Wednesday, July 29, 2009

Truth

"As mathematicians, we play and dream but we don't cheat. You can't cheat in mathematics. Truth is so important. To solve a problem with a proof is exciting and rewarding because it is true forever." ~Marie-France Vigneras

I miss that about my days studying math... Nothing to spin.

Via Seed Magazine.
Their whole slide show on photographs of mathematicians is worth checking out.

Thursday, July 23, 2009

Why cheap airlines are cheap

As someone who grew up in Europe with the luxury of an EasyJet flight from Milan to London for under 50 Euros, the exorbitant prices of U.S. airlines (even the so-called cheap ones) are a constant source of bafflement and frustration.

In case you've wondered how certain airlines can profitably keep prices their prices so low, this visual makes it very clear.


And true, many of the cost reductions come from doing more of what we all hate about airlines: cramming more seats and offering less perks. But piling into an overcrowded tin cylinder without so much as a bag of peanuts to distract me from the crying baby two rows back wouldn't be half so bad if it didn't come with a $500 price tag.

I am all about no frills flights, just as long as they're actually cheap.

Oh, and to American Airlines who insists on recycling its blankets until they are so sticky and strewn with hair that I am afraid of touching them: enough with that already. Just get rid of them. Half-assed perks are far worse than no perks at all.

Via flowingdata, which I am clearly obsessed with.

Self-tracking through Twitter

Data data data. Especially, our own.

From Nike shoes that allow you to log your miles on an iPhone app, to that kid on Twitter who feels compelled to tell the world how many laps he swam each morning, self-monitoring seems to be the latest fad. I track, therefore I am.

And while there is no shortage of tools available to our inner OCD, one in particular stands out in my mind: your.flowingdata.

Created by UCLA PhD candidate Nathan Yau as part of his thesis on self-surveillance, your.flowingdata allows users to aggregate personal data through daily tweets, and then visualize it in various different formats, including graphs, treemaps and word clouds.


Obviously, as a closet obsessive-compulsive and data visualization fan, I am more than a little intrigued so I've started tracking one simple aspect of my life: my moods and their intensity during the workday (since that's when I'm mostly on Twitter).

Yes, I realize I have picked perhaps the least objective metric possible, but that's half the fun. I'm curious as much about my moods as to what might affect my perception of and decision to report on them.

More updates on that to come.

In the meantime, you can read more about your.flowingdata here.
Also, here's an older post on visualizing music consumption, another cool thing to track.