I’m headed to Brazil tomorrow. I can’t wait. It’s no secret that Brazil is my favorite place on the earth, a superlative I’m not afraid of backing up. So, if you’re in Rio next week, let me know. I’d love to grab a suco with you somewhere and conversar um pouquinho sobre o estado das coisas tecnologicas. Deixe me saber!
In the meantime, I’ll leave with you some Caetano Veloso, which is about as close as you can get to the awesomeness of Brazil without actually being there. These songs are both from his album Tropicalia, a pioneering record and one of the first to define the Tropicalia genre of Brazilian music (which, admittedly, has its hits and misses but know this: David Byrne approves and apparently so does Kurt Cobain). Incidentally, the title of the second song, Superbacana, means "Super Awesome" so there you go.
A Presidential election is, of course, an epicenter for data visualization. It is, after all, the data that gets the last word and it’s the data that, ultimately, we’ve all been watching and discussing for the last 6, 12 or 18 months. For the Numerati, this is good times (“high five for that chi square extrapolation!”). It’s also good times for finding cool ways to look at data. Here are some favorites I’ve jotted down.
My top pick for pure aesthetics has got to be the news tracker at everymomentnow.com. It’s instantly understandable, clean and useful. Each bar represents a day and the width of the bar represents the number of article references in that day for the candidate, providing information about media trends between the two candidates.
Another, and perhaps the ambitious, is the New York Times’ Visualization Lab. The Times teamed up with IBM’s Many Eyes (and Wordle) to allow you to visualize all kinds of sources (including articles in the Times itself). Construct your own visualization of Sarah Palin’s speech at the RNC or check out a Wordle of Obama’s acceptance speech.
For a general purpose and up-to-the minute perspective on the online coverage of the election, check out Perspctv. This one also meets a high bar for aesthetics which makes the data feel highly accessible. Yahoo has also put together a really nice dashboard, which includes a cool bit of interaction where you can play out your own electoral scenarios.
Of course with all this data being thrown at us, we’re becoming more savvy about how we interpret it. Takeaway.org has picked up on that, I guess, and gives us a poll of the polls. A visualization of how the different pollsters predictions stack up (literally) against one another.
This idea (and others) has been incorporated into the “new” approach to polling that we see at fivethirtyeight.com. I first heard about those guys in an interview on the Colbert Report. I guess they started off by predicting sports scores and were able to do so with a significantly better track record than others. We’ll see if their prowess holds out for the election, but right now they’re giving McCain a 3.3% chance of winning. Sorry Red States.
Last of all, Saturday Night Live has done a very nice job of putting this all in perspective. The skit it is brilliant. The technology is pretty great too.
I’ll be speaking about Silverlight this afternoon at the <head> conference. It’s a really new kind of conference, organized by the venerable Aral Balkan. He’s arranged for an impressive speaker list (including Tim O’Reilly and Lynda Weinman). The “new” bit is that it’s online only (with hubs in select cities). It brings folks together digitally rather than physically.
I’ve been surprised by how well this works so far! There have been a handful of technical snafus (as you might expect for the first round of something like this), but the community feeling is intense. Arguably as good, albeit different, as a real conference.
It’s late notice, but I have a handful of tickets (3?) that I can give away (to the conference, not just my talk!). If you’re interested in attending, let me know. Happy to share, just drop me an email at robby@nerdplusart.com.
Alright, well wish me luck at my first ever online-only conference!
I haven’t had a lot of time in the last week to get things updated. I guess it’s good to be busy! I did finally update the particle generator and the homepage though. Other stuff (AnimatingPanelBase, Kaxaml and the VS code snippets) are coming soon.
Incidentally, converting my frame-based animations from the DispatcherTimer approach I was using to CompositionTarget.Rendering makes a bigger difference than I expected. Nice one team! Things are noticeably smoother (but I had a bit of scare before I disabled the UseLayoutRounding property, which was causing the animations to snap at pixel boundaries and get pretty jerky).
By the way, if there is any interest in the code for the homepage, I’m happy to share it. I’ve been meaning to do a walkthrough of how I created the blurring effect for a while and I was going to give out the code with that. Happy to share soon with anyone wants it, though.
The Incredible Book Eating Boy is my new favorite bed time story (for reading to my two and four year old sons). I looked up the illustrator (Oliver Jeffers) the other day to discover that he, like me, could appreciate a little nerd with his art as evidenced by his uninhibited use of math (that’s right, math) as a design element in his illustrations and paintings. Sweet! I really loved his portfolio for the content, but the site itself also stands on its own. It’s simple, but really effective. Shows how sometimes less == more (a little more math for you).
I must have been a little vague about future plans in my last post because I’ve had a couple of emails asking about whether I’ll still be blogging. Yes! Definitely, I will still be blogging.
If I’ve been a little quiet lately, it’s only because I’ve been really busy (you know, finding new health insurance and stuff). I’ll try to pick up again in the next little bit and thanks to those of you who asked. It’s always nice to be reminded that someone is listening!
As far as future plans go, I’ll still be working with WPF and Silverlight but doing freelance work now. Nerdplusart will always be home to my blog, labs, speaking notes, and anything else that I do with the community (which I hope is a lot). The freelance hub is pixellab.cc. I’ve hesitated to point anyone that way because I haven’t had a chance to put much on the site yet, but I’ll keep you posted as I do!
All that has made a hard decision even harder for me, but I’ve decided to leave IdentityMine and embark down my own path.
I know. What am I doing? IdentityMine has been amazing. It’s a great company where I’ve learned a lot and made life long fiends. I’ll really miss it.
On the other hand, venturing out on my own has been a life long ambition. So right now, I’m mostly just excited about a big challenge and a bet I’ve always wanted to make. Even though it’s not an easy decision, hopefully I’ve made a good one.
In the meantime, all my best to everyone at IdentityMine. Any good I do on my own is, in no small way, a reflection of all of you.
USA Today, eat your heart out! This is an incredibly beautiful animated short that depicts a 1969 interview between John Lennon and a young man who had snuck into his hotel room during John’s “bed-in” for peace phase. The animation has a unique stream of consciousness approach to illustrating the dialogue that puts it somewhere between cartoon and infographic. Notice the very sparse use of color (pink, brown) and incredible aesthetic throughout the whole piece. Also, note the very thoughtful graphics and how they cleverly enhance the meaning of the dialog.
Let’s face it readers, you and I are not jocks. I try to run two or three times a week. You like racquetball. Other than that, we’re not really sports people. Not sports people, that is, except when we catch some serious Olympics fever. And frankly, moments like this make Olympics fever unavoidable.
After you’ve made time for that (brought to you by Silverlight…yes!), take time to reflect on 84 years of Olympics logos. My undisputed favorite is Mexico 1968. I think that if you look long enough, it might be an optical illusion of some sort. Yup, there it is. I just got a flash of the word “Mexico.”
About a year ago, I read this great article in the New Yorker about Banksy. If you don’t know who Banksy is, you’ll want to do the same. It’s a great read, even if it is a little long (it’s the New Yorker after all).
At the time, the masked graffiti ace garnered much of his mystique from his unknown identity. He had a very public yet anonymous profile, the ultimate shrug at the organized art world. Yet his paintings have been selling for six (or even seven?) figures.
Well, I was intrigued, but The Daily Mail appears to have outted our man! Not sure how to take this one. As much as I was dying to uncover the mystery, I think it was more fun when he was anonymous.
