wednesday graphic links

I think banning books is abhorrent and counterproductive - when I see the yearly list of "most banned books" or whatever, I immediately want to read them. To Kill A Mockingbird is an American - a world - classic. I would feel sick writing a letter asking to ban it.

If your worldview can't handle a children's book about two boy penguins raising a baby penguin, it is not the book that has the problem. Anyway, Good has produced yet another quality transparency showing the 10 most-challenged books of 2009. I don't actually like this graphic as much as I like most of their work; my main complaint is that the colors chosen to represent the different challenges don't readily correspond to the reason for the challenge. I don't know that I have a better way to do it. There are twelve listed reasons that people challenged books, ranging from offensive language to violence to suicide to age-unsuitability. Twelve categories are a lot to differentiate just using color.

Speaking of color, Randall Munroe (of nerdy webcomic XKCD) just concluded a color survey. Basically, takers of the survey would enter information about their computer monitor and their 23rd chromosome and then start to describe the colors of squares that would appear on their screen. The results are in, and some of his conclusions are pretty interesting. Not surprisingly, people get mighty tired of describing colors after twenty squares or so. The descent into madness seems to start to occur after the 3rd consecutive square of 'green.'

On a more somber note, legendary Detroit Tigers announcer Ernie Harwell passed away today. You can find more eloquent and personal stories about him from guys like Rob Neyer, Joe Posnanski, and Craig Calcaterra. I will merely link to a timely graphic from Wezen-ball. I saw this last week when Bob Uecker had his heart surgery, but it works today as well.