Here’s all the news from the Underground this week…
Have you signed up for TRANSFORM 2021 yet? Because it kicks off with the hackathon next Friday 16 April. The hackathon projects are starting to take shape and there is going to be a special Rendezvous session on next Wednesday 14 April at 16.00 UTC to discuss project ideas. Come along and let the project ideas wash over you and vie for your attention.
What to learn first? — Matt created an infographic entitled, Which language should I learn first? with some opinions about how to get started in programming for science, business, and fun. There’s more context in his blog post and this thread contains some good perspectives from others. There’s quite a bit of chat on Twitter about it too.
Colour science for colouring science — Alessandro’s posted in the #viz channel an excerpt from one of Edward Tufte’s books, appealing to those particular colour orderings that “have a natural visual hierarchy”. Check out the thread for some thoughtful considerations concerning the state of the art for colouring data.
Image modified from fabriocrameri.ch.
Singing with the birds — Jesse shared an article in #random with the opening line, “I had a dream one night where a blackbird was talking in human language”. The article then ventures into an exploration of converting human speech into birdsong. If you’re into signal processing, acoustics, and ornithology, you’re going to think this is really cool.
As always, if you want to highlight anything in these weekly posts, message @Evan on Swung.