3 ms·
It’s too bad you were down-voted. Your skepticism is pretty reasonable. > What are the desirable properties of Jet? Pretty much the only desirable property is
by jacobolus 7y ago
It’s too bad you were down-voted. Your skepticism is pretty reasonable.
> What are the desirable properties of Jet?
Pretty much the only desirable property is that it used to be the Matlab default, and therefore has been used frequently and people are familiar with it.
Taking it as a starting point for a design is quite a poor choice. The design process here is pretty much just “we took jet and applied some blur to the apparent lightness”; this is not a principled or careful method, in my opinion.
One good use for this new color map might be: “My ignorant boss keeps insisting on using the jet color map even though it is terrible. I can drop this one in and he won’t notice the difference but it will be somewhat better, even if still problematical in many ways.”
> Why would anyone want low-to-high-to-low colormap?
This is sometimes called a “diverging” color map, and can be useful when e.g. you want to make choropleth map highlighting percentage of voters for Party A vs. Party B. You can make a 1/2:1/2 split of voters light and neutrally colored, and make the color get darker but with two different hues as the proportion gets more lopsided in favor of one party or the other.
But the lightness map on each side should still be more or less linear, and the obvious visual artifact created for the balance point has some concrete meaning.
Cf. https://www.kennethmoreland.com/color-maps/ https://www.kennethmoreland.com/color-maps/ https://www.kennethmoreland.com/color-advice/ https://www.kennethmoreland.com/color-advice/
- yoz-y 7y ago> It’s too bad you were down-voted. Your skepticism is pretty reasonable. It would be if all of the concerns were not actually addressed in the article. Nobody is taking inferno away from you, different scales are useful for different usages. Having an additional color dimension makes it easier to see gradients at a glance.
- spectramax 7y agoIt’s not about whether someone is taking away Inferno or Viridis. It’s about what is effectively lying to your audience and what is accurate perceptually linear representation of the data - the latter triumphs over any aesthetic considerations. There are 4 different color maps from matplotlib 2.0 - you could use a different one if you don’t like the aesthetics. If this article had come up with an original improvement to Viridis, I’d be praising it. Also, Turbo doesn’t give a fuck about colorblind considerations whereas Inferno and Viridis does.
- yoz-y 7y ago> lying to your audience I am pretty sure the scale should be always put somewhere next to the heat map so the audience can make their own judgement. A rainbow colormap gives you more depth than a single or dual hue one, I think that both have their merit depending on the data to visualize. > Also, Turbo doesn’t give a fuck about colorblind considerations whereas Inferno and Viridis does. There is a whole section of the article dedicated to that.
- twic 7y ago> this is not a principled or careful method, in my opinion This is what surprised me. I expected work from Google AI to be based on some sound and novel theory, but this is literally just "we tweaked it until it looked okay on our monitor at the time".
- spectramax 7y agoI think my comment was downvoted for the tone rather than content. I am just frustrated that according to HN, it’s ok to create random color scheme with no clear objective problem statement and perpetuate the Jet...uhhh Turbo. It took a tremendous effort to make Viridis a default matplotlib colormap. Using Jet or Turbo is literally lying to your audience.
- NoodleIncident 7y agoI doubt it. You're probably being downvoted because you quoted the answers from the article, and then typed those questions immediately below.