FORTH GO

Today’s Raleigh News & Observer ran an article about increased casualties within the 82nd Airborne Division, which is based here in North Carolina. There was a graph showing casualties by year, with the 2007 total being incomplete. A reader objected to the incomplete year being shown next to the complete years, and editor Ted Vaden thoughtfully opened a Reader’s Corner blog item to discuss ways the paper might have done a better job with the visualization.

I made a suggestion and later found some data at icasualties.org (which doesn’t quite agree with the N&O data from the Associate Press) to use to try out a few ideas.

First, this was my suggested idea, with one set of bars for the partial years values and another set of bars for the full year values. Here I overlaid the two since one is a subset of the other. You can at least see that the partial year total is not indicative of the full year total.

Next is the same thing with the bars side-by-side.

Another commenter suggested a view by month, which is revealing in showing clumps of dangerous periods for this division. The graph still has the problem that the bar for the final partial month carries the same weight as the other months. And the graph is showing a lot of data just to support a newspaper story.

Given the sparseness of the data, I tried clumping the data into trimesters of 4 months each. Not bad but a trimester is not a common year division, adding a little work to decipher the date axis.

Another idea is to look at average casualties per month for each year, but this has a more subtle partial data issue since 2007 has fewer values to average and so is less representative of the year. This is really equivalent to projecting the partial 2007 values for the full year, which the editor intentionally avoided.

Finally, here’s a more scientific view, showing the monthly values with a trend line (spline smoother) overlaid.

Thanks, Steve, for pointing me to this issue.

I saw Helvetica, the documentary film, at the Full Frame Documentary Festival in Durham. The festival, in its tenth year, may have gotten too big for its own good. There were too many films for all of them to be shown in the Carolina Theatre, so some pieces, including Helvetica were shown in ballrooms of the adjacent hotel. Unfortunately, sitting in those fixed, armless chairs for so long was an unpleasant experience making it hard to enjoy the film.

As a long time Mac developer including a stint writing printer drivers, I’m probably more conscious of fonts than most people. Maybe that’s why I didn’t find so interesting the plethora of shots showing the pervasiveness of Helvetica in the world, especially signs and advertising. I did appreciate seeing interviews with lots of font designers who showed great passion about their work, including those involved with it from its beginnings in the late 1950s.

The style of the film emulates the style of the font itself. Helvetica the font is known for its neutrality. Some love the neutrality because it lets the content deliver the message alone. Others hate it because the neutrality gives up the opportunity to communicate on another level. The film is little more than a collection of interviews and shots of the font’s usage in the real world with little commentary provided to guide the viewer, which seems fitting to mirror the neutrality of the font.

Tidbit: the designer of the American Airlines logo spoke proudly of his work noting that AA is the only airline not to redesign their logo in the past 40 years and that the logo was the first public usage of what programmers call “camelCase”, — that is, two or more capitalized words joined together without intervening spaces.

There’s been more talk lately about a new slogan for Chapel Hill. I don’t have a problem with the old slogan, “the southern part of heaven,” but apparently it doesn’t travel well.

I contributed an idea to the N&O’s Orange Chat blog posting on the subject. My idea is to emphasize of the youthfulness of the town which is constantly replenished by the university, and my suggestion is “Forever Young.” The youth theme also ties in with the strong K-12 schools and even the active retirees. “Forever Young” may be too blatant, but I think something youthful would be good.

The topic has also been discussed on OrangePolitics a while back, and a lot of folks seem to be under the false impression that a slogan should be accurate and descriptive. No, a truthful slogan doesn’t add anything. You don’t need to tell people what they already know.

However, for those who really want an accurate slogan, here are a few ideas:

• Worth the Price
• Home of the Homeless
• Park Your Car in Durham
• University Sidekick

Most of our yard is covered in ivy. It makes a nice green ground cover, and we just have to trim it back from trees, beds, and paths a few times a year, which is a lot easier than mowing grass every week. Vinca is a little more insidious, so I try to remove it entirely when it shows up in flower beds.

When I saw some vinca in the ivy a couple years ago, I decided to let them fight it out. I thought the ivy had won a while back, but it must have been a seasonal surge. Now it looks like the vinca is not only holding its own but has spread out within the ivy.

After getting a new MacBook Pro and installing Boot Camp on it so I could boot into Windows or Mac OS X, I’ve rerun some of my prime number mini-benchmarks. I only ran the tests in C++ and latest Java on each OS, skipping C# this time. The charts below summarize the results. Times are in seconds and shorter bars are better. (CSV Data)

The first chart puts the C++ and Java times side by side for each host. The Linked List allocates tons of small objects (one for each prime number found), and the C++ allocator seemed to have significantly improved to be twice as fast as Java and C++ on G5, but otherwise there is not too much difference.

The second chart shows the same data as the first but grouped for comparison of OS/CPU combinations. The Intel CPU (Core 2 Duo @ 2.33 GHz) is noticeably faster than the G5 (2 GHz), but there isn’t a real difference between OSs.

I used latest public versions of Java, which were Java 5 for Mac OS X and Java 6 for Windows XP.