Oversimplified: Volume 132

Data visualization modes, machine learning for willpower, and Avatar fonts

Hey there 👋

I’m back after a short hiatus! Oversimplified is a digest of the best links I stumble upon each week, and any new posts from me. If this is your first issue, welcome! You can subscribe with the big blue button below:

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✍️ Exploratory vs. Explanatory Visualization

I’ve been kicking around this notion of exploratory vs. explanatory data visualization and I’m starting to like it. Despite what most BI tools might have you think, not all data viz is created equal. The charts that we cobble together often have different goals.

📚 Willpower, Human and Machine

I enjoyed this short, but dense post from Scott Alexander and Astral Codex Ten. The idea is that on a philosophical level, we can draw some interesting comparisons between machine learning and human nature. Something to think about. Hmm.

📚 A Season Without Bats

Not for everyone, but this older but fun analysis from Benn Stencil showed up in my feed at the right time. I’ve been even more into this baseball season than in past years.

📚 We Need A Middle Class For Startups

I wasn’t familiar with the idea of Mittelstands prior to reading this article. It’s laid out in a friendly, easy-to-understand way, and the conclusions are compelling.

🔗 The New Avatar Font

The long-awaited sequel to Avatar dropped a trailer recently and the design agency that came up with the font wrote up their process. Lots of early sketches in here for more visibility into the process, which is cool.

🔗 Your Digital Bookshelf

My guilty pleasure is looking at other people’s personal websites, and I came across this “digital bookshelf” from Petar Gyurov that I quite liked. Enjoy and take some inspiration with you.

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Food for Thought

*It is foolish and childish, on the face of it, to affiliate ourselves with anything so insignificant and patently contrived and commercially exploitative as a professional sports team, and the amused superiority and icy scorn that the non-fan directs at the sports nut (I know this look — I know it by heart) is understandable and almost unanswerable. Almost.

What is left out of this calculation, it seems to me, is the business of caring — caring deeply and passionately, really caring — which is a capacity or an emotion that has almost gone out of our lives. And so it seems possible that we have come to a time when it no longer matters so much what the caring is about, how frail or foolish is the object of that concern, as long as the feeling itself can be saved.

Naïveté — the infantile and ignoble joy that sends a grown man or woman to dancing and shouting with joy in the middle of the night over the haphazard flight of a distant ball — seems a small price to pay for such a gift.” — Roger Angell

Until next time

As always, if you're enjoying Oversimplified, I'd love it if you shared it with a friend or two. If anything stood out, whether good or bad, I would love to hear about it. Reply to this email or tweet at me and let’s chat.

Until next time,

Conor