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.

Road trip audio books

In two and a half weeks, I'll be going on a spring break trip to Charleston, SC and Savannah, GA. My plan on the drive is to either be passed out in the passenger seat or listening to audio books, but I'm having trouble thinking of books to check out for that purpose. The problem is this - I don't want to listen to books I've read before, ruling out the by-all-accounts-terrific Harry Potter audiobooks. However, I keep going down my list of books to read and think that if I want to read them, I want to actually read them and not listen to them.

Whatever am I to do?

Links from the Week

With the release of his latest book, Slate.com created a Dan Brown plot-generating tool... and it’s awesome. If you’re a fan of Dan Brown, Tom Hanks, or insanely bad mullets, visit here and play around with it!

Beyond the Boxscore, a terrific baseball blog, recently addressed efficiency in graphic design. Within that article, they used a map created by French cartographers depicting Napoleon's invasion of/retreat from Russia. It's brilliant and dense and beautiful.

Good is a treasure trove of really interesting graphic visualizations, and this week they linked to an amazing interactive tool showing the changing demographics of the American labor force since 1850.

Rain Day

"Sometimes you win, sometimes you lose, sometimes it rains." - Bull Durham

Today it rained. And snowed. Since it would be pretty uncomfortable and not that productive to try and do archaeological survey in those conditions, we had a rain day. To fill up the time, I went with Elizabeth and Susan to lovely Princeton, WI. It seemed like half of the stores were closed - including (presumably) a potter's studio. He must have a hell of a beard, since he named it "A Hairy Potter." We went into Twister, a coffeeshop/store. Susan and Elizabeth had mochas, and I had a completely unnecessary americano. It was my 3rd cup of coffee of the day...and the best, by far. I'm not one to complain about the Americinn's complementary coffee, but it's not winning any awards anytime soon.

In addition to the americano, I bought "The Modern Gentleman: A Guide to Essential Manners, Savvy & Vice" - so far I have read Chapter One: Out and About. Nothing too spectacular, but good for soaking up time in the hotel for sure.

We had lunch at La Casbah - I had a grilled vegetable wrap with a garlic sauce. I suppose I should be bringing my camera along for these excursions...you'll have to take my word that the wrap was quite good.

Back at the hotel, I did some reading and generally killed time until 7:15, when the Cubs and Cincinnati Reds squared off in game one of a three game series. Rich Harden pitched a good game, and the Cubs offense took advantage of Micah Owing's poor command of the strike zone (a trait that the Reds bullpen shared as well) en route to a 7-2 victory.

Listening to: David Gray, "The Other Side"
Reading: "The Modern Gentleman"