Had a fair amount to drink on Christmas day so found myself awake and alert at 6am on this year’s Boxing day. When I realised my neighbourhood was totally silent, I decided to walk to the top of Parliament Hill to catch the sunrise (I ended up misjudging sunrise pretty badly and ended up waiting in the freezing dark for over an hour).
Was just surfing around on the Information is beautiful website and came across a visualisation aimed at being a discussion starter by David McCandless on what he called “Hierarchy of visual understanding?”.
He asks whether there’s anything in his brief thoughts here and I definitely think there is – there’s also a load of visualisations that already exist based on the same flow of “data, information, knowledge, wisdom”.
I’m not sure whether I agree with the title of the post though – I think this flow is less to do with visualising information and more to do with how our brains digest information. I also half agree with the upwards arrow on the left, I think it should be a measure of increased meaning – not organisation.
I use an app called Coda to write code – every so often (once a day perhaps), a sneaky invisible character appears in my code – specifically after the opening bracket of an “if” statement ( “if(…){” ) – which causes my code to break without any debug/error information at all. I usually have to manually scroll through the relevant code I was working on using the arrow keys until my claret (the cursor that appears when you type) appeared to “hit a wall” – as in it wouldn’t scroll left or right even though I was pressing the key’s alternatively.
I have no idea what this character is apart from that it’s HEX code is “08″ – and I’ve captured it here in between the letters “s” and “a”:
sa
So from now on I can just search for this invisible character within my code when something isn’t working – but thought it was worth writing about to see if anyone else has experienced an invisible character while coding before? An annoying time waster.
I forgot that my talk with Dave Reynolds was recorded at the Open Government Data Camp a few weeks ago. I’m at the end – about 9 minutes in!
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I was listening to “Power Buddha Enlightenment Radio” or something along the lines of that on iTunes recently and heard this track by William Orbit from his new album. An amazing track without much structure or bass – it gave me the opportunity to add a few other elements to it. Adding a beat reminds me of the scene from Human Traffic where the main characters are driving home along a motor way after a big night out – Belfast by Orbital is in the background.
