From: Robert J. Bradbury (bradbury@aeiveos.com)
Date: Fri Aug 09 2002 - 13:49:45 MDT
> Thanks to MaxM, I have now made 3D sociograms of the traffic on this
> list. Snapshots can be viewed at
> http://akira.nada.kth.se/~asa/Extropians/
Wow! Very very cool Anders!
A couple of suggestions.
a) Compress the scaling of the fonts a bit if feasible.
b) Perhaps consider putting the core names off on the edges with
a vector of a different color to their "ball".
c) It would be really nice to figure out how to compress the picture
to a smaller scale but I think there may be lettering pixel width
problems. I had to expand my screen to 1280x1024 resolution to see
the pictures in their full beauty (that makes the smallest fonts
really difficult to read).
It would be really nice if one could vary the color of the ball
or perhaps the left-to-right shading depending on quantitatively
whether the day-to-day post quantity was rising, falling or staying
at an average level.
> I will make my software ("Legba") available later on, it should be
> fairly portable OpenGL and C (for VR, I'm using CaveLib). It really
> works best if you have a mainframe running VR, but even as a desktop app
> it is nice for one day of list traffic. Maybe one should do a crontab
> job that images the list each day or so, so that one could judge list
> "weather" at a glance.
I have a suggestion. If you could convert the data into PDB format,
you could use one of the standard molecule navigator programs to navigate
through it. There are several browser plug-ins as well as pseudo-free
software like ChemSketch that I think one could use. These have been
tuned so you can rotate and zoom them fairly easily on a PC.
You might have to publish a key. Spike for example could be hydrogen
since he is the lightest of us all. John could carbon because I
suspect at times he would bond to almost anything (smiley here John...).
Then Anders could be Argon (easy to remember) [Though I wonder if PDB
supports Argon since it normally doesn't bond to anything.] Amara
could be Neon since she is one of the brightest of us all. Greg
could be uranium since he likes to play the heavy at times. And
so on and so forth. Of course alternatively one could pick element
abbreviations that come close to the persons name (as was done
with the protein lettering system).
It would be easy to automate this system so it ran every week or day
so it could be continually available (like the wwwstats code for
web server logs).
My 2 cents.
Robert
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