Writing

Lesson #5: Proportionality should be a guideline in war

firebombing_leaflet.jpgHalfway through The Fog of War by Errol Morris (of The Thin Blue Line, or the Apple “Switch” ad campaign depending on your persuasion), Robert S. McNamara (Secretary of Defense for the Kennedy and Johnson administrations) describes proportionality in war:

Why was it necessary to drop the nuclear bomb if [General Curtis] LeMay was burning up Japan? And he went on from Tokyo to firebomb other cities. 58% of Yokohama. Yokohama is roughly the size of Cleveland. 58% of Cleveland destroyed. Tokyo is roughly the size of New York. 51% percent of New York destroyed. 99% of the equivalent of Chattanooga, which was Toyama. 40% of the equivalent of Los Angeles, which was Nagoya. This was all done before the dropping of the nuclear bomb, which by the way was dropped by LeMay’s command.

The gruesome description is abetted by a different kind of proportionality—that when placed in the context of size with regard to U.S. cities, these numbers become more “real.” I found this set particularly striking for how ordinary the cities were—Cleveland and Chattanooga, in addition to the usual New York and Los Angeles. The huge metropolitan areas may be too abstract for many, but Cleveland!?—those are actual people!

The entire transcript is also on Errol Morris’ site—amazing. Why don’t more studios do this? It’s great to be able to study it more closely, and was enough to convince me to purchase (rather than just rent) the movie.

Sunday, March 9, 2008 | movies  
Book

Visualizing Data Book CoverVisualizing Data is my 2007 book about computational information design. It covers the path from raw data to how we understand it, detailing how to begin with a set of numbers and produce images or software that lets you view and interact with information. When first published, it was the only book(s) for people who wanted to learn how to actually build a data visualization in code.

The text was published by O’Reilly in December 2007 and can be found at Amazon and elsewhere. Amazon also has an edition for the Kindle, for people who aren’t into the dead tree thing. (Proceeds from Amazon links found on this page are used to pay my web hosting bill.)

Examples for the book can be found here.

The book covers ideas found in my Ph.D. dissertation, which is the basis for Chapter 1. The next chapter is an extremely brief introduction to Processing, which is used for the examples. Next is (chapter 3) is a simple mapping project to place data points on a map of the United States. Of course, the idea is not that lots of people want to visualize data for each of 50 states. Instead, it’s a jumping off point for learning how to lay out data spatially.

The chapters that follow cover six more projects, such as salary vs. performance (Chapter 5), zipdecode (Chapter 6), followed by more advanced topics dealing with trees, treemaps, hierarchies, and recursion (Chapter 7), plus graphs and networks (Chapter 8).

This site is used for follow-up code and writing about related topics.