Motivation

I greatly admire Edward Tufte.

After running across Tufte in R. I thought it would be a fun challenge to port the plots to python.

Comic

There is a great xkcd about plotting the relationships of characters in a movie. I find it a very elegant way to present information that is otherwise a complicated network of changing relationships.

Primer

Of course, the punchline is the movie Primer which involves a substantial amount of time travel. It’s just a bunch of scribbles. Ha Ha.

Back when I first watched the movie (2011?), I stumbled upon this chart explaining the timelines. There are at least 9, by the way. While better than the xkcd gag at explaining the movie, I wanted to make an honest attempt at displaying the information more concisely.

travels

I wanted to make a digital version of one of large maps where you put actual pins to show where you’ve been.

Basemap makes that pretty easy.

My code is on GitHub: travelmap.py

Here is what the Raw data looks like: