Or: How to Manipulate a Time Series if You Don’t Like What it Shows — In recent decades, the world has been getting warmer. This change in climate has and will continue to disrupt how we live our lives, occasionally catastrophically. There is broad scientific consensus that this change is linked to human activity, specifically the release of greenhouse gases, dwarfing the contribution of other…

In the matter of reforming things, as distinct from deforming them, there is one plain and simple principle; a principle which will probably be called a paradox. There exists in such a case a certain institution or law; let us say, for the sake of simplicity, a fence or gate…

I recently (for some pretty elastic definition of “recent,” but I’ve been juggling priorities and this recap got dropped on the floor) attended this year’s installment of IEEE VIS, the premiere conference on information visualization. This was the first hybrid installment after two years of pandemic-induced purely virtual events, with…

You were not born knowing the theory of gravity, yet when somebody tosses a ball you know roughly where to go to try to catch it (or, at the very least, where to look to see where it’s going to land). Likewise, you do not have to totally understand the…

In Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s (you, know the Le Petit Prince guy) 1931 novella Vol de Nuit (Night Flight), Rivière, the station chief of an airmail operation in South America, intentionally sends men and machines on (at the time) extremely perilous night flights up and down the Andes and in all…

This blog post accompanies a paper to be presented at CHI 2022, “Recommendations for Visualization Recommendations: Exploring Preferences and Priorities in Public Health” written by Calvin Bao, Siyao Li, Sarah Flores, Michael Correll, and Leilani Battle. For more details, read the paper: https://arxiv.org/abs/2202.01335! The pitch is pretty simple: you want…

It’s been a while since I’ve really been able to troll to my heart’s content, so here are some things in information visualization that I suspect are either a) bad, b) useless, or, at the very least, c) not nearly as useful as people tout them to be. I will…

There is a concept in evolutionary biology called carcinization, where groups of totally unrelated decapods will, through the process of convergent evolution, will end up looking like crabs. My understanding of the process (and I should note that “my understanding” of evolutionary biology does not carry me very far in…

Whatever you do, you’re not going to have complete freedom — you’ll be muzzled in one way or another, but at least you can have some diversity in how you’re muzzled. —Timnit Gebru The title of this post should give you an idea of the base level of cynicism with…