Awkward Rules: Navigating complex, irregular, or unfamiliar urban environments

I sent this over to the friendly folks at www.awkwardrules.net for consideration.

Example—You head underground to take a Manhattan subway from midtown to the lower west side. Upon exiting the train at the desired stop, assuming you’ve made it that far, you now have the task of spatially re-orientating yourself and choosing the proper course to your destination, all while minimizing time spent deliberating and avoiding damaging blows to the illusion that you know where you are and what you’re doing.

Figure 01 – Overview (notice cracked-out follow-walker)

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Letters to the President: Process Improvement

In response to the recent NYTimes piece about the process by which the White House sorts through thousands of letters addressed to Obama, I was thinking about the process that they use.

This is the CURRENT PROCESS:

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Guy Kawasaki + Wordle: Let’s Get Specific

What has Guy blogged about in the past two weeks? (April 14 – April 27)

Wordle grabs his last five posts from his RSS feed, and with some help from Excel, we can create some more tailored views of His Wordliness. Guy, I tried following you on Twitter but your stream is so voluminous that I couldn’t see my other dear friends!

Proper Nouns

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Visualizations of Time

Via Infosthetics I found a collection of (mostly hand-drawn) visualizations of time at Icastic.com. This is a fascinating collection. I’m curious to measure how often cyclical, waveform, or interval shapes appear. This is one of my favorites.

Carbon, Hydrogen, and OXYGEN: Why didn’t someone tell me?

I recently read that burning one gallon of gasoline releases about 19 lbs of carbon dioxide.

The mass on either side of a chemical reaction must balance, so I thought to myself, “If a gallon of fuel weighs 6 lbs, where is the other 13 lbs coming from?”

Well, it turns out that the additional weight is from the 21 lbs of oxygen that your car sucks from the atmosphere to burn that gallon of gas! Your car also spits out one gallon (8 lbs) of water in the process. 21 lbs of oxygen fills about four phone booths (~250 cu. ft.), and 19 lbs of carbon dioxide fills about two and a half phone booths (~150 cu. ft.). If your fuel economy is 25 mpg, then the above quantities occur every 25 miles you drive.

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Radio Program Explains the U.S. Financial Crisis (Part 2)

This American Life – Episode 375: Bad Banks

From the same guys that brought us the “Giant Pool of Money“, another ultra-simple explanation. This time, it’s the quandary that the big bad banks, taxpayers, and U.S. government currently find themselves in, with a dollhouse analogy and a simple balance sheet to introduce the concepts.

SeeingFinance.com

SeeingFinance.com is almost ready for action!

PresidentialWatch08: Political Blogosphere Visualization

Via visualcomplexity, this is a visualization that I often find myself returning to in my thoughts. It shows the relative leanings of and links among political blogs, with a lot of options for filtering and summarizing the display.



Launch the application here.

Chartjunk: U-Haul CO2

Wow! Talk about chartjunk!

This chart shows that on a 1,000 mile trip, a U-Haul truck running on gasoline will emit 2,774 lbs of carbon dioxide, while some other truck running on diesel fuel will emit 2,798 lbs. On this trip, the U-Haul will emit 24 lbs, or a whopping 0.8%, less carbon dioxide! Aside from questioning the comparison of a gasoline truck to a diesel truck, this difference is so tiny (less than one percent) that its meaning is quickly swallowed up by any other variables in the system (age of truck, miles per tank, driving habits, fuel cost, total energy efficiency, weather). The glaring offense is the fact that the other truck’s dark cloud of smoke appears to have nearly three times greater area than the lighter U-Haul cloud. So, visually, the chart implies that U-Haul emits 60% less, while the dubious numbers show that the difference is less than 1%; this is a visual distortion of extreme proportions. Mysteriously, a trip of 999 miles or 1,001 miles yields a difference of only 23 lbs.



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McCain and Obama, Personal Finances

This table presents the net worth (midpoint) and income provided in the senators’ personal financial disclosures.

Data Source: Center for Responsive Politics (OpenSecrets.org)