Category Archives: Personal

Can data be beautiful?

Datavizualisation, Personal, ,

Isn’t the beauty of beauty that we all find different things beautiful?

The other day Stephen Few posted a blog post named “Data Is Not Beautiful”. I have strong reasons to believe this was written because we at /r/dataisbeautiful contacted him and wondered if he was interested in doing an AMA, Ask Me Anything, where our users could ask question and he could provide his point of view and thoughts about data visualizations. Now, I have great respect for Stephen Few and I often send people interested in data visualization his way to read his material because he is so black and white and therefore it is easy to grasp what he think good data visualization is. In this blog post however, I think he misses the mark.

My beautiful might not be your beautiful

I have never been a fan of discussions regarding what is beautiful. What is beautiful is completely up to the consumer of some material, which can be music, art, nature or even data. Everyone has different taste and I never feel like these kind of discussion solves anything or contributes to making a disucssion go forward in any sort. The goal often seems to simply try and put themselves above others by claiming that they are not entitled to call anything beautiful. However, isn’t the beauty of beauty that we all find different things beautiful?

Data can indeed be beautiful

There are many things that can be beautiful about data and even though I am understanding Few’s point that this means that it is the attributes about data that is beautiful and not the data itself I find that to be a weird formulation. What about music is beautiful? It’s the combination of attributes, the compositon, volume, chords, etc. All of which is attributes of a music piece, which indeed can be beautiful.

Attributes of data can be things like structure, format, how it is organized and beyond that we can find a story to be beautiful. However, even without the story the data itself can be in what I’d call a beautiful state. It is not often I go to a customer and find beautiful data, but when I do it is a beauitufl sight indeed! Data that is well organized, formated and of good quality. I have no problem of using the word beautiful to describe this phenomenon.

I believe that data can indeed be beautiful, but in the end even if the data is beautiful it has little to no value if all it does is lie hidden within a database or an Excel sheet. Therefore it is our job to take that data and turn it into something useful for example through good visualizations. And when it comes to this I believe this older blog post from Few, “Should Data Visualizations Be Beautiful” is a lot more interesting than his recent post.

On a last note: As the moderator that reached out to Stephen Few and asked if he was interested in doing and AMA I still think it is a shame he declined. I personally find his point of view very interesting and I am sure a lot of users on /r/dataisbeautiful would have thought so too. There is something refreshing about a person speaking so loud about what he believe is right so if he at any time changes his mind we would be very happy to have him do an AMA at /r/dataisbeautiful.

 

Tracking myself in 2017

Azure, Lifelogging, Personal, SQL Server, , , ,

2017 is here and once again I’ll have a goal of writing here at least one time every month. Last year I failed this goal, but this year? Let’s give it another go.

I have a list of projects I want to do and I’ve finally started to track what I am doing every day. I’ve thought of this for a while as I think it would be interesting to see if I am able to find out if there are parameters in my life that affect things like my mood and evergy level. To do this tracking I’ve made a very simple website that is hosted in Azure with an Azure SQL Database behind to store my data. This was needed to make the registration as easy as possible. I had an Excel sheet the first couple of days before I got this site up and running, and I would not recommand that approach at all if you’re going to do the same. It is a too big effort to open an excel sheet every time you drink something or whatever you want to register. So far I am very happy with how it is working out, but I have started to get quite the backlog of increasing size with ideas for improvements. I have told myself to not change anything during January and then do an evalutation of how I think it is working out and which changes are absolutely needed. I’ve also decided not too look at any of the data until January is over. I don’t want to be too aware of what I am logging in the beginning, but rather try to make logging into somethig I just do and then when I have some months of data I can see if something sticks out from them.

So far I have split registration into two parts. First part is activities during the day. Things such as what I eat, drink, if I work out and for how long etc. The other part is a registration I do at the end of each day. Here I note down my mood, energy level, stress level and overall feeling as well as some small notes about f.ex if I hang out with friends during the day or did 100 math puzzles on an app I downloaded. As mentioned I am hoping to see if there is something that affects f.ex my mood and I am able to more actively apporach these things in the future. Not really sure if this will pop up, but at least I’ll have some more data on myself and what I do during the day.

Ever done something like this or have ideas of things that are worth noting down during the day? Let me know. I know some people take these kind of things to the extreme and I probably won’t do that, but I’m always interested in new input or ideas.

Note at the end: I really like how easy it is to create a web app in Azure and everytime I now do a push to my master branch in my Git reposit the website updates within seconds. Easy to set up a Visual Studio Team Services account and create the reposit to start working right away.

Activity registration