here is a chart that i made, trying my darndest to represent the win-loss-draw relationship between the four teams in each of the eight world cup groups. if there were only three teams per group, this type of visualisation would be relatively straight forward. with four teams (and two spatial dimensions), things get a little dicey and the visualisation turns into a topological math problem. in the end, i wound up with this shield design based on a solution to a similar problem by john venn. i hope it is not overly confusing.

f(x) = ½x + 7

it was only yesterday that i realised that the rule of thumb for dating people of different ages (the “half your age plus 7” rule) determines not only the lower bounds for dating but the upper bounds as well—that for each ½x + 7, there is a corresponding 2(x-7). for the last 15 years of my life, i have been ignoring an entire market segment, namely those of the genus cougar.

i decided to graph these equations as a handy pocket guide for when i mack on chicks in the library stacks and a few interesting things soon became apparent. for starters, if one is under 14, it is mathematically impossible to date anybody. let’s say my five year-old nephew wanted to join the scene. according to this rule, he could only date girls older than 7.5 (which he would be down with), BUT the same girls also have to be younger than -4. MATH has prevented my nephew from getting jiggy with anybody!

only when you become 14, does math allow you to begin dating—and then you can ONLY date other 14 year-olds. society will scoff at you if you ask a 15 year-old to your freshman day dance, and don’t even think of approaching a 13 year-old.

from 14 on, your options increase at a linear rate such that by the time you are seventy, you are eligible to date 42 year-olds AND 126 year-olds. so the next time that your seventy year-old auntie introduces you to her 126 year-old paramour, give them each a (gentle) nudge and let them know that you support their union.

like a crossword puzzle but for the spectrum of food

the royal line

the other day, me and my three handsomest friends and orson went to a trivia night at a local pub. one of the first few questions was, “how many british sovereigns were alive in 1684?” orson, who is an actuary in real life* estimated that five was the maximum overlapage among generations. so we added one for good measure (ie. some sickly pipsqueak who ruled for 12 days, or whatever) and said six even though my other friends (who are more handsome than orson) thought this seemed way too high.

we were therefore quite floored when we found out that the answer was eight. it was at this point that i proposed that we adjourn the trivia game so i could go home and graph out the logistics of how exactly that this was possible.

a: it was a perfect shitstorm of joint sovereignty, the glorious revolution, and lord protectoring.

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* not professionally

in hot pursuit of the most deceptively named animal

thanks to a lot of stellar comments, i have been catatonically obsessing over deceptively named animals all weekend long. i built this chart to help determine which animal is the biggest impostor on planet earth. it turns out* it’s the sea cucumber! silly sea cucumber, you’re not even in the same kingdom as the key ingredient of my tzatziki sauce.

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*unless of course, the rules of our pursuit allow us to add up the non-antness, non-lionness qualities of the antlion.

special thanks to the remarkable f+l blog for helping me rethink the size of my footnotes.

not worth your time

when i was on my daily snow jog (making my quads look like those of a thoroughbred stallion), a glint of metal from a tarnished nickel caught my eye. here’s the thing: normally raynor ganan never breaks up his workout routine for any reason, nor does he stop to retrieve anything less than a newly-minted benjamin or a hot wheels rear loading 1969 volkswagen beach bomb—but this time i paused briefly before double-timing it up a hill to make my obliques pop. i am a consumer of luxury brands like banana republic, but what would a member of the gap bourgeois or <choke> the prole navy do in a similar situation*?

i decided to try to correlate the act of retrieving a found coin with the value of one’s time. this chart is the result. the calculations are proprietary, so i cannot reveal them though i should mention that in order to determine the average time that it takes for one to bend over and retrieve a coin, i scattered a sack of pennies outside the local all-girls catholic school and filmed the result from the tinted windows of my van.

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*another metric that i have developed to help one determine one’s class is this: the next time that you are making stuffed peppers, observe the colour of the pepper that you are stuffing. if it is green, you are unfortunately a member of the lower class. if it is red, you have found yourself in the middle class. if it is yellow, you are an aristocrat like me and are thus eligible for a banana republic luxe card.

FERLY

by Orson O’Reilly

Let’s talk bear. Pandas are wonderful (durr) but even my nephew knows about them and he is a nitwit. Ursus thibetanus gedrosianus exists only as fossilized crud in a dusty vault—it’s strange for sure, but about as interesting as as the skin on my butterscotch pudding. Garden variety brown bears? They are neither wonderful nor strange; they are ordinary. But what of the missing fourth quadrant: bears that are both strange AND wonderful? Bears like werebears and carebears and ursa major—how could they be described? Fabulous and marvelous don’t convey unfamiliarity. Uncanny, peculiar, and curious don’t quite convey wonder. If only there was a single word that could fill this void. [SPOLIER ALERT: it’s ferly]

To get there, we must hop in our DeLorean and point it to the 1400s. This was back when everything was strange. Forests were strange! Birds were (and still are) strange! Children that threw fits were strange! This was also back when everything was still full of wonder. Rain was full of wonder! Socks were full of wonder! Porridge was full of wonder! In short, everything fit into our werebear quadrant—everything was FERLY. It’s easy to look at and easy to say, yet there is a tinge of the exotic in ferly. Indeed, there is a tinge of ferly in ferly.

Back now in 1985, where former-wonders have been vivisected to smithereens and apathetic youths find interest only in their walkmans and rubik’s cubes, is ferly still a thing? Indeed it is! Lake Vostok is ferly! The Fibonacci sequence is ferly! Dirigibles are ferly! To belabor my point, I direct you to exhibit A: a chart on what’s ferly and what ain’t; a chart that the boys at Kinkos were all to eager to make for you.

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orson and i were on the high school mathlete squadron. what can be said about him that doesn’t conflict with his fanatic attempt to guard his privacy? he has a pet turtle? his ring fingers are longer than his middle fingers? he speaks with a peculiar hungarian accent which is entirely affected? he is an elite member of the cowboy aristocracy?

this post is an entry in the word idol series. you can learn about this series here.

the adventures of papa and bill continued

i feel that perhaps my post from yesterday has lead to the belief that i am of the mindset that papa hemingway and bill faulkner were twins separated at birth. indeed, i do think this and if the rigorous application of statistics to the sublime can’t prove it, our only recourse is exhumation. let us grab some shovels together and get ourselves to work!

the adventures of papa and bill

there are, as far as i am aware, two famous literary disputes about length involving ernest hemingway. the first was with his buddy, f. scott fitzgerald over the length of his wiener. the second was a dispute with his adversary, william faulkner over the length of the words they chose.

faulkner fired the first shot saying, “hemingway has never been known to use a word that might send a reader to the dictionary.” which earned the following riposte from hemingway, “poor faulkner. does he really think big emotions come from big words? i know all the ten-dollar words as he does, but i prefer the older, simpler ones.”

i decided to chart the longest words in each of their major works and see if i could draw a non-scientific conclusion. the longest of all words was faulkner’s cinderstrewnpacked, which only appears in the dictionary of made up words that william faulkner made up.

additional data: the average word length in these three hemingway novels is 3.85 letters; faulkner’s average word length is 3.88 letters, which is statistically the same. 1.08% of hemingway’s words were 10 letters or more whereas 1.56% of faulkner’s were.

conclusion: hype. the top two 20th century american novelists were engaging in a literary pillow fight so they could ride the gravy train of book sales for as long as the public would allow.

the jack-o-lantern map of boylan heights

in the 1970s, radical cartographer, denis woods started an nontraditional atlas of his neighborhood in raleigh, north carolina. this image is his attempt at mapping the locations and faces of decorative gourds. the other maps are also worth a looksy.

the image is from dancing and singing: a narrative atlas of boylan heights, unpublished (ca. 1975).

you can read more about this ferly project here and listen about it here.

receiving robo-facials

the fact that modern day photo programs like picasa and iphoto have the ability to recognise my face gives me the heebie-jeebies. i have tried to disguise myself by: growing a beautiful mustache, wearing XL hipster glasses, and shaving off my exquisite unibrow to no avail—picasa can still somehow distinguish between me and my many handsome associates. how far would i have to go to keep these systems from recognising me? furthermore, what is the threshold of abstraction for a face to still be understood as a face? enter scott mccloud and his graphical abstraction scale from understanding comics.

before i start presenting this groundbreaking chart at siggraph, i should note that the function of facial recognition in photo programs is to help catalogue your photo database, it is NOT for helping you organize your manga collection. thus neither iphoto’s literal view of the world or picasa’s high tolerance for icon is better than the other.

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many many thanks to my taekwondo sparring partner for running this image through iphoto and reporting back the results in the scientific manner that this issue deserves.

chaz babbage’s windows error report

ever since i posted the marvelous letter from charles babbage, father of your laptop, to alfred tennyson, i could not shake babbage’s neuroses from my thoughts. the one that struck me the most was that he actually tallied and categorised the causes of 464 broken windows of a nearby factory in a ten month period. what mad mind would do this? whatever the state of his mind, his data was ripe for the pickin’ and plottin’—thus this chart (you can distend it with a well-placed mouseclick).

for the inquisitive: this is the first treemap that i have had occasion to make and i didn’t quite know how to start—my slapdash solution involved these two programs.

arial & helvetica

on friday, i hosted a screening of helvetica for some buddies of mine that didn’t know that there were other typefaces besides times new roman. it turns out, there ARE other typefaces and one of them is helvetica (and another of them is papyrus.)

the documentary does not explore the relationship between helvetica and microsoft’s derivative, arial. so to help ignite the post-viewing dialogue, i made this supplement illustrating the key differences in letterforms. however, in place of any spirited debate, my buddies decided instead to take turns delivering roundhouses to my jaw, saying “a documentary about a font is as interesting as it sounds.” i could not agree more.

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update (9/22/2009): welcome internet-at-large! i am ostrich-feather-tickled that you are finding this chart useful. should you want to see my other type-related posts, you can give this a gentle click. should you want to see a collection of my favourite posts, you can get dirty with this link. should you want to close this tab and see what else is on the internet (hint: pictures of cats), you can hit cmd + w and be on your way.

news bulletin (for immediate release): my former boy-bandmates, rafi kam and dallas penn, who style themselves the internets celebrities, have just released a new video on the topic of street vending called the vend diagram for which they approached me to concoct some venn diagrams (wordplay!). the above chart is perhaps my favourite as it deals with creole and mixed languages and ends rather absurdly where it all began—with a ginormous slice* of pie.

rafi and dallas’ investigation into how the economy is effing up the most micro of businesses—the street vendors, can be found here. i made the charts for it, but i will not now confirm (nor double confirm) that i made a cameo in it.

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*properly speaking, the shape of this slice is a reuleaux triangle (maths!)

the other day, a friend and i decided it would be a hoot to watch leatherheads. boy were we wrong! at-any-rate, at some point during the snapless dialogue, i remarked that renée zellweger was probably the most periody thespian in modern cinema. once the actual sentiment of what i was saying registered with my companion, he immediately countered by throwing a cate blanchett in my face. and thus the seeds of this chart were sewn.

mean periods: ms zellweger—1923. ms knightley—1812. ms blanchett—1942.

notes: certain quasi-period pieces were omitted: star wars (ms knightley was in star wars?) and lord of the rings. also, both of ms blanchett’s elizabeth films (ca. 1570) and ms knightley’s arthur (ca. 460) have been left out. when an actress was in an epic movie that spanned multiple decades (ms blanchett in benjamin button), i selected the decade that best matched the actresses’ actual age during filming. as always, it is within your power to click this image and DOUBLE its girth.