Springtime

It’s not all angry rants between class… Got out this weekend to take some pictures.

You can see the full set here:

Springtime in Cookeville

Data to Desktop

One of the more interesting things to do with data – at least certain types of data – is to look at it. As the “Small World” Photomicrography competition puts it, “…a good photomicrograph is also an image whose structure, color, composition, and content is an object of beauty, open to several levels of comprehension and appreciation.” Some kinds of data don’t really lend themselves to being treated this way, of course – a straight line is a straight line.

Other datasets take a lot of work to turn into something that can be “looked at” at all. This was much more of a challenge with the Raman data I used to collect: 60,000 noisy spectra aren’t really all that attractive. By looking at the parts of the spectra that changed based on the sample – for instance, a blob of plastic embedded in glass – it’s possible to convert this big pile of data into a “chemical image”: A two-dimensional representation of the chemical features of the specimen.

My current data tend to be much more in the “straight line” category, unfortunately, so there aren’t as many opportunities to turn the data into pretty pictures, or even interesting ones. Sometimes it’s easy to play around a bit and come up with something after all. I finally got the interferometer set up again, and used it to produce this picture…