A dark slide from Polaroid-compatible instant film sold by The Impossible Project.

Basically the darkslide is a purely technical necessity, protecting the film from light as long as it is outside the camera. Impossible is converting the darkslides in collector cards by transforming them into an area to present art projects. On a regular basis we will invite artists to develop refreshing, creative and inspiring content that turns the Impossible Darkslides into unique pieces of art.

You can see all 123 dark slides here.

Images from The Impossible Project.

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You can see in the snippets below the original file and two sorts of that file.

woodrow@woodrow-x200:~/tmp$ cat sort_test
1.2.3.4
2.3.4.5
12.3.2.4
12.2.3.4
12.2.3.5
11.2.3.4
1.12.3.4
20.2.3.4
21.2.3.4
12.2.3.6
12.2.3.5

The first sort, below, uses a numeric sort (-n) which extracts the first part of the value that looks like a decimal number and uses that as the sort key. You can see this in the first underline beneath each entry. It then performs a sort of last resort on the entire value, which you can see as the second underline beneath each entry.

woodrow@woodrow-x200:~/tmp$ /home/woodrow/bin/sort -n --debug sort_test
/home/woodrow/bin/sort: using simple byte comparison
1.12.3.4
____
________
1.2.3.4
___
_______
2.3.4.5
___
_______
11.2.3.4
____
________
12.2.3.4
____
________
12.2.3.5
____
________
12.2.3.5
____
________
12.2.3.6
____
________
12.3.2.4
____
________
20.2.3.4
____
________
21.2.3.4
____
________

The second sort, below, also uses a numeric sort (-n), with the key shown by the underline. However, this sort is a stable sort (-s) meaning that it doesn’t perform a sort of last resort on the entire value. This preserves the input ordering of values which have the same key, which is why this sort is “stable” in computer science parlance.

woodrow@woodrow-x200:~/tmp$ /home/woodrow/bin/sort -n -s --debug sort_test
/home/woodrow/bin/sort: using simple byte comparison
1.12.3.4
____
1.2.3.4
___
2.3.4.5
___
11.2.3.4
____
12.2.3.4
____
12.2.3.5
____
12.2.3.6
____
12.2.3.5
____
12.3.2.4
____
20.2.3.4
____
21.2.3.4
____

US NGS benchmarks, from this publication.

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A current sample of visualization of thesis data — in this case, the CIDR Report. Vertical position on the graph reflects ranking on the CIDR Report.

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If you have a single series of data (in my case, AS numbers) and you want a frequency count, how can you do that on the command line?

... pipe input here ... | sort | uniq -c | sort -r -n


This 1. sorts incoming data as required by uniq, 2. outputs the unique keys and their frequency of occurrence, sorted by the key in lexicographical order, and 3. resorts the output by the frequency of occurrence in descending order, leaving you with something like:


$ grep -P " 33363$" rib.20101113.txt | awk '{print $2}' | sort | uniq -c | sort -r -n


   1558 11686
    317 3549
    310 852
    310 3130
    162 8492
    162 8001
    162 7660
    162 7018
    162 701
    162 6762
    162 5413
    162 5056
    162 3356
    162 3257
    162 31500
    162 2905
    162 286
    162 13030
    162 1299
    156 6939
    155 812
    155 6539
    155 3561
    155 293
    155 2914
    155 2497
    155 2152
    155 1668
    155 1239
    155 1221
     76 3303

Where the first column is the frequency and the second column is the unique key in the source data stream.

And it says Univers. As seen in Montréal.

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via flickr.com

At risk of the blog becoming stale already, I thought I’d fall back on some older material of mine. Back in the summer of 2007 I worked in a semiconductor research fab lab. Everything was pretty much focused on the engineering, and yet there were unintentionally beautiful things to be found here and there. Like the brilliant colors on wafers caused by thin-film interference in the silicon dioxide we grew and later etched, or the patterns created by rows of copper and stainless steel gas tubing that snaked outside of the cleanroom, delivering vital gasses to the equipment therein. I brought a camera in one day to capture some of this unintentional beauty.

This photo captures the perfectly flat, mirror-like surface of a set of freshly cleaned wafers in a quartz boat, waiting to be loaded into an oxidation furnace. The no-lint wipe that the boat is sitting on becomes very interesting with the depth of field. The red dot on the wafers is from a power-on lamp on a sputtering machine behind the camera.

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While perhaps not exactly traditionally form+function, I thought this ad was interesting. Perhaps a subtle joke from some conservative-leaning ad agency? I don't think the function of this scene is the type of self-expression that most protestors are interested in.

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