Michael Friendly @datavisfriendly.bsky.social

#rstats developer of graphical methods for categorical and multivariate data; #datavis history of data visualization; #historicaldatavis; Milestones project

[Michael Friendly @datavisfriendly.bsky.social @datavisFriendly]

ANNOUNCE: #psy6135
I'm teaching my course _Psychology of Data Visualization_ again starting in Jan. Among other topics: #history of #dataviz, graph #perception, #rstats graphs, data journalism, ...
Course materials (not yet revised) available at: https://t.co/LPgqsWs2AQ

[Captain Obvious™️ @TheFungi669]

I’m boycotting CBS and so should you.

[Molly Ploofkins @Mollyploofkins]

Frank saw it coming. He called It. Nobody listened.

[Elon Mack @ElonMackk]

This video was deleted from Facebook and Instagram yesterday.

You know what to do ‼️

[Canada Hates Trump @AntiTrumpCanada]

MANY PEOPLE ARE SAYING THE LINE TO PISS ON HIS GRAVE WILL START IN CANADA. IT’LL BE TREMENDOUS, PROBABLY THE GREATEST LINE IN HISTORY. AND WE’LL BE EATING A LOT OF ASPARAGUS, THE FINEST ASPARAGUS, SO BIG, SO STRONG. THANK YOU FOR YOUR ATTENTION TO THIS MATTER. CHT 🇨🇦

[Louis Gleeson @aigleeson]

A computer scientist won the Turing Award at 36 and then walked away from almost every other project for the next 50 years to write one book that he has still not finished at age 88, and it may be the most important book in his field.

His name is Donald Knuth. He won the Turing Award in 1974, which is the closest thing computer science has to a Nobel Prize.

He was 36 years old. He had already written volumes one, two, and three of a book series called The Art of Computer Programming. He was the youngest person ever to receive the award at that point in its history.

Almost anyone else would have ridden that moment for the rest of their career. Founded a company. Sat on boards. Gone on speaking tours. Knuth did the opposite. He went back to his desk and kept writing.

He started the book in 1962. He was 24 years old. His publisher had asked him to write a short paperback on compilers. He sat down to outline it and discovered that to explain compilers properly he would have to explain the deeper algorithms underneath them first.

The short paperback became a draft outline of 12 chapters. The 12 chapters became a planned 7-volume series. The 7-volume series became the project he is still working on 63 years later.

Volume 1 came out in 1968. Volume 2 in 1969. Volume 3 in 1973. He was producing books faster than most academics produce papers. Then everything stopped.

In 1977 he received the printed proofs of the second edition of Volume 2. He looked at the pages and was so disgusted by how the publisher had typeset his mathematical notation that he could not bring himself to release the book.

The equations looked ugly. The fonts looked wrong. The spacing was off. He decided he could not in good conscience publish another volume of TAOCP until the typesetting problem was solved.

So he paused the book.

He stopped writing TAOCP and spent the next 8 years inventing TeX from scratch.

TeX is the typesetting system that every academic paper, every math textbook, every physics journal on earth now uses. Every PhD thesis in the sciences is set in TeX. Every paper on arxiv. Every equation in every paper Anthropic, OpenAI, and DeepMind have ever published. The system that the entire scientific publishing world runs on exists because one man refused to compromise on how the second edition of Volume 2 looked.

He gave the entire TeX system away for free. He never tried to commercialize it. He went back to writing TAOCP.

In 1992 he retired from Stanford at the age of 54. Most professors retire to slow down. Knuth retired to speed up. He explicitly said he was leaving teaching because he needed every remaining hour of his life to keep writing the book. He stopped using email on January 1, 1990.

He answers no calls. He takes paper mail only. He is on a personal mission to finish a multi-volume series that nobody is forcing him to write, on a deadline that only exists in his own head.

Volume 4A came out in 2011. Volume 4B in 2022. He is currently working on Volume 4C. Volumes 4D, 4E, 4F, 5, 6, and 7 are still ahead of him. He is 88 years old. He will almost certainly die before he finishes.

The thing that should haunt anyone reading this is the math of his choice.

Every modern incentive structure tells you to optimize for speed. Ship the imperfect version. Get it out the door. Iterate later. Move on to the next thing.

Knuth has spent 63 years doing the exact opposite. He pays a $2.56 reward in hexadecimal dollars to anyone who finds an error in his published books. Real checks, until check fraud made him switch to certificates of deposit. He treats every single error in every single volume as a personal failure. He revises. He rewrites. He goes back to fix issues that nobody else could have spotted.

He could have written 30 books in 63 years. He chose to write one.

The reason is the one almost nobody understands the first time they hear it. There is a category of work that loses all its value when it is done quickly.

A reference book that engineers will rely on for the next 200 years is not the same kind of object as a blog post that has to ship today. The slow project and the fast project look like the same activity from the outside. They are completely different games.

Bill Gates once said in an interview that if you can read the whole of TAOCP, you should send him your resume. He meant it. He was not joking. The man who founded Microsoft was telling the world that the rarest skill on earth is being able to finish a book that one man has spent his entire adult life writing for an audience that mostly does not have the patience to read it.

The book may never be finished.

The man writing it knows this and keeps writing anyway.

The work outlives the worker. That is the entire point.

[The Tennessee Holler @TheTNHoller]

FLASHBACK: Barbara Walters called out Trump for being $3 BILLION in debt, infidelity, not talking to his son, reading the works of Hitler, etc

Real Journalism used to be a thing!

(Now ask yourself what long-term promises you might make to people if you were billions in debt…)

[Michael Friendly @datavisfriendly.bsky.social @datavisFriendly]

@NYCMayor Strong mayor powers!

[Headquarters @HQNewsNow]

Jimmy Kimmel: We have the right guaranteed by the Constitution to criticize and satirize our leaders. This is a right that I took for granted until last year when the FCC delivered a very unpleasant surprise. But then I watched as millions of people objected because they refuse to allow our freedoms to be bulldozed like the East Wing of the White House. We will not stand by when comedy and journalism are censored and criminalized.

[AJ Thurston, PhD @AJThurston]

This interactive tool from @flowingdata is the best inoculation against misleading data visualization! https://t.co/smU2BPyfc4

[TheUkester🇺🇸🇺🇦🇬🇧🇨🇦🇬🇪🇪🇺 @BurghandBklyn]

Renowned pianist Schroeder has dropped out of the Great American State Fair.

[REPUBLICANS AGAINST MAGA @michaelt5656]

One thing Trump has accomplished is appointing the most unqualified, repulsive, group of idiots the world has ever seen.

[Richard Warnica @richardwarnica]

I spent some time looking at the company behind a massive lobbying push to have Toronto's island airport expanded. What I found was a deep tangle of corporate and PR webs that all obscured a relatively simple truth.
https://t.co/gOexIUSwbx

[Jim Moir @JamesMoir10]

I am very pleased to announce that my bug colour wheel has been accepted into this year’s Royal Academy summer exhibition. This is my sixth time. Have a look it opens on the 16th of June.
@royalacademy

[Molly Ploofkins @Mollyploofkins]

‘No Kings’ movement planning nationwide event on Trump 80th birthday
https://t.co/PeuViJiXbs

[Norm Eisen @NormEisen]

BREAKING: we just won our Kennedy Center case!

Both the renaming & the closure of the Kennedy Center are enjoined

Kudos to our wonderful client @RepBeatty
& my colleagues @DDAction_ & Washington Litigation Group

This is a 1-2 punch against Trump's corruption

[Marlene Robertson🇨🇦 @marlene4719]

This is so fucking awesome.

Since Stephen Colbert‘s departure, CBS has experienced a significant decline. His last show attracted 6.74 million viewers.

The following night his replacement Comics Unleashed drew less than 1 million viewers, an 85% drop.

This proves how powerful we the people can be.

[Protect Kamala Harris ✊ @DisavowTrump20]

🚨NEW: Federal Judge Leonie Brinkema has blocked Donald Trump’s $1.8 billion “anti-weaponization” slush fund to pay January 6th insurrectionists.

RETWEET to thank Judge Brinkema for standing up for our democracy!

[Brian Krassenstein @krassenstein]

The Democrats’ Social media account is on fire.

[Stephanie Smyth @stephaniesmyth]

#BREAKING Esther has been found and she is safe. More information coming from Toronto Police at 3pm.

[Hoodlum 🇺🇸 @NotHoodlum]

Elect a clown, expect a circus. And boy, did we get one.