Inspirations

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Various links, references, databases, etc. I try to keep this section up-to-date whenever I came across something interesting!

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Miscellaneous

Books

• Euclid’s Elements : The Elements of Euclid, in which coloured diagrams and symbols are used instead of letters for the greater ease of learners. It a book by Byrne, published in 1847, with a very nice and graphical web version.

Dataviz and colormap theory :

• SciVisColor Portal : A website to explore various colorschemes for scientific visualisation, with the possibility to download them in xml format.
• Some color Map advices for scientific visualization can be found here.

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Maps

Climate and energy related:

A collection of maps with different types of data:

• Eart.nullscholl: See current wind, weather, ocean, and pollution conditions, as forecast by supercomputers, on an interactive animated map. Updated every three hours.
• Blitzortung: Live World Lightning Map
• Global winds visualisation / WeGL wind simulation: Mapbox demo
• Europe Electricity map, with live production/consumption and transfers Electricty Map
• Meteorological data visualisation worldwide (1 week history) Darksky Maps
• “A novel tool for flexible spatial and temporal analyses of much of the observed and projected climate change information underpinning the Working Group I contribution to the Sixth Assessment Report, including regional synthesis for Climatic Impact-Drivers (CIDs): Interactice IPCC atlas

Others

• True size of countries, with a way to compare them without the “planispheric deformations”: The true size of …
• A nice map of Paris’ Underground metro Metropolitan
• A beautiful collection of historical maps, with the ability to buy prints or export in various resolutions: David Rumsey
• …

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Climate databases and tools

• NOAA-hourly: Historical and presents meteorological records, worldwide, hourly data.
• Visualisation of EPW meteorological data, 3D sun paths, schedule editor, shadings and much more!! Andrew Marsh Apps
• Yet another website, more simple, for EPW file visualisation, with the most common information and the ability to cross select data: mdahlhausen.github.io/epwvis/

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Python libraries

Some featured Python modules I find particularly usefull and use a lot.

Geometry, Meshes and VTK

• The Pyvista project, with: Pyvista / PyMeshFix / TetGen. “3D plotting and mesh analysis through a streamlined interface for the Visualization Toolkit (VTK)”. A set of wrappers to facilitate the use of the VTK library, “VTK for Humans” as they say!
• Trimesh: Trimesh is a pure Python (2.7-3.4+) library for loading and using triangular meshes with an emphasis on watertight surfaces.
• …

Parallel Computing and Execution times

• Numba: “Numba is an open source JIT compiler that translates a subset of Python and NumPy code into fast machine code.”
• Multiprocessing: “Multiprocessing is a package that supports spawning processes using an API similar to the threading module. The multiprocessing package offers both local and remote concurrency, effectively side-stepping the Global Interpreter Lock by using subprocesses instead of threads. Due to this, the multiprocessing module allows the programmer to fully leverage multiple processors on a given machine. It runs on both Unix and Windows.”
• Joblib: “Joblib is a set of tools to provide lightweight pipelining in Python. In particular for transparent disk-caching of functions and lazy re-evaluation (memoize pattern) and easy simple parallel computing. Joblib is optimized to be fast and robust on large data in particular and has specific optimizations for numpy arrays. It is BSD-licensed.”

Others

• EPW: “Lightweight Python package for editing EnergyPlus Weather (epw) files” A very handy library to read and parse EPW files!
• …

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Dataviz

Geek

• Text to ASCCI art generator: just type your text, and test a number of styles !

  __  __       _                     
   |  \/  |     | |                    
   | \  / | __ _| |_ ___ _   _ ___ ____
   | |\/| |/ _` | __/ _ \ | | / __|_  /
   | |  | | (_| | ||  __/ |_| \__ \/ / 
   |_|  |_|\__,_|\__\___|\__,_|___/___|    
  

• ASCII Art Generator: to convert a picture to text, with an ASCII style !

Software

• Paraview: “ParaView is an open-source, multi-platform data analysis and visualization application.” THE software for simulation results analysis, post-processing, large scael data-visualisation and even rendering!
• Blender: “Blender is the free and open source 3D creation suite. It supports the entirety of the 3D pipeline—modeling, rigging, animation, simulation, rendering, compositing and motion tracking, video editing and 2D animation pipeline.” Everything you’ll ever need for rendering in 2D / 3D, static or animated.
• …

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