chartjunk lives!

After an excellent talk on visualising data yesterday, a colleague and I were chatting about Tufte, and bemoaning the chartjunk infesting many publications nowadays.  Being academics, we of course discussed giving some lectures on data visualisation.

Later, she sent me the two examples below, in order that I could share her exasperation. (Exasperation is not the word I would have chosen, though.)

I merely cringed at the first, but literally lol’d at the second, in stunned disbelief.

WTF!?  (And what do you mean “normalized”? to 360°?)

Really?  What were you thinking?

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what do these have in common?

Searching for “systematic data collection” on Amazon yields:

hmm

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clearly typecast

Peter Capaldi as John Frobisher

Peter Capaldi has just been announced as the twelfth Doctor.  Given he played Caecilius in the 2008 episode The Fires of Pompeii, and John Frobisher in Torchwood season 3, he's clearly no stranger to the Who universe.






His IMDB entry shows a less obvious connection:

But to me he will always be The Angel Islington.

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keeping it in the family

I've just had a letter from NS&I, encouraging me to buy more Premium Bonds.  I was intrigued to see who had sent it:

Nominative determinism in action!

I wonder if the sinister "Agent Million" is in fact Basildon Bond?

Russ Abbot as secret agent Basildon Bond

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faceless

I was just uploading my photo to my Google profile.  The drag-and-drop interface is nice (although it's very irritating to be told of the minimum 250x250 pixel size only after uploading a smaller pic).  However, I was a little disconcerted to see:

No, the problem isn't that I have acquired a large red halo!  That's just there to highlight the surprising warning box:

I'm not sure whether to be concerned at my lack of face, or to be pleased that I'm immune to Google's face recognition software...

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still here

Guardian item on Mayan apocalypse

I see the world didn't end after all, only the Mayan calendar did.

I suppose that means I still have to do my Christmas shopping, and mark all those exam scripts....

Ah, well.

So, of course, the next end of the world is Monday 31 December 2012, when the Western calendar ends.

What do you mean, that calendar starts again on Tuesday 1 January 2013?

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volume two

Possible contender for the Diagram Prize seen in a local second hand book shop:

It's the "Volume 2" that kills me.

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calling at...

Just as a train leaves a station, there is an announcment of where it is calling.  I suppose the announcement occurs at this point, rather than the more helpful just before the train leaves, to stop all the people who are on the wrong train piling off, and delaying it.

I was recently at a meeting in Bristol.  Returning to York, I boarded the Dundee service at Bristol Parkway.  As we left the station, there was a slight variation on the standard announcement

This service is the departure for Dundee, calling at ... just about everywhere you can think of.

causing much hilarity amongst the passengers.

I sympathise with the announcer.  The service was calling at: Cheltenham Spa, Birmingham New Street, Burton-on-Trent, Derby, Chesterfield, Sheffield, Wakefield Westgate, Leeds, York (yay!), Darlington, Durham, Newcastle, Berwick-upon-Tweed, Dunbar, Edinburgh, Haymarket, Inverkeithing, Markinch, Ladybank, Cupar, Leuchars, and Dundee. Phew! We would have been nearly at the next stop before the announcement was over!

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I don't think this can be correct

Sign seen last week in a Motorway service station:

My first thought: and that leaves where, precisely?

My second thought: and the claim is rather easily refuted...

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meme goes mainstream

Okay, so the punchline is obvious, but it's still fun!

from Life as I know it

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Middle Earth today

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other Grays

While writing about The Puppet of Dorian Gray my thoughts turned to alien grays (as you do).

These are all over the place around here.  There's the signpost on the A14 to Hemingford Grey (maybe the resting place of a famous historical alien?)  Locally, Greys of Ely are so well assimilated into the community that they run a transport business.

But what got me worried recently was seeing a van with a logo warning of Grays Surfacing.  I didn't even know they lived underwater!

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fake fake moon landing site

As I was trawling the web to find a particular picture for my "Angry Birds * Space" post, I came across the "Fake Moon Landings Revealed" site.  It's well worth a visit.

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best April Fool evah

I was reading Jo Walton's review of the new film Oscar! over at Tor.com, thinking, this is weird, but sounds interesting.  She had me going right up to the point where we learn that Dorian Grey [sic] is played by Cliff Richard. ROFL!

The fact that it didn't strike me as at all implausible, just interesting, up until then (and then only the total perfection of that casting made me realise something was Just Not Right) demonstrates the surreal SFnal world I inhabit most of the time.

And I really want to see this film!

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extreme summer time

British Summer Time (daylight savings time) is due to start at 2am tonight, so we lose an hour of sleep.  But the Toodledo calendar widget seems to have lost a whole day!

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O tempora o mores

It was very windy in Scotland on Thursday evening. Two colleagues had travelled back up to Dundee after a meeting in York, so I Googled BBC news to see how bad it had been. I was amused to see that

Grampian Fire and Rescue dealt with 75 storm-related call-outs on Thursday night, three times the normal amount. Many calls were to remove trees and chimney pots and a number of trampolines which had blown away.

Trees, and chimney pots, and trampolines! Oh my!
A number of trampolines.
First world problems, indeed.

(My colleagues arrived home safely after a somewhat longer than usual train journey, btw.)

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I like short meetings

I get quite of lot of email circulars for workshops and conferences. My first thought on seeing this one was, "well, that's not going to take long":

(And my second thought was, "but there shouldn't be a hyphen ... oh!")

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v. good name for a defence lawyer?

Seen recently in Edinburgh:

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roflysst

Watched the DVD of Bill Bailey's Dandelion Mind show last night. Brilliant, as usual. There was a great Internet abbreviation song, including the marvelous punchline roflysst (Rolling On Floor Laughing Yet Somehow Still Typing).

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