I don’t think I have ever learned a lesson in my life. I don’t watch somebody make a mistake and conclude, well, I’ll make sure I don’t do that, then. We pretend that we can learn lessons like this because the alternative is to face the music: to accept that most of what we do in our human lives is driven by some deep, old compulsion we can neither understand nor control, and that when it comes upon us, all we can do is hold on to the wrecked boat and pray. Or laugh, depending on our personalities.
Via this week’s Data is Plural email, the CDC’s daily vaccination statistics are being hosted on GiHub here. These are pretty amazing data, so I thought I’d take a quick look using some of my favourite R packages: ggplot2 and highcharter.
First, we can look at rate at which first doses are being administered across the States. In the visual below, I’ve highlighted the national trend as well as the tops and tails: New Mexico leads the way in terms of the percentage of the population having received a first dose, and Puerto Rico has the lowest rate.
These data are highly conducive to mapping as well, so I’ve put the most recent data (Apr 1) in a map below:
If you’re interested in the code you can find it all here: rentry.co/cdcvacc
Early spring 📷
Human dignity must be associated with the idea of a scamp and not with that of an obedient, disciplined, and regimented soldier…. In the present age of threats to democracy and individual liberty, probably only the scamp and the the spirit of the scamp alone will save us from becoming lost as serially numbered units in the masses of disciplined, obedient, regimented and uniformed [removed pejorative]. The scamp will be the last and most formidable enemy of dictatorships. He will be the champion of human dignity and individual freedom, and will be the last to be conquered. All modern civilization depends entirely upon him.
Human personality is the last thing to be reduced to mechanical laws; somehow the human mind is forever elusive, uncatchable and unpredictable, and manages to wriggle out of mechanistic laws or a materialistic dialectic that crazy psychologists and unmarried economists are trying to impose upon him. Man, therefore, is a curious, dreamy, humorous and wayward creature.
[Ishiguro] is a planner, patient and meticulous. Before he begins the writing proper, he will spend years in a sort of open-ended conversation with himself, jotting down ideas about tone, setting, point of view, motivation, the ins and outs of the world he is trying to build.
Only once he has drawn up detailed blueprints for the entire novel does he set about the business of composing actual sentences and paragraphs. In this, too, he follows a set of carefully honed procedures.
First, writing very quickly and without pausing to make revisions, he’ll draft a chapter in longhand. He then reads it through, dividing the text into numbered sections. On a new sheet of paper he now produces a sort of map of what he has just written, summarizing in short bullet points each of the numbered sections from the draft.
The idea is to understand what the different sections are doing, how they relate to one another and whether they require adjustment or elaboration. Working from this sheet, he then produces a flow chart, which in turn serves as the basis for a second, more painstaking and deliberate draft. When this is finished to his satisfaction he finally types it up. Then he moves on to the next chapter and the process starts again.
Google’s Data Analytics Certificate is now live on Coursera. I’ve had the incredible privilege of contributing to its development over the last twelve months in a small way, and it’s great to see it out in the wild (already 693 reviews and a 4.7 out of 5 rating!) Check it out!
Without the company’s New York headquarters, people who worked in other cities and countries felt much more involved. One worker wrote, “New York has stopped acting like it’s New York and everyone else.”
Other than explicitly not living his dream, is Kazuo Ishiguro living the dream? In his own words, from a recent NYT Magazine feature:
In some ways, I suppose, I’m just not that dedicated to my vocation. I expect it’s because writing wasn’t my first choice of profession. It’s almost something I fell back on because I couldn’t make it as a singer-songwriter. It’s not something I’ve wanted to do every minute of my life. It’s what I was permitted to do. So, you know, I do it when I really want to do it, but otherwise I don’t.
