Now that’s comedy:

Is that really from the 3rd ever Johnny Carson show?

About a year ago I started to write a blog post about why I couldn’t get behind twitter. I never finished it because I thought “if so many people love it, isn’t there a pretty good chance I’m just missing something?”. As Brent Butt used to say in his pre-fame stand up routines,

“Just because I don’t get it doesn’t mean it doesn’t have merit.
What I don’t get could fill a soccer stadium”

and I try to avoid being a hater on the blog.

My reason for doubting twitter was basically this: while I appreciate the artistic challenges imposed by the haiku-like restrictions of the medium, there’s no getting around the fact that it’s a medium best suited to it trivial narcissism. So I don’t blame people if they seem to mostly end up tweeting trivially narcisstic things, that’s just the way it’s going to be. And I celebrate those exceptions where someone manages to edit their profound/interesting thoughts into 140 characters. But I don’t really blame twitterers (and I don’t really celebrate them) because I just don’t care about twitter. And I don’t quite understand why the world seems to think I should.

The rash of articles — and I do mean rash — about how this or that celebrity or institution is using twitter and isn’t that amazing and forward looking was painful but seems to be receding. And I no longer see so many blog posts insisting that if people’s twitter streams are full or descriptions of their sandwiches, it’s just because they haven’t figured out how to write good tweets, and then failing to suggest what a good tweet might actually consist of. But the twitter backlash I always expected to come has never arrived, and people sure do seem to be tweeting. So here I am undergoing another round of self-doubt, wondering anew if maybe it really is just me that doesn’t get it.

Which would be great. I love it when new things emerge in the world, and there’s nothing more interesting than being wrong. Except, then, again, it sure is fun to have your private opinions reaffirmed for you by public authorities. Take it away, famous internet pundit Joel Spolsky:

Although I appreciate that many people find Twitter to be valuable, I find it a truly awful way to exchange thoughts and ideas. It creates a mentally stunted world in which the most complicated thought you can think is one sentence long. It’s a cacophony of people shouting their thoughts into the abyss without listening to what anyone else is saying. Logging on gives you a page full of little hand grenades: impossible-to-understand, context-free sentences that take five minutes of research to unravel and which then turn out to be stupid, irrelevant, or pertaining to the television series Battlestar Galactica. I would write an essay describing why Twitter gives me a headache and makes me fear for the future of humanity, but it doesn’t deserve more than 140 characters of explanation, and I’ve already spent 820.

The Pacific premiered on HBO last night. The Pacific is a follow-up to Band of Brothers. Only recently have I begun to doubt the inherent truth value of the following statement: “Band of Brothers is the best TV series ever”. I’m trying to hold off until the end of the week to watch the first episode.

I finally came to question Band of Brothers‘ best-everness upon completion of David Simon’s The Wire. I am also a big fan of anything to do with New Orleans. So I am mighty stoked to discover that David Simon has a new series called Treme coming up, set in post-Katrina New Orleans. Oh boy oh boy.

Edit: the trailer above no longer seems to be working, I think because I’m in Canada. I would embed a youtube version instead, but HBO seems to have cease-and-desisted all them. Boy, they really don’t want you to watch the trailer for their new TV show.

I’m too busy to watch this NFB documentary about Mexican migrant labourers in southern Ontario, but Jane’s watching it and it looks sooper interesting:

I used to work the friday night shift at the local office supply store in Collingwood, and for a certain stretch in the summer that’s when the Jamaican orchard pickers would roll into town, looking to buy stuff to take home with them. Cross-cultural perplexity inevitably ensued, good times to be sure. There were also local orchards that employed Mexicans under a similar arrangement, but for some reason they never showed up in towne. More recently, Vantreight farms employed a parallel Mexican migrant crew during daffodil picking season, but they never mingled them with us local pickers.

The particular legal exemptions that allow migrant agricultural workforces in Canada have always seemed murky and more than a little suspect. CBC Victoria once did a decent radio program on the Mexican workers at Vantreight, and the managers there had some reasonably reassuring things to say. I’m really looking forward to watching this doc, eventually.

Just as surely as Zach Galifianakis has become the Bill Murray of our generation, so Mike Doughty is our Fred Eaglesmith.

— from My Way, a New York Times collection of faux maps by illustrator Christoph Niemann

That became slightly less funny to me when I noticed that the road to Rick’s was explicitly labelled (referential jokes are a dish best served cold), but it’s still funny.

It’s a statistical certainty that you watched Hans Rosling’s extraordinary information visualization presentation, from back when TED talks were cool. If not, you should certainly watch it below, as well as all the triumphant sequels.

And now, courtesy of Google, an experimental interface for rolling your own Rosling-esque statistical displays. Below is one of the examples they offer, slightly customized by me, but you can start from scratch and cook up anything you want from the datasets they have on hand.

The interface for assigning variables to axes and symbolism is fantastic. It’s reminds me of the Hectares BC approach. (Which reminds me in turn of the wonderful and neglected JMP exploratory stats package.) Complicated interfaces are great when you know what you want and want to be able to get it no matter how complicated it is, but a simpler interface allows for faster experimentation.

I hope they expand the amount of data, and I’m sure they will. I also hope they allow for cross-tabbing data from disparate data sets: for now you can only correlate numbers from the World Development Indicators with other WDI numbers, for instance.

We’re increasingly seeing numerical and geographical information displays which explicitly incorporate time, and Google is a big part of that. I’m a big fan of that trend towards explicit temporality — it helps take the focus off stocks and onto flows, and makes casually it clear that baselines really do shift.

Sounds kind of like an Onion headline. But also sounds like a good idea.

The stimulus and associated bank bailouts were almost certainly absolutely necessary. We will never know, because we can’t run the experiment again. The implementation of the American stimulus seems to have been mismanaged by some criteria. We should know about that, but it’s hard, because transparency is one of the criteria it seems to be failing on. Perhaps Tufte will help us with that.

I’m entering the final stretch of my contract with the Canadian Wildlife Service, I’ve got a couple of volunteer commitments, and I’m working on a new theme for hughstimson.org. As such I haven’t had much time for blogging. Might could stay that way for a little while longer, but I will be back. Promise.