Personally, I’ve never really wanted to be Tom Cruise - with the exception of two moments. The first was when he was rocketing around in an F-14 Tomcat in Top Gun. The second was when he got to play with that really cool interface in Minority Report (and yes, I’m aware that this makes me a total geek):
I’ve known that if you get wealthy enough you can always buy a jet fighter (Larry Ellison and his son have mock dogfights over the Pacific), but how about that interface?
I couldn’t help but notice all the chatter on Facebook today about Barack Obama’s election as the 44th President of the United States. Here are a couple of status updates by my friends (who, it should be mentioned are overwhelmingly in the Obama demographic: highly educated, urban 25-35 year olds-but mostly not American):
ABC is raising a glass to the US voters with relief and a heartfelt thank-you
DEF can’t wait to see the White House occupied by an African-American family, as it should have been since 143 years ago
GHI (American) has renewed optimism with our new charismatic, unifying leader…
JKL (American) is glad he won’t have to listen to people in the middle east complain to him about US polotics [sic] for the next 4 years!
MNO is impressed by America today.
PQR (American) is alternating between pinching herself and drinking champagne, pinching herself and drinking champagne….
STU (American) YES WE DID!
VWX is is [sic] hopeful that today is the dawn of a new era for the US and the world.
YZA thinks she picked a good year to establish permanent residency in the US! (and is happy 123 went blue).
BCD is OBAMA-licious.
EFG (American) is inspired to use her status line to congratulate Ohio (and the rest of you) on an election well done. Cleveland Baracks!
Here’s to the next four years:
And I apologize for the weak Star Wars pun in the title of this post.
I had an interesting experience the other day while shopping for groceries: I discovered a new fruit. I’m not talking about some mild variation on apples (golden honey crisp granny smith…), rather something mind-blowing that I’d never seen before - the Buddha’s Hand citron. The thing looks like a yellow octopus; here’s a shot of Wendy pretending to eat it:
I thought I new just about every interesting fruit out there, but this one was a pleasant suprise - until we tried eating it. The darn thing tasted like a pithy lemon with little flavour. I’m going to put it in the same category as Dragon Fruit: stunning until bitten into.
I was going through an old German magazine the other day and came across this ad, which I thought worth sharing:
At first it doesn’t look like much. I mean after all, it’s just a train set, right? Actually, it’s a little more subtle than that. It’s called the “Stop-den-castor-start-set” which would translate as “Stop the nuclear train beginner’s set”. The ‘castor’ refers to a canister holding nuclear waste that was sent to Germany for reprocessing. Every couple of years these are sent from France and there are inevitable riots and then more riots. Here’s a photo from the 2006 installment:
If you look closely at the ad, you can see the following:
A protester has tied himself to the tracks (top)
In the middle are farm equipment (used to block the tracks) and protesters (carrying placards saying “We’re against this”)
In the bottom is a sample of what the actual ‘castor’ looks like: a massive container mounted on a flatbed
I thought it a great ad and worth sharing. The paper also gets a bonus for their slogan: “The traditional paper for the new philistines.”
If you live in NYC, chances are that you’re voting for Obama (as a non-American I’m one of the lucky few who don’t have to choose sides). Yahoo’s Political Dashboard has him leading here 60 to 35. What’s amazing me is how he’s become a cult of personality.
You may have seen the Shepard Fairey Obama paintings, but what really struck me was the window display the other day when I walked past Brooklyn Industries on 8th. They make inexpensive, trendy clothes sold overwhelmingly to young, white New Yorkers. And they’ve placed a Barack Obama mask over each of their mannequins (even the female ones).
Obama is really resonating with a block of Americans in ways I’ve never seen before. As a corollary, I can’t imagine Brooks Brothers doing this for John McCain.
I’ve always had a perverse interest in how humans simply abandon things. We’re definitely the only species that covet objects and then abandon them as soon as our internal calculus judges them to be no longer valuable. I’m not talking about no longer wanting your old plates or bicycle, rather the fact that we construct massive edifices and then leave them to rust.
A few years ago this was hammered home to me on a trip to the Yukon. Here’s an old mine near Whitehorse:
Later we were hiking the Chilkoot Trail and when we hit Canyon City we found the detritus of a civilization that lasted at most two years:
As we continued on to Dawson, we came across a set of dredges that are now landlocked. They were built on-site in a pond and literally moved a creek with them as they crunched through the mud looking for gold. The creek is long gone and the dredges (there are two) sit as a testament to, amongst other things, what humans will do for a dollar:
To me, the Yukon was the most personal and poignant example of both how relentless and feckless humans can be.
That is until tonight, when I heard of Hashima Island, off the coast of Japan.
This place almost defies description. Starting in 1890, a small island was built up to contain exactly two things: a coal mine and a city that existed solely to serve it. By the 1950’s, it was the most densely populated place on earth (over 10x as dense as Tokyo). And then in 1973, the coal ran out and it was abandoned in weeks. It’s still there, rusting away and waiting to fall into the sea:
It sounds-and looks-unbelievable but it really exists. For more, check out this and this. Also, watch this video:
I just finished reading John McPhee’s Oranges. It’s a fascinating book (and an easy read at 149 pages). One of the interesting passages concerns Indian River, Florida.
Indian River is where the best oranges in Florida come from (they commanded a $1/box premium in the Northeast - and that was in the 1960s). It’s also quite resilient to freezing as it is on a tidal bay. What’s interesting about the area is how it has changed over time. Here’s how McPhee describes the life of the original post-Civil War orange farmers:
The plantation society of the St. Johns was fairly metropolitan in contrast to life on the Indian River. Families had settled all along the Indian River, but even twenty years after the Civil War they were few enough so that when they saw a sail miles away they could usually tell by the cut of it who was approaching. At night, a family would go out in a small boat, light a lantern, talk, drift, and in thirty minutes catch enough fish to feed them for a week. On trips for supplies in sailboats, they would sometimes see ahead of them a darkness formed on the water’s surface by five hundred acres of ducks. As a boat approached, the ducks would rise with a sound of rolling thunder, leaving on the water five hundred acres of down. Everyone slept on down pillows and down mattresses. The river was full of oysters. The shores were full of cabbage palms, whose hears, boiled, were delicious. Currency was almost unknown. The nearest bank was in Jacksonville. When families put up Northerners who came for part of the winter, payment was often made by check at the end of a visit. For months, these checks would go up and down the Indian River as currency, until they had so many endorsements on them that they looked like petitions. In Titusville, near Merritt Island at the north end of the river, there wa a group called The Sons of Rest. Any member who was seen with perspiration on his face was fined twenty-five cents. At the end of each month, the money was used to buy a pair of overalls for the member who had worked the least. A man named Cuddybuck won four pairs of overalls in a row and the organization disbanded. there was one lawyer on the river. He raised oranges because the practice was so small.
However, the good times didn’t last as first the railroad came and then land promotion led to speculation. By the time McPhee was visiting in the early 1960’s, things had changed substantially:
…Aerospace [NASA - it's right near Cape Canaveral] industries, residential housing, and places like Ramon’s [a bar] are taking over so rapidly that in a few years there will be no citrus trees on the island, with the exception of those owned by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. Hill’s son has built a new house next to his father’s, and he will probably stay there even if the family grove is cut down. He works for R.C.A. No space-age Chekov is going to write a play called The Orange Grove about the Hill family of Merritt Island.
McPhee was largely prescient. Take a look at what the place looks like today:
The orange grows have been plowed under and replaced with communities engineered so that everyone gets a space on the sea:
So the other weekend I cashed in all my loose change. I had three coffee containers full - which ended up working out to be a little over $300! I used a coin sorting machine that gave me an Amazon gift certificate, and that’s now led to the following:
That’s 17 books so I think I’m good from now to the end of the year (if only because I’ll be trying to figure out how any publisher can make money when I can get this many books delivered to me via UPS for so little).
In case you’re looking for a book to read, here’s what’s on the list (from top to bottom):
On a related note, this shopping experience completely confirmed why Amazon is the platform for buying things. Every single one of these books was part of my wishlist (some for a few years). Amazon never asked me to update my wishlist, rather just kept it there for the day when I was finally ready.
Also, now that I’ve bought the books they don’t appear in my wishlist and if I go to the page for any of the books there’s a gentle reminder that I’ve already bought it:
If that’s not the ultimate retail experience, then I don’t know what is.
A little over a week ago I attended Edward Tufte’s day-long course on how to visualize information. What follows is a chronological summary of what he presented; the course consists of a series of infographics along with running commentary.
The first infographic was actually an animation: the Music Animation Machine’s rendering of Chopin’s Berceuse, opus 57 (a lullaby). You can’t see that video online, but here’s a rendering of Chopin’s Etude, opus 10 #7:
There are two powerful elements to these visualizations. The first is that you cannot delete anything from the graphic without removing information. The second is that you can literally choose to hear a note by looking at it.
The next graphic was the following one from Nature (apparently the best source to see people pushing the limits on infographics) showing the epidemiology of SARS:
What makes this graphic so useful is that it includes labels on the linking lines so that it subtly adds additional information. The use of directional arrows also clearly indicates the nature of relationships. It’s not perfect though - it could add incident and mortality rates in different countries and not overwhelm the rest of the graphic.
A quick commentary: if you want to create illegible boxes, give them a big, heavy border and use all caps sans serif fonts - that what cigarette companies do on their warnings:
After that we looked at a graphical history of rock & roll:
There’s a massive amount of information on this chart - more than any one person can possibly explain. What makes the chart work is that every reader has a chance to look at it and explore it using their own cognitive style. Each user will tease out their own story; if they can’t find one then you can tell them one.
Another related point: clutter is not a property of information; it’s a property of design. If you’ve a cluttered diagram you don’t understand your information.
The next graphic was a hospital bill overlaid with commentary as to what each element actually meant (alas, no image online). The bill was a two column itemized list; the commentary was provided in boxes next to the components of the list.
Tufte emphasized that the connections between the boxes were via gray - not black lines; this rendered them more visible. The point here was that a grey line was the smallest “visual move” you could make to connect to the graphic and not distract from it.
From there we moved on to a graphic showing cancer survival rates (here’s a sample):
Note that the graphic goes from least to most lethal and visually depicts how a person can expect to survive over time. While this may seem trivial, you won’t find a chart like this on any major health-related website. And, in fact, Tufte mentioned that he used to show up as the number 3 result in Google queries for “cancer surival rates” - well above any health-related sites.
And here’s Tufte’s favourite graphic of all time. Charles Minard’s description of Napoleon’s disastrous advance on Moscow:
What makes this graphic so impressive is that it has six variables on it: location (x&y), time, the size of Napoleon’s army, temperature and direction. Without a word, the horror of Napoleon’s failed march is immediately obvious. Note that there’s no flourish on this map: it’s just data.
From there, Tufte lectured on a variety of topics. Here are some random comments:
We do our best analytical thinking when we are 24-30 inches away from the page. That should help you decide how big a graphic should be
For serious work, you need data that is adjacent in space (think of a wallchart), not stacked (like a typical Powerpoint presentation)
Whenever possible, get a ‘relevant object’ in the room when you’re giving a presentation: we are human and love both tactile objects and metaphor
Sidenotes are “where god wants footnotes”
When designing a user interface, always focus on what percentage of total screen real estate is data/information (vs. marketing speak)
Genius of the iPhone is that it reduces the need for stacked paths. Most phones had the same functionality but made it impossibly difficult to get to. One of the reasons why Apple was able to do this is that the screen has 2.5x the resolution of a computer screen (hence the screen is effectively 2.5X larger than a similar-sized phone)
If possible, don’t present rather give people a report ideally containing a “supergraphic” like the Rock & Roll history map. They can read faster than you can speak and will ask questions if they find anything interesting in the supergraphic
See how long you can go in your presentation without saying “I”. Will make you appear more informed and professional
Use the “PGP” rule: say something particular, explain the general principle and then say something particular. This is how teachers educate young kids and it works well
The course also featured a number of great quotes. Here are two:
John Von Neumann: There’s no sense in being precise when you don’t even know what you’re talking about.
T.S. Eliot: Talent imitates, genius steals. Apparently Eliot stole this from Oscar Wilde: Good writers borrow. Great writers steal.
And now for some not-so-serious info. Check out this little message that was left in one of my books over lunch:
