It takes little talent to see clearly what lies under one’s nose, a good deal of it to know in which direction to point that organ.
From The Dyer’s Hand by W.H. Auden 📚
Discipline is the impossible conquered by the obstinate repetition of the possible.
From A philosophy of walking by Frédéric Gros. 📚
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.
From The Importance of Living by Lin Yutang 📚
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.
From The Importance of Living by Lin Yutang 📚
[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.
From Kazuo Ishiguro Sees What the Future Is Doing to Us, The New York Times Magazine. 📚
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Net + sand + water = 👍 📷
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.”
John Seabrook on the post-COVID workplace in The New Yorker
Added to the archive 📷
New notebook day 📷
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.
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Currently reading
Technique 📷
[Kant] was awoken each morning at five o’clock, never later. He breakfasted on a couple of bowls of tea, then smoked a pipe, the only one of the day. On teaching days, he would go out in the morning to give his lecture, then resume his dressing-gown and slippers to work and write until precisely a quarter to one. At that point he would dress again to receive, with enjoyment, a small group of friends to discuss science, philosophy, and the weather.
There were invariably three dishes and some cheese, placed on the table - sometimes with a few desserts - along with a small carafe of wine for each guest. Conversation lasted until five o’clock.
Then it was time for his walk. Rain or shine, it had to be taken. He went alone, for he wanted to breath through his noe all the way, with his mouth closed, which he believed to be excellent for the body… He always took the same route, so consistently that his itinerary through the park later came to be called ‘The Philosopher’s Walk’.
From A philosophy of walking by Frédéric Gros. 📚
Harvesting “sea bubbles” 📷
One of the benefits of having a finicky two week old baby who likes to spend significant portions of the night walking around in arms is the opportunity to listen to some old favourites.
Last night’s listen was Boys and Girls In America by The Hold Steady, and boy does it hold up (2006!). It now sounds even more like an elegy, not just for youth and it’s misadventures but for a whole world, pre-pandemic:
And everyone was funny, and everyone was pretty
And everyone was coming towards the center of the city
The dance floor was crowded, the bathrooms were worse
We kissed in your car and we drank from your purse
🎵
The urban stroller is subversive. The walker of wide-open spaces, the trekker with his rucksack opposes civilization with the burst of a clean break, the cutting edge of a rejection. The stroller’s walking activity is more ambiguous, his resistance to modernity ambivalent. Subversion is not a matter of opposing by evading, deflecting, altering with exaggeration, accepting blandly and moving rapidly on. The flâneur subverts solitude, speed, dubious business politics and consumerism.
From A philosophy of walking by Frédéric Gros. 📚
Our judgement of an established author is never simply an aesthetic judgment. In addition to any literary merit it may have, a new book by him has a historic interest for us as the act of a person in whom we have long been interested. He is not only a poet or a novelist; he is also a character in our biography.
From The Dyer’s Hand by W.H. Auden 📚
better bar chart 📈
Bar charts are everywhere, and it’s hard to make them not boring. One way to dress them up a bit is to replace bars with dot-line combinations. This is pretty simple to pull off using ggplot2: I’ll show how below.
The data comes from the Winning the Internet project from The Pudding, hosted on GitHub here. Winning the Internet aggregates the links shared across a number of different newsletters… so it’s a newsletter of newsletters, sort of.
The dataset is simple: one row per URL and columns corresponding to the URL itself, the date of publication, the newsletter it was published in, and whether or not The Pudding classifies the link as spam (eg, not a real link to content).
Once we have it as a df, we can do a little bit of summarizing using count() and mutate() and then pipe the data into a visual:
df %>%
count(newsletter, sort = T) %>%
mutate(share = n / sum(n),
cumulative_share = cumsum(share)) %>%
filter(cumulative_share <= 0.5) %>%
ggplot(aes(reorder(newsletter, n), n, label = n)) +
geom_text(nudge_y = 500, color = "#F72485") +
geom_point(color = "#F72485", size = 2) +
geom_bar(stat = "identity", width = .02, fill = "#F72485") +
ylim(0, 8000) +
coord_flip() +
labs(x = "", y = "",
subtitle = "\nWinning the Internet: top newsletters by link volume.
\n(these newsletters make up 50% of all links in the dataset).") +
theme_custom()
A standard bar chart would use geom_bar() to do the heavy lifting when encoding the data. What we’ve done here is made the bars really skinny, and then also encoded the data in end of bar points using geom_point() and labels geom_text().
If you’re interested in the full code (including the themeing that goes into the theme_custom() function at the end of the chunk above, you can find it all here: rentry.co/puddinglinks1
This week’s best toy: dad’s chip set 📷
New boots! 📷
