McCandless at TED on beautiful data
The seductive power of visualizing data, beautifully explored by David McCandless. Many great moments - near the end, he touches on the requirements of and desired aesthetic preferences for the visual image - for balance, for symmetry, for beauty - and how simply obeying them can cause a change in thought. To what extent is thinking dependent on images it likes to believe are merely helpful utilitizations? How can we know if the beauty of data usurps truth?
Labels: beauty, david mccandless, metadata and data, visual representation
posted by Tom Matrullo at Monday, August 23, 2010
2 Comments:
This brought to mind (perhaps inappropriately) an old Richard Feynmann blurb on "Fun to Imagine - Ways of thinking"
The imagery and methods by which we store and think about things is hard to translate into each others heads.
However, (if I'm interpreting correctly) it may be possible to get to know things without the hindrances caused by the ways in which we go about "picturing" things.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/archive/feynman/10705.shtml
A belated thanks, Kent, for the pointer. What a refreshing fellow he was. Would have been great to see him and Nietzsche go at it - perhaps in some quantum multiverse coming to twitter soon.
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