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.

Art from paper

Simon Schubert makes art simply by folding paper, and the results almost unbelievable.


It's amazing what a sheet of paper and a serious dose of imagination can create.

Check out this earlier post for some more paper-based inspiration.

Via today and tomorrow.

Of money and morality

A little while ago I posted about site called YourMorals.org, which uses responses to various quizzes as data for research on moral psychology, and since then I've been taking a bunch of their tests.

This has afforded me such encouraging insights as: I am significantly less satisfied with my life than the average test-taker, I am more likely than average to react to things with disgust, my morality is essentially about avoiding harm and preserving freedom, and I take serious issue against authority and purity. Go figure.

But there's one test in particular that caused me to pause: the "Sacredness Survey".

It works like this:
You are presented with various hypothetical acts (burning your country's flag, pricking a child's hand...) that might violate notions you hold "sacred" and you are asked what it would take for you to engage in these acts. Your response options are the following:

• $0 (I'd do it for free)
• $10
• $100
• $1,000
• $10,000
• $100,000
• A million dollars
• Never for any amount of money

So, at risk of revealing myself as the freak that I am, here were my results -- and it should be noted that this applies only to the acts that I said I would do: it excludes things I wouldn't do for any sum of money.

• It would take an average of $0 to get you to violate the HARM foundation.
• It would take an average of $5000 to get you to violate the FAIRNESS foundation.
• It would take an average of $33333.333333333 to get you to violate the INGROUP foundation.
• It would take an average of $0 to get you to violate the AUTHORITY foundation.
• It would take an average of $0 to get you to violate the PURITY foundation.

Creepy right? I sound like a cheap psychopath.

But this is where I think the study is flawed, or at least very ill-suited to my personal brand of morality...

When it comes to morality and "sacredness", if there's something that doesn't bother me, then I need no financial compensation to do it. In fact, I will gladly break a taboo just for laughs.

One that tickled me from the survey: Sign a piece of paper that says "I hereby sell my soul, after my death, to whoever has this piece of paper." Sure, I'll do that for free for the sheer irony of it.

However, when it comes to things I won't do, like pricking a child's hand (back to my harm-based personal morality), then typically no amount of money will convince me to do it, not because I'm so honest I can't be bought, but because getting paid for doing something bad makes it worse, not better. I may regret harming a child, but getting paid to harm a child is something I might never be able to live down. And the greater the fee the more immoral the act.

Who knows... I guess it's my relationship with money that's coming into play. I have no problem getting paid for work done or services rendered (heck, I have a job after all!), but getting paid to do something bad is a whole other story. So basically, I think my personal financial hang-ups are creating "noise" in my responses to that survey, confusing the results.

I my mind, the major flaw with this survey is that is assumes a commensurability between money and morality, as if the costs of one could be compensated by the benefits of the other. However, money itself has huge moral connotations for most people and it's wrong to think one could introduce that into the equation without fundamentally changing the game.

Quizzes for a cause

Ever been curious about the fundamental underpinnings of your personal moral code? Or how you stack up against others in the moral spectrum? Or how morality affects your daily behaviors?

Take the quizzes offered on YourMorals.org and your answers will be added to the body of knowledge informing current research on moral psychology.

Plus, the tests are wonderfully addictive.

The world in miniature

Okay, bear with me here, because when I first saw this, I thought it was about how to take photographs of miniature model landscapes - something I'd much rather leave to the more arts-and-crafty among us. But that's not what this is about.

This is about taking an ordinary photo, say of a real city or landscape, and making it look like it's depicting miniature models. Like the photo below... Toy boats on a miniature lake, right?


Nope, it's actually just a doctored image of a real life coastal landscape.

Trivial? Useless? Maybe, but check out how it's done.

TiltShiftMaker is a site that does just that, and it does it very simply, by just reducing the depth of field of the photo: the portion of the photo that looks sharp and in-focus. Turns out, the shallower the depth of field, the smaller and closer the objects in a photo look, to the point of making real landscapes and buildings look like nothing more than miniature models.

The reason this works is that when we look at something small and close to our eyes, the portion of our field of vision that is in focus is very small. Conversely when we look at something very large and far away, the potion that is in focus is actually much greater. So when we notice a shallow depth of field, regardless of what we're really looking at, our brain signals SMALL and CLOSE (rather than BIG and FAR) and we use this to make a determination as to what we might be looking at - for example, tiny model boats as opposed to a life-size coastal landscape.

What fascinates me about this is that we do this entirely unconsciously. I didn't know anything about photography or depths of field before looking into this -- in fact I had to wiki depth of field to make sure I was talking about the right concept. But on some level, my brain did know. It's just one thing among a huge quantity of information that we unconsciously process in order to make deductions about the world around us from what is essentially a pretty limited set of sensory perceptions.

Here's other related example - it's a pretty common optical illusion.
Look at the image below... Concave or convex?


To virtually everyone the left side looks like buttons, while the right side looks like shallow holes. The interesting question, however, is why.

The answer is that we make the determination based on how the disks are shaded, interpreting the colors as light and shadow. If there is one thing we know intuitively (though perhaps not fully consciously) about light is that it tends to come from above - from the sun or from lamps. So a disk that is lighter on top we interpret as a protruding button catching light from above, whereas a disk that is darker on top we interpret as a hole shaded from above and catching light on the bottom.

In a way our minds are incredibly ingenious at noticing patterns in our perceptions and using them as clues to navigate the world around us, basically making educated guesses along the way.

But know enough about how the mind works, and you can easily trick it!

Via Apartment Therapy.

Art down the rabbit hole

A philosophy major turned artist, Maggie Taylor depicts a whimsical world that looks like something Lewis Carroll might have dreamed up had Alice's adventures through the looking glass led her into Monty Python's flying circus.


Check out Maggie Taylor's website for more about the artist and her quirky gorgeous works.

United Sins of America

Theoretically interesting, but sketchy in its execution: geographers from Kansas State University create visual maps of the prevalence of the seven deadly sins across the U.S. using various statistics as a (tenuous) proxy for the country's sinfulness.


Lust: based on the incidence of sexually transmitted diseases. Because lusty people have unsafe sex and spread disease. Research courtesy of the Bible Belt!



Gluttony: based on the number of fast food restaurants per capita... While I definitely get the correlation between gluttony and fast food (big, cheap and FAST!), perhaps an obesity map would have worked better? All this shows to me is the homogeneity with which fast food franchises have colonized the country.



Greed: reflects average incomes versus total inhabitants below the poverty line... This one I believe is flawed. I can't think of a way of combining these two statistics to come up with a measure that would at all correlate to or even connote greed. The map too seems to indicate that they are simply equating greed with prosperity.



Sloth: reflects spending on arts, entertainment and recreation versus rate of employment... A bit uninspired, and ideologically flawed, but okay.



Wrath: reflects total violent crimes per capita. Sounds about right!



Envy: based on the total number of thefts... Seriously? San Francisco guiltier of envy than LA???



Pride: calculated as the average of the six other sins... because pride is the origin of all sins? Cop out.


So... I take it Heaven is full of mid-westerners.

Via Flowing Data and Revolutions.

A world inside a book

Brian Dettmer is an American artist, mostly known for his works involving alterations of existing media: books, maps, records, audio casettes...

Among his most fascinating pieces are his book carvings, turning ordinary books into sculptures and revealing their content as a three-dimensional work of art.

This one is entitled Science in the Twentieth Century.



Check out more of Dettmer's works on Flickr.

Found through Centripetal Notion.

Mad science?

While many people's reaction to this is likely to be outrage at the money we're wasting, In This Economy, researching pipe-dream theories... this is actually the sort of thing I love.

Wired Magazine outlines six of the most out-there fields being studied today.

My three favorites?

1. Precognition (Daryl Bem, Professor Emeritus of Psychology, Cornell University)
2. Disembodied Consciousness (Edward Kelly, Research Professor of Psychiatry and Neurobehavioral Sciences, University of Virginia)
3. Telekinesis (Garret Moddel, Professor of Electrical, Computer and Energy Engineering, University of Colorado at Boulder)

Seriously, if there's a future out there where these notions become reality, sign me up!

Check out the article here.