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#microwave

Recoloring Planck Data 30 April 2013

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The rationale behind this is actually pretty contrived, but one of my friends had an imminent birthday, and I had no idea what kind of present to get her. Incidentally she sent had been working on some project and sent me a copy to look over- a request that I honored by perpetually promising to get to it eventually. Sure, it was interesting enough, but several months elapsed and I was beginning to face the fact that I would in all likelihood never actually get to it (kind of like my bottomless Instapaper queue from three years ago)- but that resounding guilt instilled the notion that somehow she liked astrophysics (the paper was something on Perlmutter’s Nobel). So in the absence of any other good ideas, I decided to get her a giant printout of the classic WMAP CMBR.

Soon after finding a poster for sale off Zazzle entitled the “Face of God“ (a particularly poetic pantheistic epithet), I found out that only a week earlier the European Space Agency had published the results of their Planck probe- a substantially higher quality rendition of the cosmic microwave background. So the solution would be simple, I’d just take that new, clearer image and upload it to that poster-printer under some clever title like “Face of God- Dove Real BeautyTM“, as if the NASA’s WMAP is some kind of odd gaussian girl trope.

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But the ESA’s Planck coloring is for some unfathomable reason particularly ugly. Sure it has a kind of crude appeal reminiscent of some kind of yellowed 14th century cartographic map with its tan speckled shades of color, but in general, it’s just kind of ugly. Maybe it’s five hundred million years of evolution that makes me particularly predisposed to the blue-green aesthetic of leafy flora and the azure sky. Also, for sake of recognizability, the WMAP data has made its fame with that particular coloring, it’s kind of unreasonable to expect someone to recognize it even after the color scheme has been changed.

The task of recoloring it was actually pretty simple, I just had to locate a legend for the respective graphs- a solid gradient which spans from the cool side to the warm side (the actual range of the data is only ±2mK so there isn’t in this case a massive difference between cool and warm). After crawling through a handful of scientific publications, it’s easy enough to find one and take a screenshot.

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The difference in width is actually a kind of useless distinction, an artifact of the resolution of the paper or image I extracted the gradient from. It’s kind of interesting because I don’t really have any idea what the mathematical basis of these gradients are. The WMAP one looks like a simple rainbow so it may just be the colors arranged in progressively increasing wavelength, while the ESA coloring appears to be some kind of linear interpolation between red, white and blue (if the nationalities were inverted, one might be tempted to say murrica).

But once the gradient is established, it becomes the trivial task of mapping the colors of one image to another, something that I kind of hackedly accomplished with a Python script using PIL (It took a minute or so to process the 8 million pixels, but that’s not really too bad). And then, because the ultimate purpose of my project wasn’t so much to attain scientific accuracy as feigning it with some kind of better aesthetic, I went to GIMP and superimposed a translucent copy of the WMAP data so the image isn’t quite so speckled and the larger continental blobs more apparent.

Here is the poster if you want it. And the resulting 6.1MB jpeg.


microwave on app store 23 August 2010

http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/microwave-google-wave-client/id386081118?mt=8

So microwave is now on the app store. Though wave was just announced to be shut down, I had the app done already (though I was waiting for a wave server update so thread continuation and attachment uploading would work), and I just published it anyway. So here it is. Grab it while wave still works :). It supports offline, so you can cache some waves and read them on-the-go.


Anony-bot 30 June 2010

A little robot using the Robots V2 API to expose a wave to a URL. If the URL is shared, then anyone can post anonymously on the wave.


Wave Reader 30 June 2010

Information 2 - Chromium_080
Wave Reader started around early December of 2009 to fill a somewhat significant void. Embedded waves could not be accessed by people who were not logged into their Google accounts, there was no way to link to a specific blip and the official wave client was insanely slow. Most of these issues have been mitigated, so the project is virtually defunct.

μwave updates again 30 June 2010

microwave-screen630-wave

Edit mode is no longer experimental, a new implementation includes a tiny diff engine which allows editing a post without necessarily destroying layout. Root blip editing is now possible. There is a new tag list on the bottom of each wave, also including an “Add Tag” button. Search results are now formatted with modification date, number of blips, number of unread blips and read/unread state. There is a new settings panel when you click the logo. Added support for the internet exploder browser starting at version six. Owner_utils is a setting which adds utilities like “set everyone as read only”. The New Wave feature no longer creates pop-up prompts, but rather silently creates and opens an empty wave. It renders the live-editing cursors. There is a new multipane interface for desktop. Gadget support has greatly improved. It handles rotation on a mobile webkit device better. It now uses Wave Data/Robots Protocol 0.22 and renders using the newly exposed conversation model.


μwave updates 03 June 2010

Microwave June 2 Search

Over a few days, things can change fairly quickly. There have been several speed improvements, a new Forum-Style blip rendering option which arranges blip linearly by the time edited with each containing a formatted quote of the parent to establish context. Attachments are now fully supported, including thumbnails and download links. The operations engine was totally rewritten which uses asynchronous XMLHttpRequest, a new callback based system and support for a batch operations (which means fewer requests and faster responses). A wavelet header containing a list of all participants in the entire wave has been added, as well as an Add Participant button. A specialized, extremely fast gadget viewer was added, which allows for blazingly fast rendering of two popular gadgets (and more will come), it works by bypassing the entire gadget infrastructure and loading trusted code directly inline with the DOM. There is a “New Wave” button which allows people to create new waves directly from the client. The OAuth backend was authenticated with google, for more secure login transactions. Blips have a new context menu which allows for features such as Delete Blip, Edit Blip and Change Title. A full changelog can be found here.

Try it out.