Opinion

It’s probably not news to anyone in data visualization that the most-used “jet” colormap (sic) (sometimes referred to as “rainbow”) is a bad choice for many reasons. Doesn’t work when printed black & white Doesn’t work well for colourblind people Not linear in colour space, so it’s hard to estimate numerical values from the resulting image The Matlab team recently developed a new colormap called “parula” but amazingly because Matlab is commercially-licensed software no-one else is allowed to use it!...

Netronix and, purportedly also Onyx International, are developing 13.3 inch screen eReaders using eInk’s Mobius screen, as rivals to Sony’s expensive, PDF-only DPT-S1 Digital Paper. A new video shows the Netronix device prototype being displayed at a recent trade show: Unfortunately, it seems that without a major company to put up the money to manufacture, market, distribute and sell it the device won’t become available to consumers. That is a real shame!...

Salome is an open source software package used to create geometric models and finite element meshes for use in numerical simulations. It is also able to perform its own numerical simulations and has post-processing capabilities built in. Here are my 5 tips for anyone who is interested in using Salome for model and mesh creation. 1. Practice manually first This goes without saying. Although Salome has a powerful Python-based scripting capability, it is worth practicing with manual model generation....

“If six points is a ‘million miles away’, I don’t know what the translation of a mile into a point is.” – Arsene Wenger According to reports, Arsene Wenger is not great at simple mathematics. He was quoted today responding to criticism by Paul Scholes that Arsenal were “a million miles away” from winning the Premier League. Wenger said in response “If six points is a ‘million miles away’, I don’t know what the translation of a mile into a point is....