I just finished two projects:

• The most frequently cited books on Human Relations from 5+ years of Ask.MetaFilter Q&A
  
  
• The most frequently cited books on Work & Money from 5+ years of Ask.MetaFilter Q&A

I counted every amazon.com link in every single question and answer page (12,000+ pages) from the human relations and work & money categories of Ask.MetaFilter. This spans more than five years worth of advice.

Personally, I trust these lists to be the best books on their topics. That's because I believe in the power of hive minds, and I believe that MetaFilter is one of the best hive minds out there. I don't know why MetaFilter is so good. Perhaps it's because it costs $5 to join the community, or that it has a slight bias for librarians. All I know is that some book recommendations on there have changed my life.

And now I have a lot more reading to do.

So guess what, there is going to be a Singularity University now. It's interesting to see that the concept of the Singularity is starting to go mainstream. Ray Kurzweil really spearheaded the movement with his book, The Age of Spiritual Machines. I read that book in college and became instantly mesmerized by the concept.

Recently, Kurzweil gave a PowerPoint presentation at TED pitching the University and also the idea of the Singularity. I decided to extract the slides from the PowerPoint that I term, "logarithmic plot porn." These are graphs that really nail home the point that we may be approaching an End of Days scenario very soon. Here they are, all in one place:

Continue reading...

Wordle is a pretty neat tool for making tag clouds, or simply, word-frequency graphs.

A friend sent this one, it's based on Obama's Inauguration Speech:

This is one from the Bible:

Another friend of mine suggested, "I'd like to see a wordle of my life. maybe broken down by decade." So I decided to try wordle on my blog. I pretty much speak my mind here, so maybe this will be telling:

That's a graph based on 340,000 words over 6 years on this blog. Some interpretations:

• "like" appears a lot, which makes me think about how much I love similes or comparing things.
• "people" makes me think about how I'm always generalizing patterns to everybody
• it's pretty obvious why "think" is on there.

I also like how you can look at these Wordles and sentences emerge. When I see mine, sentences like, "think man, think" or "just like people know" or "things now really are making, man" come to mind.

Often these word counts seem more exciting to make than they are to actually read. Although, it could be nice to hear a soft cacophony of whispers reading these aloud.

Cool interactive feature on the approval ratings of modern presidents. Interesting to see that only one president had a net increase in approval ratings.

Knowledge of historical cycles has a calming effect on me. People who've been to my place know I have a poster from HistoryShots on History of the Political Parties II.

As can be seen in this chart, "Google search results for "KH(Ax)N" for x=1 to 100," there's a real spike of "AAAAA"s around 40 and 50. That's a lot of reptitious typing! Also, you have to admire the bloody-minded preserverence of the folks over there at 97-100 "AAAAA"s.

via ricky via BB

Another winning interactive from NYTimes. (Where can I find an RSS feed for just NYTimes Interactives??)

As an aside, probably the infographic presentation that people are most familiar comes from airplanes: those in-flight safety guides.

NYTimes just keeps coming out with awesome interactives. This one finds interesting patterns in the electoral data:

A lot of those places, and counties in particular, are where Hillary Clinton did better than Obama.

Link to the interactive (go to p.2 for the above graphic)

Link to the NYTimes article

Another well-done infoviz. Utah is also interesting to see here again. It's the only state painted that color on the map!

I've constructed a visualization of the spread of anti-Semitism in Europe. The map compares different countries' responses to anti-Semitic statements such as, "Jews still talk too much about what happened to them in the Holocaust."

Click "Continue Reading" below for some background information on how I came up with this project. Click here to view the project.

Continue reading...

K-Street, by Soderbergh and Clooney, is a reality show on HBO about the life of political consultants.

Very engrossing series, I highly recommend it. It really brings you there. The most notable feature is all the noise and stress induced by following the show, which in a way, keeps you glued.

Read my Excel Blog on K-Street, it elaborates my thought process on why I enjoy it so much.