I recently ran into this bar chart as part of a credit card summary. It took me a few moments to realize each run of superscripted digits was part of a single number, as opposed to indicating exponentiation or footnotes. I’ve never seen such bad labels before. I hope the chart was custom-made and not a feature of some charting software.
At least the bad labeling overshadows the other minor faults of the graph. Sort of like when having a bad toothache prevents you from noticing your sore knee.
At a family gathering last month, Bonnie and I received an unexpected gift from my cousin the Polka Dot Debutante. She made this amazing quilt for us titled “Lots of Dots”:
Being in the data visualization business, I can’t help but see lots of familiar and new plots:
While trying out a new Google plug-in for Chrome, I noticed that Google thought my blog was smattered with pharmaceutical text. But when I checked the site in the browser, everything looked normal. Eventually I figured out my blog was a victim of the WordPress Pharma Hack, which injects text and links only when Google is scanning the site. Apparently it’s part of some Search Engine Optimization scheme to make some sites look more popular than they are.
It took several evenings to figure out what was going on. Along the way I looked at all the sites Google thought I was now linking to. They all seemed to be similarly hacked blogs. I contacted about 20 or so other webmasters to inform them they were also infected, which was an adventure in itself since not everybody likes to put email addresses on their blog. I got some nice responses, including a couple that provided additional information for me to better clean my site.
According to Google there only about 337,000,000 pages left that are infected:
Search showing infected blogs
Luckily I wasn’t delisted from Google; maybe the infection has learned how to keep from destroying the host. However, Bing and Yahoo seem to be missing pages from this blog, including the home page, so maybe they’re more sensitive.
I can be found walking Stella along the trails of Duke Forest almost every week-end. Last week-end Bonnie joined us with her camera for the occasion of Stella’s second birthday.
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While swimming in the creek is usually the highlight, she’s lately been obsessed with fetching sticks. She’ll chase any stick, but she’s training me to pick out the perfect one. It needs to be big enough to offer resistance, sturdy enough for a little tug-of-war, and soft enough for munching on.
Bonnie captured this amazing action shot with the airborne stick in the foreground. In the original you could barely make out the brown stick in front of the brown leaves, so I grayed out the background.
Last week we had second row seats to a Bombay Bellywood belly dancing show in Durham. The seats were worth it for the view but was a bit rough on my ears with the giant speakers only a few yards away.
If there was a story or theme, I missed it. Instead, I only saw two and half hours of high-energy dancing. It seemed that each dancer was always doing at least two of the following things at once: hopping feet, swinging hips, rolling bellies, shimmying shoulders, articulating arms, and twirling bodies. Two different troupes represented two different styles of costumes and dance, cabaret and tribal, though there were plenty of costume variations throughout the night for all dancers. The music seemed to be a surprising mix of Indian/Arabic songs and electronic techno music, except for a live solo drummer who supported a few pieces.
My favorite dances were those with veils. It was amazing how many captivating visuals could be produced by the swirling veils.
The crowd was mostly women, who were constantly offering up enthusiastic shrill howls I later learned were called zaghareets. And strangely enough, less than 24 hours later my ears were again bombarded with zaghareets from the crowd at the Sanity Rally. One more occurrence and it may have qualified as Jungian Synchronicity.
I made it to the Rally to Restore Sanity and/or Fear last week-end in Washington, DC, and it was a lot of fun but very crowded. I didn’t have a sign, but I did wear a tie-dye shirt I made in a US flag pattern just for the occasion.
I arrived by plane around 9 am and took the Metro toward the mall to get my first taste of the crowds. The Metro cars were already crowded when I got on and were soon too full for anyone else to squeeze in (reminiscent of Japanese subways, but without the packers). From there I walked against the masses to meet Bill at the hotel. By the time we got to the mall around 10:30, the front sections were already full and gated off. We were lucky to get a spot within view of a video screen, as they obviously didn’t have enough screens for everyone to see one. With so few screens, the crowd was packed very tight where we were, and I ended up standing in about 1 square foot of space for over four hours, which is much more exhausting than it sounds.
The stage entertainment was very good, and it was a delight to see my favorite comedian, Don Novello as Father Guido Sarducci, give the benediction for the rally. But the real rally, of course, was all the people there. I was really surprised to see so many older people and families attending and carrying signs. In hindsight, I wish I had paid more attention to the people than the stage.
I spent the next morning touring the mall monuments and as a bonus got to see a lot of the Marine Corps Marathon. There was something inspiring about seeing thousands of people running while thousands of other people cheered them on. I never saw the beginning or end of the runners, and I had to jog with them a little ways each time I want to cross the street.
We saw Shakespeare’s As You Like It at PlayMakers Repertory Company last week. It was my first time in the updated theatre, which was very nice — stadium style seating surrounding the stage on three sides. The downside to having seats on three sides instead of all in front is that one side sometimes had an obscured view of the characters. But I think it was worth the occasional missed gesture since the layout also meant everyone was closer to the stage.
I wasn’t familiar with the play, and I had a hard time following the dialog since it was in the original Shakespearean English. Here’s the first sentence as a witness:
As I remember, Adam, it was upon this fashion
bequeathed me by will but poor a thousand crowns,
and, as thou sayest, charged my brother, on his
blessing, to breed me well: and there begins my
sadness.
I guess it’s not legitimate to complain about the language of a Shakespeare play, but it did take away from my appreciation. I’m sure there was a lot of wit in the text that was lost on me. I was expecting the language style could be updated while maintaining the cleverness.
Without the wit, the simple plot was not enough to hold interest. Fortunately, the staging of the play was very good. The set was simple, versatile and high quality. The acting was fine as far as I could judge. I was most impressed with the physical advancement of the story, with active fight scenes and silent communications via gesturing. I wonder how much of that is standard or new to this production.
