Unsought Input

Scenario: you are in a restaurant in an unfamiliar town. You’ve been seated for just a minute when the waitress walks up. “What’ll you have to drink?” It’s too early for an alcoholic beverage and you’re not in the mood for coffee or tea. Water is for cheapskates and juice is for hippies. But what do you call those sugary carbonated beverages that go perfectly with a burger and fries?

Depending on where you are in the country, asking what kinds of “pop,” “soda,” or “coke” they have on tap has a 66 percent chance of earning you a dirty look. Don’t call it pop in Massachusetts. Don’t call it soda in Toledo.

And now you can see what to call it no matter where you are in the nation:

(more…)

If you design web sites, write reports, or do presentations, you should probably take a look at the work of Edward Tufte. One of his best-known essays tells how your typical PowerPoint presentation can obscure information more than it helps illustrate.

So what do you do if you have a ton of numerical data and just two and a half minutes to present it? Well, if it’s data about the pron industry on the Internet, you could do something like this:

(Might be NSFW)

(more…)