today i attended edward tufte’s seminar on “presenting data and information”.
brilliant.
it was pretty fascinating stuff, albeit i suppose you could have picked it all up by reading his four books on the subject. in fact, the course provided all four books as part of the reading materials, as he used them for reference for most of the course.
if i have to distill it down to one line (and in itself by doing this, tufte would probably be horrified— have i learned NOTHING?) it would have to be this quote:
the point being that we are quite capable of digesting loads and loads of information visually. we do it every day by looking around the world, we do it by reading detailed maps. yet there seems to be this need to dumb down charts and graphs using powerpoint, which instead of making things clearer actually obfuscates things by not providing enough relevant detail.
it’s funny though; he makes a big case about how design shouldn’t detract from and can’t compensate for good content: if the data you’re presenting is crappy, no design can hide the fact. to fix this problem, get better data. which hmc points out is a nice academic attitude, often unavailable for real life. additionally, he espouses full disclosure: annotate everything, and reveal all of your data. this is supposed to give your presentation credibility, and avoid the temptation or impression that you’re cherry picking the data for the most favorable results. in fact, he describes cherry picking as “the most widespread and serious threat to learning the truth from an evidence-based report.”
and all i can think is, i’m in SALES. i’m SUPPOSED to cherry pick. i don’t necessarily want the truth. THE TRUTH IS NOT NECESSARILY MY FRIEND. i only want the version of the truth that is favorable to me at that point in time. i certainly appreciate the desire to convey all the data clearly, but sometimes that’s not necessarily my job.
sigh.
anyway, it was great to hear tufte in person, and to get him to sign a copy of his classic a visual display of quantitative information. better yet was to get work to pay for it all! w00t!
i’ve been (slowly) reading William McDonough and Michael Braungart’s cradle to cradle
there’s a great article in the january 14th issue of the new yorker (sorry, not online) which talks about the scrap metal industry, in which amazingly, they actually do seem to be reclaiming all of these unreclaimable materials. from machines that shred cars down to component parts for use as scrap iron and steel, to shipping the scrambled bits of wire and plastic to china to have hundreds of women pore over it to pick out all the bits of valuable copper, if designers won’t address the issue, then possibly economics will.
meanwhile there’s another great article in the nytimes magazine about recycling cellphones:
This may never be more true than for cellphones. They are the most valuable form of e-waste. Each one contains about a dollar’s worth of precious metals, mostly gold. And while single phones house far less hazardous material than a computer — an old, clunky monitor can incorporate seven pounds of lead — their cumulative presence is staggering. Last year, according to ABI Research, 1.2 billion phones were sold worldwide. Sixty percent of them probably replaced existing ones. In the United States, phones are cast aside after, on average, 12 months. And according to the industry trade group CTIA, four out of every five people in the country own cellphones.
…
Reuse, we are told, is as green a virtue as recycling. But with e-waste all the old ecological dogmas start to become ambiguous. Cellphones represent only a part of the world’s e-waste problem. But they are a key to understanding how complicated it is. They also embody the kind of high-tech products that we will be throwing away more of: easier to upgrade than repair, increasingly disposable-seeming but also deeply personal. As governments around the world, from the European Union to New York City, propose or pass laws to require the recycling of e-waste, there’s little consensus about what recycling actually means. No matter how close our relationship with our phones has become — how faithfully we keep them with us, how we hold them to our faces and whisper into them — we rarely wonder where they go when they die.
food for thought. which doesn’t make me want an iphone or a new hdtv any less.
yes we had HUGE storms this past week. which is to say no thunderstorm, but pouring pouring rain for days on end. i think i saw an ark float by the other day. our house was relatively unscathed, except for the part where water was leaking into our basement in one corner. however, now i know that the sump pump actually works.
considering where the leak occurred, it underscored that i had perhaps put off for far too long the one thing the housing inspector had reminded me that i needed to do: clean the gutters. certainly when it had rained in the past and the water dripping onto the deck was a reminder (“oh yeah. the gutters.”), but once you actually have water spilling INTO YOUR HOUSE that really drives it home (“dammit! gutters!”).
so this morning snapper and i make a pilgrimage to ikea to buy some more shelves for the basement and then to home despot to get a ladder so i can finally climb up onto the roof and clean those gutters (she liked ikea fine, but home despot not so much. too loud for sleeping babies with all the noise and people throwing lumber and stuff about).
up there scrabbling about on the roof, scooping mucks of leaves and dirt out of the clogged gutters, it was really at that point that i really felt it: welcome, homeowner, this is your life.
since i’m suddenly changing accounts (woohoo!) i figured this would be a good time to use up all those days i’ve saved and time a short little break. plus since we’ve gotten pounded this past week with all that rain, this means that there’s lots of great snow in tahoe!
as it was, the timing was pretty great: mel and her friends had a cabin this week up there, so we went up on wednesday to stay with them. most of the group had been there in the beginning of the week but already left, so we got to stay in our own bedroom and thus snapper was able to sleep and not disturb anyone else.
all in all it worked pretty well. this trip did underscore a couple things:
by the time we got out there the fantastic snow had started to get a little hard, but it was good to get some good boarding in. and at least we didn’t hurt ourselves, which is now suddenly top of mind: what if i break my leg — how do i get around on crutches and still carry snapper? maybe i can get someone to carry ME in a sling while i carry snapper in a sling? thankfully, no one was hurt and we didn’t have to figure this out. oh, except for that big welt on hmc’s knee. doh.
(and yes we intended to take a picture of snapper’s first visit to the snow. except that we didn’t. doh doh.)
dear snapper,
happy 4th month birthday!
this was the month of possibly unnecessary changes. first off, at your dr.’s appointment, he told us that we should stop swaddling you because it made things too easy. being easily impressionable parents, we agreed and suddenly you were back to waking up at 3am, much to everyone’s chagrin.
just when we had gotten everyone back on schedule, it was time to go to lost angels for xmas! hooray your first xmas! xmas means presents and fun and relatives and lots of good eatin’. of course, it also means going down to lost angels, where we stay at the palace and you’re sleeping in the pack & play in the same room as us. it also means lots of holiday parties where you try to sleep in weird bedrooms not far enough from all the hubub. all of which resulted in you going back to waking up in the middle of the night and needing lots of soothing to get back to sleep. which has the corollary of making your parents TIRED AND OLD. someday you’ll appreciate all of this. except i’m sure you won’t.
this month we also started having some nursing issues. while you’ve been a really good eater, suddenly you decided that you weren’t going to eat every three hours, but instead were just going to eat whenever you felt like it. which, sure, sounds fine, but how are we supposed to plan our day? as a result of this and other nefarious factors, this is the month you started getting a little formula every now and then. hopefully you won’t balloon out like those baseball players on HGH.
you also had your very first new year’s eve. which mean that grandma and grandpa watched you fuss through the new year while we suffered through interminable wait for a mediocre screening of tim burton’s sweeny todd. “jooooaaaaaannnnnaaaa i feeeeeeeel yooooooou…”
i think you got the better of that deal.
