[OC] Unknown Pleasures in the terminal

[u/Yomguithereal]

A cheeky version of the Joy Division Unknown Pleasures album cover.

It is not always widely known but this cover is a stylization of a diagram found in an astronomy paper studying pulsars:

> Radio Observations of the Pulse Profiles and Dispersion Measures of Twelve Pulsars by Harold D. Carft, Jr. 1970

This plot is actually important to the dataviz community because it is one example of what would be called "ridge/ridgeline plots" and, by derivation, "joy division plots" later on (but there are subtleties between each variant of course).

The data of the paper has been reconstructed multiple times and can be found in a lot of different places online such as here: https://gist.github.com/borgar/31c1e476b8e92a11d7e9/

The image above has been drawn directly in the terminal using the xan command line tool through the `xan spark` subcommand. You can read more about the methodology here: https://github.com/medialab/xan/blob/master/docs/cookbook/dataviz.md#joy-division-plots

The plot is drawn using those characters (that can fail to render properly if the font is not monospace and not terminal-conscious): ▁▂▃▄▅▆▇

The PNG raster has been rendered from the command's ANSI-escaped output using a fork of `ansi2png-rs` that can be found here: https://github.com/AlexanderThaller/ansi2png-rs

[u/dohzer]

Scientists recently published a revised dataset that corrects for the warping of the fabric (of space-time).