saint_monkey

• Mon, 15:39: To a friend at bay-to-breakers. Me: "There goes a girl dressed as Hunter S Thompson!" Friend: "I don't know who that is" #IDon'tEven
• Mon, 15:40: For some messed up fun, explore the #JustSayin tag. (Politically incorrect people always justify outrageous statements with "Just Sayin")
• Mon, 16:02: IT. COULD. WORK!!!! http://t.co/O0ZvBe0H
• Tue, 11:21: RT @pocahontasshole: Tattoo of Leviticus 18:22 forbidding homosexuality: 200 pounds. Not knowing that Leviticus 19:28 forbids tattoos: Priceless.

The best link in that melange above is this one:

http://t.co/O0ZvBe0H

An engineer describes in great detail, how we might build the starship Enterprise with current technology.

• Tue, 15:22: This tweet requires sense of humor 1.0 or greater: You have no sense of humor installed.
• Tue, 15:45: RT @Disalmanac: Today is National Chocolate Chip Day, the day we remember all the chocolate chips that died in the Great Cookie Wars.
• Wed, 06:39: You start out thinking that a pie chart might be a good idea, but they almost never are.
• Wed, 06:40: It's also funny that clip art people often use pie charts to show "charting" conceptually...
• Wed, 06:41: I find that pie charts aren't even the best way to display how much pie remains... So there you have it.
• Wed, 11:45: Jesus is not the answer if the question is "do we have enough cheese?" #JustSayin #OrIsIt?

In 1786, a Scotsman named William Playfair published his "Commercial and Political Atlas," which contained the earliest known examples of both a line chart and a bar graph. Not content to rest on those laurels, in 1801, he published his "Statistical Breviary" which included the first known example of a pie chart, which showed the geographic distribution of the Turkish Empire prior to 1896 1789.

Since then, there has been only one pie chart ever published that can ONLY be sufficiently displayed as a pie chart:



Seriously, in 1991, a study called "Displaying Proportions and Percentages," appeared in the magazine "Applied Psychology" that showed that the only mental problem that people could solve more quickly with a pie chart than with any other, is to visually determine if Thing A plus Thing B, were greater than Thing C plus Thing D. If Things A thru D are displayed as portions of a pie chart, people solved the problem ASAP, otherwise they were sometimes misled by the data. It seems we are wired to visually sum up chunks of the whole in order to determine which choices would be the most advantageous for us.

For any other type of comparison that might lead you to a pie chart (or a doughnut chart, or a "spedometer" chart, or almost any other rotating axis charts...) You can almost always portray the information more clearly as a stacked bar or stacked column.

None of this logic, however, does much to deter pie charts. In fact, we seem to collectively love them. People rabidly defend them. Think of clock faces. These are just pie charts, displaying a portion of a 12 hour time period. You'd think that if pie charts were so darn confusing, that digital faces would have completely eliminated the clock face by now... and look around... In fact, do a little experiment. Count the number of rotary phones you find, and compare that to the number of clock faces you see. Both were replaced by better technology at around the same time. The ten key took off, the digital clock face gained acceptance as well, but while you'll find analog clock faces, you just won't find a rotary style dial any longer...not even the ten key arrayed in a circle.

I think it comes down to the study mentioned above a bit... people love thinking they get a big chunk of something, so they gravitate to displays that show a chunk from a whole... They look at that and think, "look at that chunk. That's a big chunk. I want that big chunk. I want to BE that big chunk." Now, if we think of that chunk as pie... well hell son, who doesn't like pie? No real American would turn down pie.

• Mon, 09:55: RT @TeamCoco: Ever had one of those mornings when you don't want to get out of bed because you can hear a giant squid slithering around ...
• Mon, 11:30: Pinterest: 20,000 people bookmarking pictures of "cute hair" plus 20,000 SEO dweebs trolling the new thing plus 25 people with content

"SEO" refers to "Search Engine Optimization," or phrases and other options designed to drive traffic to websites. There are tons of people out there who are paid to discover, exploit, and write about ways to "game" the complex search engine world so that people don't find what they are actually looking for, and instead find what you want them to find (ie: stuff that gets their client paid.)

These guys are SEO dweebs. Interestingly, a way to discover a ton of them is to tweet sarcastically using the term "SEO," and then they will all "follow" you. I'm not sure if they collectively fail to understand sarcasm, or if they are just that cynical and self deprecating... Honestly it doesn't matter to me.

PINTEREST, on the other hand, is a very nifty social image bookmarking site. I've been using it for a few months, and it is a very nice way to discover things to look at on the internet, or at least it was, until celebrities started mentioning it on talk shows, and now it has gone the way of a lot of other forms of social media, hence my comment above about SEO dweebs and people putting up links of "cute hair!"

• Wed, 14:59: RT @LafinJack: https://t.co/ANXYEXLh
• Thu, 11:08: RT @LaughingSquid: Sushi Nori Beautifully Laser-Cut Into Classic Japanese Patterns http://t.co/3oQizDS2

Check out that top link for an ALL STAR leap by a cat after its favorite toy.

By the way, cats just LOVE nori wrappers... at least my cat does. Perhaps he has a sushi deficiency?

Check out the second link for cool laser etched nori wrappers for super hipster sushi that you can't ever afford. That shiz is prolly stuffed with foie gras and gold leaf and caviar and gummy bears and ALL that.

• Tue, 14:05: RT @altonbrown: And by the way, everyone knows, lawyer is a dish best served cold.

As I am sure I've mentioned before... Legend says that when the Spanish asked the Aztecs for the name of the strange fruit they were being served, the Aztecs said that it was "ahuácatl," a name meaning "testicle" in their language, (because of the shape of the fruit.) The Spaniards heard the word and misinterpreted it as "Avocado," or "Lawyer."

So ask for your advocates on ice...