caek/Picture5.png

Here's me confronting some predictions with some observations. Each plot shows the speed at which the stars in a galaxy are rotating (in km/s on the vertical axis) as a function of distance from the centre (in weird units you don't need to care about). The observations are the points. The red lines are the predictions of models. Above each plot are the parameters of those models. The first number is the number of solar masses we ascribe to each unit of solar light we see. The second number is the amount of dark matter (in units of solar masses and then logarithmed for those of you playing along at home).

So the point it this:

Take the top left plot. The first number is 0.5 so we're saying each sun we can see weighs half as much as our sun. And we've got a 1 with ten 0s after it dark matter. And the model does not rotate as quickly as the real galaxy.

So we add more dark matter (plots to the right) and more visible matter (plots to the bottom) until we get the best fit. The best fit gives us an estimate of the amount of dark matter present. The best fit here is probably about 1 with twelve 0s dark matter.

Does this guy know how to party or what?!

Today I plotted 3,330 graphs. 30 galaxies, 111 for each galaxy.

YAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAOOOOOOOOOOW.jpg

My supervisor has been away for a week, so I printed them all out (ran to 50 pages), wrote "Welcome back, here's 3 x 10^3 graphs, see you at 10am to discuss them." That will teach him to get on my back about my progress.

I was just reading the new scientist story on how another possible explanation for the discrepancies could be that the copernican assumptions of our postal code being somewhere in a universal kansas are incorrect, or at least the assumptions about the attributes of said kansas

yes, that would do it. again though, all these are post facto fits to observations and not predictions : (

My program is going to take ten days to run for one graph.

Sort of bragging, but mainly I just write shitty code.

i made a really excellent graph this weekend but i cannot post it becuz it was for work. i managed to get like five pgs of text into one easy-to-read bar graph

making charts and graphs is like my favorite part of my job

BOO YA

http://i50.photobucket.com/albums/f325/caek/jamchi2.png

(two months of my life)

btw, ur graph is v. pretty

An early version of my model

http://i44.tinypic.com/33ww5yb.jpg

final version will look way different but hey

that's cool, but needs you get good and drunk and do stuff to it in fifteen minutes

(sounds like my wife etc.)

hat tip to dan m? http://www.andrewjaffe.net/blog/science/000399.html

tufte up in this muthafucka

lol structure of the universe

http://sdss.physics.nyu.edu/vagc/shells.gif

universe is made of shells

have you heard that new song by the boxy bulges, "dark matter & bars"?

http://www.politico.com/blogs/anneschroeder/0609/Sen_Voinovich_Had_us_at_PacMan.html

lol bright galaxies spin faster, but one type of galaxy (the red ones) spins faster at a given luminosity than normal ones (the blue ones)

http://i50.photobucket.com/albums/f325/caek/tf4.gif

http://www.informationisbeautiful.net/2009/the-visual-miscellaneum/

http://s3.amazonaws.com/infobeautiful/billion_dollar_960.gif

want to see some fucking beautiful display holy shits http://www.ted.com/talks/view/id/92

ha i was just watching this. and i saw it quite a long time ago during a TED addiction phase. amazing shyt.

incredible how similar and middle class most of the planet is

love that dude

http://manyeyes.alphaworks.ibm.com/manyeyes/