The semi-marathon of Paris 2011

7 March, 2011 (20:09) | Uncategorized | By: jerome

This post is a tribute to my friends who ran this Sunday. If I had known in advance, I would surely had joined you guys, or found a better excuse not to. Anyway, about 30,000 people tried to finish the semi-marathon, and 23764 did (plotted below).

[Edit: this is the 2nd version of the vis. The first, much slower one can be found here. In the previous version I showed all individual runners, here they are binned so the vis is much quicker to draw]

All the data was scraped from the result page.

Runners, you can see your progresses by typing in your bib#. Vincent said he was humiliated by a Malory Greene, so Malory if you want to see you beating Vincent type in 20187. Oh and the winner has bib# 4. The fastest girl is #102.

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Comments

Comment from Jan Willem Tulp
Time March 8, 2011 at 12:18 am

Hi Jerome, the first version looks great (slow though), but am I missing the link to the second version?

Comment from Jan Willem Tulp
Time March 8, 2011 at 12:18 am

Oh… soryy… the page apparently didn’t load correctly… it’s showing now! Great job!!!

Comment from jerome
Time March 8, 2011 at 12:46 am

glad you like it! that’s my first self-animated protovis thing. Originally I wanted to do something over a map but it would have been too slow…

Comment from Jan Willem Tulp
Time March 8, 2011 at 9:44 am

One more thing: your first version might be an excellent test case for the improved performance of D3, so if you’re ready for it and want to make the conversion to D3… that might be really interesting! :)

Comment from jerome
Time March 8, 2011 at 2:16 pm

following Mike’s message http://mbostock.github.com/d3/tutorial/protovis.html I think at some point soon I’ll have to take the dive :)

Comment from Firat Gelbal
Time March 8, 2011 at 3:57 pm

Hey Jerome,

This is cool : ) Nice work..

My humble criticism:
- Your script is completely devouring my CPU. Great that I have 2 cores.
- On first view, I didn’t understand what X and Y axis stand for. It looks clean and simple now as it is, but I would have put tiny legend to explain.

Comment from jerome
Time March 8, 2011 at 4:24 pm

Hi Firat, how are you?
are you referring to the view with dots, or that one with bars? I have a very low-end machine which handles the bars quite well but which chokes on the dots. I don’t think it’s a good idea to show individual dots, though…
for this view here x is the position in km from the start, the darker lines mark 5km, and y is the number of runners. I think 1px is 30 runners or something. For the dot view, the y was just a random number. The dots were all very transparent so they looked different when they stacked up to some point, but 100 dots on top of each other looked no different than 1000 or 10000 dots that’s why I scattered them a bit.

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