I recently finished reading one of Kevin Mitnick‘s books, Ghost in the Wires. Fantastic. I constantly found it amazing that someone had lived that life, hacking, evading capture, changing identities. Reads like an action movie at many points, and in fact, severalmovies have been made loosely (and one very loosely) based on his life. Mitnick often talks about how much the “myth of Mitnick” is inflated or distorted, especially in the media and particularly with the movies.
As it turns out, Mitnick lived briefly in Seattle, and with my interest piqued, I figured I might be able to track down his old apartment. He describes going home one day before realizing his was being followed, and in the course of the description he mentions a few street names and the part of town he lived in. And at the end of the book, there’s a photo of the apartment, slightly too grainy to read the name of the building. But clear enough to read the number. A little time with Google Maps and found it! Being so close, I figured I’d drop by to take a picture:
A professor of mine recently criticized some graphs I submitted on a paper and handed me a book by Edward Tufte called The Visual Display of Quantitative Information. It shreds on graphs made in order to show four numbers, or obvious flaws in design giving misleading impressions of numbers.
He talks about the misconception that graphics lie. Of course some do, but his attitude encapsulates well what I think is great about visualization – good representations convey understanding. Graphics can be the most effective way to get a handle on data, or a trend, and they should reveal what underlies the numbers. But in a world of Excel and every insignificant and meaningless piece interrelationship being plotted in an impressive-looking format, it’s easy to forget this.
A quote I heard recently in my Scientific Visualization course (thanks, Thomas!) puts it well:
Visualize to inform, not to impress. If you really inform, you will impress. – Fred Brooks. SIGGRAPH 2003
Although a child can understand a time series, it wasn’t until a couple hundred years ago that they were actually used, as Tufte points out, but its power to convey is obvious. Similarly, just from glancing at a map like this one from the census bureau, one can almost instantly understand the distribution of income across the United States – literally tens of thousands of pieces of data.
A US Census Bureau graphic depicting the income of the 3000+ counties of the United States.
In this vein of conveying understanding, I remember several years ago now watching a TED Talk that immediately captivated me with visualization. Hans Rosling talks about how often when we see the rows about rows and tables upon tables of the massive amounts of census data, not only do our eyes glaze over but it becomes very difficult to keep it all in one’s head at any one time. Visualizing the data is thus a key tool for gaining the insight we seek.
The book is full of tremendous insight about how ink should be used as efficiently as possible (within reason – Tufte is quick to emphasize this point) and that the human eye has a great capacity for handling dense data sets if presented efficiently. It is an entirely necessary resource for anyone who intends to pursue any science, nay, anyone intends to pursue any discipline dealing with numbers.
He has several other books, all of which I intend to read as I was virtually unable to put down the book; I was constantly floored by the myriad examples of strong and weak graphics alike. He also published a book by his mother that I happened to encounter recently via Cool Tools.
I’ll close with a brief excerpt from his book with which I was taken:
Words and pictures belong together. Viewers need the help that words can provide. Words on graphics are data-ink, making effective use of the space freed up by erasing redundant and non-data-ink. It is nearly always helpful to write little messages on the plotting field to explain the data, to label outliers and interesting data points, to write equations and sometimes table son the graphic itself, and to integrate the caption and legend into the design so that the eye is not required to dart back and fort between textual material and the graphic.
A couple of weeks ago, I read about Charles Barber’s new book, Comfortably Numb in Wired, and it sounded intensely interesting. It’s due to come out this month, and I’ve reserved one of the first copies to come into Golden Public Library.
At any rate, I decided to pursue his other book, Songs From The Black Chair. Honestly, when I found (in the prologue) that this was a reference to Tears For Fear’s Songs From The Big Chair, I was turned off, but perhaps in the end it was relatively appropriate. Still, I felt like it was a stretch.
In terms of the meat of the book, rarely in my “adult life” have I been so floored by a book. I got the book last week, and read the prologue on Thursday night, but finished the rest of it on Sunday and today. When class let out this afternoon, I wasn’t thinking of coming home, having a beer and watching a TV show before starting homework. Instead, I was set on finishing up the home stretch of this book. The last time I read a book so quickly (for me, this is very fast) was Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five. (I reread it for a scholarship essay I wrote; incidentally, I didn’t win the moneys.)
Reading this book was like reading about my friend and myself. At first, to the point that I felt completely and utterly involved, and then so much that it was eerie, and then at last to the point that I almost felt indignant about being very eloquently how I felt. I can’t very well articulate how much its reading has affected me.
Oddly enough, at certain points it made me give more credence to the whole anarchist nihilistic punk thing – a “thing” I always regarded as, well, silly. That’s certainly not to say I don’t love Fight Club or SLC Punk, but like Stevo said, he had given no thought to the future, and when the world didn’t end, he had to grow up.
. It shreds on graphs made in order to show four numbers, or obvious flaws in design giving misleading impressions of numbers.