Tie-dying your charts: inserting backgrounds in R plots

Ben Bolker (author of a great R ecology text book) just put out a cool chunk of code that lets you add some fancy touches to charts. The overall goals was make R do some of the fancier - and admittedly pointless - things Excel does. This includes background images on plots, rounded corners on plots, and shadowed points.

R and batman

As if R and ggplot weren't cool enough, you can now draw the Batman symbol using code from a Chinese bioinformatician's blog. Another reason R is cooler than SAS.

The Processing program language

The Processing program language looks like an interesting tool for developing powerful data visualizations, or at least the skills and insight to do so with another language. Its author Ben Fry has several books about the language for various uses, including Visualizing Data. The book has few graphs of "visualized" data than I'd expect, and based on the introduction seems to emphasize Fry's philosophy and theory for all stages of data acquisition, analysis, and visualization.

From Wikipedia:
"Processing is an open source programming language and integrated development environment (IDE) built for the electronic arts and visual design communities with the purpose of teaching the basics of computer programming in a visual context, and to serve as the foundation for electronic sketchbooks. The project was initiated in 2001 by Casey Reas and Benjamin Fry, both formerly of the Aesthetics and Computation Group at the MIT Media Lab. One of the stated aims of Processing is to act as a tool to get non-programmers started with programming, through the instant gratification of visual feedback. The language builds on the Java programming language, but uses a simplified syntax and graphics programming model."

Path and Lifecycle diagrams with graphviz

I came across is a cool program called graphviz. It uses a programming language-style syntax to create chart like the "Cluster" graph.

This looks like it could be very useful for drawing all sorts of charts for ecologist, such as food web, life cycle, path, and MARK-recapture diagrams.

Graphviz is used extensively in bio-informatics in such web applications as PubGene and Protein Interaction Extraction System (1).

(1) Ellson et al. Graphvix and Dyangraph: Static and
Dynamic Graph Drawing Tools

Why R is cooler than SAS

The coolest things in science are dinosaurs and volcanoes.

R can draw pictures of volcanoes.

Ergo, R is cooler than SAS.

This mountain is drawn with the rgl package and data from the package. The figure generated by R is interactive, allowing you to swoop around the mountain with your mouse.

I found out about this from a post on R-bloggers. The post has a cool-looking exercise, but I couldn't get the code to run on my first try.