God wants your footnotes on the side, damn it!

Last night I had nightmares about implementing hash tables from scratch. I suppose that my anxiety over the next few weeks is bearing down on me, as I start in earnest on my graduate thesis and prepare my mind for the upcoming Google campus interviews. I only slept soundly for a couple of hours before I had to wake up for a seminar by Edward Tufte on the visual display of information.

By its end, I had a consciousness expanding experience. It is a true joy to attend a presentation on presentations from a master of presentation. The economy of thought and words he used to convey meaning was really astounding in retrospect. One main thread stood out during the six hours or so that I mutely absorbed sage advice, however, and that thread concerned the scaling of information.

It seems like scaling information to the point where it becomes a useful tool for generating conclusions and causal relationships is the true focal point in analytics. Tufte presented reams of stock quotes for a company over a massive period of time, rescaled into a single small squiggle representing the movement of the stock price, with four dots representing

• the starting value of the period
• the ending value of the period
• the maximum value of the period
• the minimum value of the period

In just glancing at the squiggle, the information had been scaled to an inviting size for human analysis. This seems to me to encompass the same function as asymptotic notation in computer science, scaling the behavior of the function (with respect to the input size) to an inviting size for comparison. I can only presuppose that if the fundamental property of analytics is scaling information so that conclusions can be inferred, then computers may be able to assist cognition in far more profound and serious ways than I had previously thought by simply auto-scaling the data to the appropriate perspective.

Addendum

Professor Tufte must be making a <insert expletive here> storm of money from his seminar circuit to be able to purchase first edition copies of Galileo's works and erect large stainless steel sculptures in his backyard. I imagine such hobbies are quite costly indeed, even if he does claim to collect large scale scrap from his local nuclear facility.

Freefallin'

Yesterday I walked over to the rock climbing wall at the student recreation center for a little more information. Fifteen minutes later, a one hundred pound girl who alternated between disinterest and enthusiasm had me suspended twenty feet above the ground in a situation which assured death if the rope gave way. Did I mention that I'm afraid of heights, as well as afraid of looking like a pussy in front of the young ladies. Which won? My fear of looking like a pussy. I made it all the way up, and eventually got used to glancing at the very hard looking ground below me.

I even think I'm going back for more. Every now and then it's nice to be afraid of something concrete, like falling to your death. At least it's a reasonable fear and you get a good workout too. My forearms were killing me afterwards.

Before mounting my fears, I went to a presentation on mobility and spaces by Ken Anderson of the People and Practices division at Intel Research. How the western world experiences in between moments is a fascinating area of technology research that's tightly coupled to social mores and cultural practice. It made me reconsider just how isolationist Orange County is, which is probably what made me climb the wall in the first place. It's harder to contend with pervasive social distancing than it is to contend with falling to one's doom.