Editor’s Note: The following is a guest post from Jake VanderPlas, a data scientist who worked on the Graphic Science illustration in the October issue of Scientific American magazine. One of the ...

Editor’s Note: The following is a guest post from Jake VanderPlas, a data scientist who worked on the Graphic Science illustration in the October issue of Scientific American magazine.

It’s a quiet, sunny summer afternoon at the University of Washington’s physics-astronomy complex. But inside the hushed, empty auditorium building, Jake VanderPlas has turned off the lights and shut ...

Regardless of what you might think of the ubiquity of the "Big Data" meme, it's clear that the growing size of datasets is changing the way we approach the world around us. This is ...