Info We Trust

by R J Andrews

  My mother, Mary Ellen Andrews, taught me to be filled with awe and wonder at it all. My father, Ray Andrews, taught me how to build. My wife, Kelly Han, inspires life into the whole adventure.

  NOTES

  Dates used in the main text best reflect the date of original composition. If composition or publication date was not clear, life-span dates were used. Dates in these notes reflect the formal publication date referenced in the following bibliography. In some cases there is a discrepancy between text and bibliography dates. This occurs with lectures, translations, and posthumous publications—all of which were not published until years after original composition.

  ii The frontispiece title is a mirrored ambigram. It was inspired by the work of Douglas Hofstadter and refined by studying Langdon (2005). vii Of course the first thing to do… Carroll (1871) Chapter III: Looking-Glass Insects.

  Preface: Ancient Roots

  xi Etymology, for the preface and throughout the book, was compiled by referencing the Oxford English Dictionary, etymonline.com, wiktionary.org, Merriam-Webster's Collegiate Dictionary, and Google Dictionary. xiii nostalgia for paradise Eliade (1952) p. 55.

  Origin: The Goal of Our Craft

  1 This art takes as given… Plato Book VII, 518d, Bloom trans. (1968) p. 194. 2 “international organization” referred to is the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN). 5 writhing sea-dragons… Beowulf lines 1426-1432, 1442-1443, Heaney trans (2008) pp. 97–99. • “The water dragons of chaos represent…” motivated by Peterson (2017). • The monsters of the abyss… Eliade (1991) p. 158. • Our willingness to distinguish good and evil… Zander and Zander (2000) p. 105. • The heroine illustration is based on the Libertas Americana medal, conceived by Benjamin Franklin to celebrate America's Revolutionary War military victories and enhance Franco-American goodwill. The sea monster she is confronting is based on a map dragon from Olaus Magnus's 1539 Carta Marina. 6 I am interested… Popper (1959) p. xviii. • The ways of seeing put forth… Sousanis (2015) p. 46. 7 And is there no implied intention… Campbell (1972) p. 17. • Explanations establish islands… Carse (1986) p. 139. • 1 Separation: a hero ventures forth… Campbell (2008) p. 23. • All utopias are depressing… Perec (1982), Bellow trans. (2011) p. 149. 8 Helmets, Their Kinds and Developments during the Centuries, educational chart devised by Bashford Dean and drawn by Stanley Rowland, 1915. 9 Bashford Dean biography from Pyhrr (2012) p. 10. • Each field has its own concept… Spear (1969) p. 1. 11 I am looking for someone… Gandalf to Bilbo Baggins, Tolkien (1937) Chapter I.

  Chapter 1: Data Shadows

  13 James Brown illustration based on photograph taken by Michael Ochs (New York, 1962). • Matter and all else… Eddington (1929) pp. 33, 43. 14 The value of a fact shrinks… Wainer (1997) p. 25. 15 “only six percent of workers in the United States are in STEM occupations.” STEM Jobs: 2017 Update, U.S. Department of Commerce. • the truth is nothing other than… Plato Book VII, 515c-d, Bloom trans. (1968) p. 194. 16 The Inca quipucamayoc is inspired by a drawing by Felipe Guaman Poma de Ayala in El Primer Nueva Crónica Y Buen Gobierno (1615). 17 Evolution of numerals illustration based on Menninger (1969) pp. 418–419. Like many evolutionary processes, numbers did not develop in any simple linear fashion. A richer exploration would depict Gwalior, Sanskrit (Devanagari), West Arabic, East Arabic, and countless other numeral variations across a complex temporal-network. • At one time, there was speculation that the figures past 4… Mazur (2014) p. 35. • Base-10 box tally system: Tukey (1977) p. 16. 18 “The roar of the crowd.…” refers to American Joe Louis's historic rematch against German Max Schmeling at Yankee Stadium in 1938. Heavyweights used to fight at less than the 200 pounds modern minimum. • Value type overview motivated by Kirk (2016) pp. 100–105. • Many codes… exist primarily to… Norman (2013) pp. 86–87. 19 Rote learning and drill… Lakoff and Núñez (2000) p. 49. 20 It's not the numbers… Rosling et al. (2018) p. 20. 21 S. suffered from.… Rumsey (2016) pp. 120–121. • Storytellers of all stripes… Austin (2010) p. 34. • To see why encoding is necessary… Hofstadter and Sander (2013) pp. 172, 347.

  Chapter 2: Information Murmurs

  23 Data! data! data!… Conan Doyle (1892) p. 618. • Harvest scene illustration inspired by the Tomb of Sennedjem, Deir el-Medina, Egypt. 24 The wheat stack illustration is a tribute to the Statistical Society of London's original logo. Founded in 1834 with the mission to procure, arrange, and publish facts, Aliis Exterendum (for others to thresh out, i.e., interpret). It became the Royal Statistical Society in 1887. • These plants domesticated Homo Sapiens… Harari (2015) pp. 80–81. • Uruk table illustration adapted from Englund (1998) pp. 50–63. 25 objective witnesses… Rumsey (2016) p. 21. • The application of figures of arithmetic… Guy (1885) p. 72. • The plague victim being lifted into a cart is inspired by the 1740s print by James Hulett titled Plague in 1665. 26 Progress of information technology motivated by Rumsey (2016). • As knowledge increases and multiplies… Playfair (1786) p. vii. • We can no longer rely… Rumsey (2016) p. 4. 27 “James Webb Space Telescope…” The JWST will be the scientific successor to the Hubble Space Telescope. Its primary mirror, made of 18 hexagonal sections, has a diameter of 6.5 meters. • more evidence is better… Stigler (2016) p. 55. • A river cannot… Huff (1954) p. 20. • If, for example, it is a gasoline account… Ogilvy (1985) p. 34. 28 We live in an era of social science… Pinker (2014) p. 24. • Human centered design [emphasizes]… Norman (2013) p. 218. • We are ready to question… Lupi (2017). 29 Book-to-shelf story builds on Hidalgo (2015) p. 63. • Engineers and businesspeople are trained to… Norman (2013) p. 218. • The foundation of an edifice is of vast importance… Brinton (1914) pp. 1–2. • Facts are incomplete without context… Wainer (1997) p. 134. • To see an object in space… Arnheim (1969) p. 54. 30 “a pile of stones is not a house.” references Henri Poincaré's Hypotheses in Physics, Tr. George Bruce Halsted (1913): Science is built up with facts, as a house is with stones. But a collection of facts is no more a science than a heap of stones is a house. 31 Round—a lot! Wainer (2007) p. 97. • Basic problem: Make data more easily… Tukey (1977) p. v. • A table is for communication… Wainer (2007) p. 95. 32 “John Tukey advised.…” Tukey (1977) p. 332. • As statistical results never can… Playfair (1801) p. 11. • to avoid the tedious repetition… Robert Recorde The Whetstone of Witte (1557). 34 In the course of executing that design… Playfair (1801) p. 3.

  Chapter 3: Embodied Encoding

  35 Greek battle illustration inspired by combat between Achilles and Memnon on a volute krater (bowl for mixing wine and water) made in Attica c. 490BC–460BC, British Museum number 1848,0801.1. • What our eyes behold… Stevens (1951). 36 The hero has to go… Eliade (1952) p. 83. • The ceaseless activity of making mappings… Hofstadter and Sander (2013) pp. 126–127, 440. 37 ‘You don't know much,'… Carroll (1865) Chapter VI: Pig and Pepper. • All that has been learned empirically… Edward O. Wilson quoted by Austin (2010) p. 133. • From the experientialist perspective… Lakoff and Johnson (1980) p. 235. 38 Illustration of intersecting figures is a tribute to Sousanis (2015). • Imagination lets us exceed… Ibid. pp. 88–89. • a form of cognitively induced deprivation… Loewenstein (1994) p. 75. • Interesting theories are those which… Davis (1971) p. 309. 39 Your claims are indefensible… Lakoff and Johnson (1980) p. 4. • For we, on our little pile… Voltaire (1752) Chapter I. • We are at our human best… Raymo (1998) p. 48. • Analogy is the fuel… Hofstadter and Sander (2013) p. 3. • The essence of metaphor is… Lakoff and Johnson (1980) p. 5. 40 For more on snake detection see Van Strien and Isbell (2017). • The sole aim of a metaphor is… Orwell (1946). • One's interaction with one's body… Hofstadter and Sander (2013) p. 288. 41 For more on the study of color concepts see Davidoff (2006). • The imaginative reader illustration references Norman Rockwell's Boy Reading Adventure Story (1923) and the Britain Needs You at Once WWI propaganda poster (1915). • The abstract is understood in the context of… Geary (2011) p. 93. • Theory-laden: Th
ere is no such thing as ‘raw' experience… Deutsch (2011) p. 41. • Our psychology also limits our perception… Hofstadter and Sander (2013) p. 171. 42 You have the power to… Elizabeth Andrews in conversation with author (2018). • This “mental cinema” is always at work… Calvino (2016) p. 102. 43 “Big things are important” is motivated by Lakoff and Núñez (2000) p. 41. • The essence of graphical display… Wainer (1997) p. 20. • The great criterion is the effect produced… Playfair (1801) p. 16. • Clever encoding does not always translate… Cleveland (1985) p. 20. • Seeing comes before words… Berger (1972) p. 7. 44 “Big things are important in Zulu, Hawaiian…” see Geary (2011) page 24. • An appeal to the eye when proportion… Playfair (1801) pp. 4, 14.

  Chapter 4: Counting Time

  45 Dorothy and Toto illustration inspired by W.W. Denslow's illustrations for Baum (1900). • There were several roads near by… Baum (1900) p. 33. 46 This chapter's chain of mathematical metaphors is inspired by Lakoff and Núñez (2000). • “assembly-number metaphor” Lakoff and Núñez (2000) pp. 65–68. • “Closure is an engine for creating…” motivated by Ibid pp. 81–82. 47 “length-number metaphor” Ibid pp. 68–71. • “The rod, equal to sixteen feet…” inspired by Stigler (2016) p. 31. • Sixteen feet illustration after Jacob Köbel's original 1522 illustration. 48 “distance-number metaphor” Lakoff and Núñez (2000) pp. 71–72. 49 “Source-path-goal” and “fictive motion” motivated by Ibid. pp. 37–39. • Fictive motion bicycle illustration inspired by work of Nigel Holmes. • Personification is a general category… Lakoff and Johnson (1980) p. 34. • Science interests me… Calvino (2016) p. 111. • We use the same language… Lakoff and Núñez (2000) p. 74. 50 The depiction of time: The process begins with metaphor… Lippincott (1999) p. 169. • Perception of time is not linear… Wong (2010) p. 100. 51 “Like someone looking out the back window of a car…” this vision of time is inspired by John-Paul Sartre's comments on William Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury. • Time travel is only science fiction… Bierut (2005) p. 203. • “You can be traveling through time…” motivated by Lakoff and Johnson (1980) pp. 41–45. 52 Skeleton with hourglass is inspired by Jolly Roger pirate flags. • Three-headed illustration references Titian's Allegory of Prudence (c. 1560–1570). • Then I reflected that everything happens… Borges (2003) p. 30. 53 “Time is linear travel over a landscape” metaphor inspired by Lakoff and Johnson (1980) pp. 41–45 and Lakoff and Núñez (2000) pp. 406–407. • Levidrome, the name for a word that spells something else backwards, was coined by six-year-old Levi Budd.• “Linear time on the page moves from left to right…” A curious exception to this rule is financial statement tables which puts the most important accounting period, the most recent, first. • In all these cases… Norman (2013) p. 122. 54 Chinese Mandarin contrast motivated by Shlain (1998) p. 183. • “how the Chinese language orients time.” see Geary (2011) pp. 98–99. • Zodiac animals illustration inspired by emoji.• A man who explains… Hui Tzu quoted in Geary (2011) p. 172. • While the Indo-Aryans and Semites found… Shlain (1998) p. 181. • The cosmic clock: If time was conceived as the precise measure of… Umberto Eco in Lippincott (1999) p. 10. 55 In [South American] Aymaran culture… Geary (2011) p. 98. • [Australian Aboriginal] Pormpuraawans arrange time… Boroditsky and Gaby (2010) p. 1635. 56 “A different visual metaphor for time…” motivated by Lakoff and Johnson (1980) pp. 7–9. • “time is an irreversible performance” motivated by Hidalgo (2015) chapter 3 summary of Prigogine (1984). • There is no past… Hidalgo (2015) p. 40.

  Chapter 5: World Building

  57 The Grid, a digital frontier… Daft Punk featuring Jeff Bridges. “The Grid.” Tron: Legacy. Walt Disney Records, 2010. 58 In one dimension… Sousanis (2015) p. 23. • One might say that the world… Valéry (1950) p. 123. • Imagine a vast sheet of paper… Abbott (1884) p. 4. 59 “Find your way home…” and other quests motivated by Roam (2016) p. 93. • What do we make of our contemporary interactive maps'.… Mattern (2015). • The crowning achievement of memory… Rumsey (2016) p. 110. 60 Globe-projection illustration is inspired by Albrecht Dürer's “Perspective Machine” (c. 1525). 61 “Descartes cemented the convention of…” see Levins (2014) and Moore (2012). 63 Historic city center illustration is based on Oviedo, Spain c. 1777. • To look is a territorial activity. Carse (1986) p. 70. • None of these things exist… Harari (2015) p. 28. 64 “Other animals…” see Dell'Amore (2013). • Muhammad Ali illustration is inspired by the famous photograph Neil Leifer shot for Sports Illustrated after Ali's first round knockout of Sonny Liston in 1965.

  Chapter 6: Infuse Meaning

  67 Mad Hatter illustration inspired by John Tenniel's illustration for Carroll (1865). • That was an instance of the charts meaning… Neurath and Kinross (2009) p. 26. 68 “Good goes up” motivated by Lakoff and Johnson 1980 pp. 14–21. 69 Opioid chart inspired by Iraq's Bloody Toll, Simon Scarr, South China Morning Post, Dec 17, 2011, http://www.scmp.com/infographics/article/1284683/iraqs-bloody-toll • The principles… Bang (2000) pp. 42–44. 70 “ways of showing time…” inspired by Cleveland (1985) pp. 178–186. In tribute to Cleveland the same geomagnetic data series he used has been refreshed to include the last 30 years. The aa index is derived from two approximately antipodal observatories, one in the UK and one in Australia. Collection began in 1868, making it the oldest planetary index time-series. 71 “Dona Wong advocates…” Wong (2010) pp. 50–53. • Alice is being pulled through her own story by the Red Queen's hand, inspired by John Tenniel's illustration for Carroll (1871). • The dashed line… Malamed (2012). • Ratio scales… Cairo (2016) p. 107. 73 Stack of coins illustration inspired by Holmes (1984) p. 39. • columns of stacked facts Levasseur (1885) p. 227. • Suppose the money received by a man… Playfair (1786) p. xi. 74 believed that by wedding… Wainer (2005) p. 49. 75 [Euclid] gave his famous… Dyson (1988) p. 16. 76 “The page lacks natural depth cues…” motivated by Ware (2008) p. 90. and Munzer (2014) pp. 118–120. 77 The maze is modeled after the set used by Stanley Kubrick to shoot THE SHINING horror film (1980). • Most of us must undertake… Biderman et al. (1963) p. 6.

  Chapter 7: True Colors

  79 Colorful birds illustration inspired by “The dream of Nebuchadnezzer” from the Morgan Beatus, a medieval illuminated manuscript now in the Pierpont Morgan Library, New York. • Man lives with what… Valéry (1950) p. 222. 81 Dorothy and Toto illustration are inspired by W.W. Denslow's illustrations for Baum (1900). • “The sequence from dark to light…” motivated by Stone (2003). 82 “Distinct hues are farthest separated…” motivated by Ware (2008) pp. 69–79. 83 “Basic colors” Berlin and Kay (1969). 84 CMY subtractive color illustration inspired by Stone (2003) p. 164. • Gamut comparison illustration based on CIE 1976 chromaticity diagram by the Commission Internationale de l'Eclairage. • Take a brightly colored object… Stone (2003) pp. 36-37. 85 Human cone distribution illustration adapted from by Roorda (1999). • A color scale should vary… Simmon (2013) Part 2. • “The ‘opponent process' theory of color is…” motivated by Stone (2003) pp. 28–29. 86 For a productive use of rainbow palettes see Munzer (2014) pp. 231–232. • The bathymetric color palette that diverges from sea level is based on an example palette from Cynthia Brewer's ColorBrewer2.org. 87 Binned color illustration inspired by Ware (2008) p. 73. • Perceptual effects [can] strengthen… Stone (2003) p. 261. • Pleasing colors blend… Cleveland (1985) p. 207. • To label (color as noun)… Tufte (1990) p. 81. 88 Whenever possible, make intuitive palettes… Simmon (2013) Part 4. • Recognize that it's hard… Meeks (2018).

  Chapter 8: Explore to Create

  89 And this I believe… Steinbeck (1952) p. 131. 90 “the man is Michelangelo…” this particular telling of the story is based on the film The Agony and the Ecstasy (1965) • The gesture drawing is based on one in pen and brown ink by Michelangelo in 1511. It is now held by Ashmolean Museum, Oxford, https://www.michelangelo-gallery.com/sistine-sketchbook-6.aspx • The germ of an idea may often come… Ware (2008) p. 147. 91 “John Tukey intr
oduced” Tukey (1977) p. 1. • Simple arithmetic and easy-to-draw pictures… Tukey (1977) p. v. • Which general-purpose plot… Wainer (1997) p. 181. • The term “forensic”… Rumsey (2016) p. 99. • A means of orchestrating a conversation… Sousanis (2015) p. 79. 92 “enough context for the viewer to make sense of a lonely number…” for a more critical take on lonely numbers see Rosling et al. (2018) pp. 130, 142. • Hypotheses are nets… Novalis Schriften II (1802) cited in Popper (1959) p. xiv. • There is no logical path to these laws… Einstein (1918). • Every discovery contains an irrational element… Popper (1959) p. 8. • In my research I have needed… Rosling et al. (2018) p. 191. 93 “The language used to describe these differences” Tukey introduced this distinction with Bill is a head taller than Jim … George weights twice as much as his brother Jack… Tukey (1977) p. 110. • “Add and subtract comparisons…” motivated by Lakoff and Núñez (2000) pp. 55–56. • “Multiplication is a conceptual extension of addition…” motivated by Lakoff and Núñez (2000) pp. 60–61. • The astronauts are inspired by ISOTYPE forms. • “Newborns have been studied to count…” see Butterworth (1999) p. 108 cited in Lakoff and Núñez (2000) p. 19. 94 “Jacques Bertin extolled the power…” see Bertin (1983) p. 11. • pains and labour full sentence is As it is not without some pains and labour that the memory is impressed with the proportion between different quantities expressed in words or figures, many persons never take that trouble—and there is even, to those that do so, a fresh effort of memory necessary each time the question occurs. Playfair(1801) p. 6. • learn how to make one picture do. Tukey (1977) p. 109. • “Cleveland distinguished two types…” Cleveland (1985) p. 22. • “Exports and Imports” illustration is a tribute to Playfair (1786). 95 “The mind ingests many” for a detailed look at how 2-D space is structured in the mind see Ware (2008) Chapter 3. • Trend: Something practically everybody is… Huff (1954) p. 62. • “Binding” motivated by Ware (2008) p. 47. 96 “Scagnostics” Wilkinson and Wills (2008). • Theory and experimentation led… Cleveland and McGill and McGill (1988). 97 Each of the four data sets… Anscombe (1973). 98 Average bridge traffic illustration plots San Francisco commuter traffic. • Drawing with data is… Lupi (2017). • The greatest value of a picture is… Tukey (1977) p. vi. • The eye cannot look on similar forms… William Playfair's Statistical Breviary (1801) p. 6 in Play-fair (2005).