For my final, I worked with trying to refine my idea of visualizing campaign speech texts between Obama and Clinton. While this is somehow still a relevant idea, I came to some conclusions about datavis. It’s hard to just take a mass of data and just try to “visualize” it without an agenda about what you’re doing. It’s hard to rectify my idea of having a “painterly” kind of effect with really including a lot of information about the material.

in any case, having a third dimension to scroll through, while keeping the kind of effects i want may be a way of keeping the visualization painterly while not getting it too busy with pop-up tooltips and things like that.

here’s the code:
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Here is the PCB, fresh from Advanced Circuits. I threw it together and mocked it up with the battery from sparkfun for size. It looks like it’ll be fine. For scale, I measured it against my thumb. It’s a little thicker than I’d like, as I’m thinking about casting a resin box for it (probably not in time for the thesis presentation, more likely for the show), and the size may make it kind of unwieldy for a pocket. Otherwise I’m pretty happy with it.

The last couple days I’ve been doing some writing of the thesis paper. Tomorrow, I debug the xbee circuits with the new PCB controlling them, and hopefully plan out how I am going to build the insecurity prosthesis that has me kind of stymied at the moment. Triage time!

Also, this is a really nice review of the new Iron Man movie, talking about a lot of the same stuff that I’m working through as I write. Zeitgeist?