That's-a-me (when I was still at Observable)! We mostly talked about my background, industry vs. academia, visualization research and how much it makes it into products, and also treemaps. Oddly, pie charts only make a very brief appearance. It was fun to record, and I think it's worth your time.

That's-a-me (when I was still at Observable)! We mostly talked about my background, industry vs. academia, visualization research and how much it makes it into products, and also treemaps. Oddly, pie charts only make a very brief appearance. It was fun to record, and I think it's worth your time.

I just vibe-coded a little Python script that is currently deleting all my old imported tweets that I had transferred over here. It's pretty simple, just goes by post date (since I didn't post here before I stopped tweeting), and the BlueSky API and Python SDK (and Copilot…) make this super simple.

I'm sorry to say that the MurderBot show on AppleTV was pretty meh. The books have more dry humor and good pacing, but the show is just boring. There's also a lot more world-building in the books. Since they're all inner monologue, a lot can be explained without it feeling overdone.

There's a beautiful new (in English) comic about Muybridge. It's very well done, both as a story and a comic. Highly recommended. www.goodreads.com/book/show/23...

I thought there was a way to mark accounts here as bots, even saying who's running them. Am I imagining this?

That's us!

A confusion of dashboards? An overwhelm of dashboards? An ignoring of dashboards? A murder of dashboards? Oh wait, was that a serious question?

It looks like CloudFlare don't delete your pages when you delete your account. I still get traffic report emails every so often, even though I've deleted my account with them 18 months ago. There's no way for me to delete the pages now, since my account is long gone.

Wow, this is fascinating work and a great thread. (Also, I didn't realize that Betteridge's law (the answer to a question in a headline is always no) also applies to paper titles…)

I either just bought the cheapest copy of Karsten's Charts and Graphs ever, or I've fallen for a scam. Stay tuned for updates!

TIL that the Butlerian Jihad in Dune is (possibly) named after Samuel Butler, who wrote a famous letter in the 1860s, and later a book, worrying about the evolution of machines, and arguing for their destruction. arstechnica.com/ai/2025/01/1...

There's a lot going on, but this is a little dramatic. The actual change here is around 1.5% (from about 20.48:1 to around 20.75:1). Even a cropped axis can leave a little more room for a more nuanced picture, IMHO.

Congress: today we swipe right on tiktok Zoomers: thats ... not how it ... what Congress: we flip the phone shut Zoomers: ...? Congress: with this bill we open up 'my computer' and drag the tiktok file to the recycle bin Zoomers: ITS ON A PHONE. Congress: we have degaussed the monitor of freedom

Kind of funny to watch this, because I always wonder if they're just doing their emails on stage. And no, I'm not hating on electronic music, Justice are on my list of bands to see live for sure. I've also seen ODESZA in concert twice, both times were epic. www.youtube.com/watch?v=zL8f...

Yay @arnicas.bsky.social wrote a blog post just for me! I see you, RSS-only blog post! blogger.ghostweather.com/2025/01/this...

What? Who would write such a thing? This is an outrage! Everybody agrees on the dumb, unfounded hate for pie charts, right? I mean, the righteous, totally normal, well sourced, not exaggerated at all, pie chart hate!

I mean I get it, but it's still useful to think of kWh/day, because electricity is sold in kWh (so you can figure out what it'll cost to run per day, month, etc.). It's also meaningful because it's an average over time, it doesn't draw a constant 125W. That aside, I completely agree.

Kind of related to my previous post, this documentary on Phil Collins is pretty good. Especially if you don't know that he was originally the drummer in Genesis. But they also cover a lot of other ground and talk about the toll drumming ended up taking on his health. youtu.be/WdGmydR715Q

Friends of mine like going to concerts by Heart and Billy Joel, and I see The Beach Boys playing the WA State Fair, so I've been thinking about this a bit lately. I don't want to see bands decades past their prime, I find it painful and sad. wapo.st/4afNipJ (gift link)

I get @eagereyes.org's rhetorical strategy here, but disliking pie charts is incredibly uncool. The pie chart haters need to be warned that they're embarrassing themselves.

Well look what showed up in my mailbox today! Very exciting!

This cracked me up. You have to know that this skeet(?) is written by a math professor, and I guess you have to remember some basic set th… I guess I should stop explaining.

It's been a while since I binged @chrisstaecker.bsky.social videos on YT. Great to see him on here, and this video brought him back into my consciousness.

My favorite is, "I want to scream into a pillow until I turn into a teapot." It takes an interesting turn at the end.

The new iOS image playground isn’t entirely clear on the number of legs and tails on a standard-issue cat. It’s a typical generative AI issue, but I figured they’d have done some more work to avoid such obvious issues.

By which, clearly, you mean I contributed the most – right? 🤔 nice analysis, and interesting even if you’re not the best podcast guest ever 😅

This is an interesting chart 📊, not just because of its content. The time axis here strikes me as relative rather than absolute, since the values aren't tied to the years. They'll be different next year, so they're relative to when the chart is made. From www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/...

Interesting! Though now I want to see what words are in one book but not the other, or even words that aren't in any of a set of books. I also wonder if there might be a better use for the size encoding – since it's so prominent, but only shows overall prevalence of the word (not book-specific).

The RobWords YouTube channel is great if you enjoy well-researched videos about language. This one is particularly fun, about a 19th-century English phrase book, "English as She is Spoke." Come for the bad vocabulary, stay for the chapter on "Idiotisms and Proverbs." youtu.be/hXfeh0Rf5gI?...

Fall Guy is the perfect movie. Funny, cute, ridiculous, just the right kind of meta, and doesn't take itself seriously. They can shut down Hollywood now, it's over.

This is a mind-blowing thread, especially if you lived through the early Pentium drama. But even if you didn’t, and just have even just the slightest interest in electronics and computer hardware, Ken is a must-follow.

Yeah, but just in case we'll also send you *another email* to say how sad we are to see you go, and include a link to re-subscribe. Maybe you've changed your mind! Maybe you've realized the error of your ways! Come back pleeeeeeaaase!

Visionary Press holiday deals are live. 🎁 Biggest discounts of the year + free 🇺🇸 shipping code: holidayshipping $49 Info We Trust early edition $75 Nightingale $75 Willard $65 Marey visionarypress.com

Of course *technically*, this isn't correct because the 📊 chart adds a bunch of space below the zero so you get a fairly distorted representation of the data. But it also makes it way more fun, and this isn't exactly life-and-death data, so it's a fair tradeoff.

This is how I'm writing my name from now on!

Optimist: The cup is half full Pessimist: The cup is half empty Science Fiction Writer: The cup is a crystalline super computer and the liquid is hyperintelligent, they want to know why humanity should be allowed to exist, you have 30 minutes to respond and the answer must be danced by a cat

Nice! I honestly never looked into how Gini is calculated, I just saw different numbers and knew that higher was worse. This really helps, though I was expecting the country flags to move the slider for me, cause I'm lazy 😅

The 2,309 possible Wordle solutions interactively visualized! perthirtysix.com/tool/wordle-... This is a project I shared last year, and probably remains my #dataviz claim to fame haha

Man, Galaxy Quest holds up! en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galaxy_...

Wow, I read zero poetry, but this was super easy. Just no question, even just the childish rhyming schemes give them away. Since this was an online study, I wonder if people might have just clicked randomly…

Okay, this connected scatterplot I find much harder to read. The main problem is the roundabout way of labeling the axes – but also both axes are difference in vote share, just for different population groups? I'm still not sure I understand what this is trying to tell me. 📊

I can't not comment on a post about connected scatterplots. I agree that the line charts are easier to read if you're just after the numbers. But if you're trying to draw people in, you have to give them something more interesting. The CSP is perfectly readable IMHO and way more engaging.

The last thing you hear from X, once you've deleted your account, is that deep inside, it's still Twitter.

The last thing you hear from X, once you've deleted your account, is that deep inside, it's still Twitter.

I got started in BASIC, and I turned out okay.

A rare "I drink your milkshake" chart www.economist.com/business/201...

Whoa, Captain Disillusion is on BlueSky? All the other social networks are over.

Whoa, Captain Disillusion is on BlueSky? All the other social networks are over.