So how big is an acre?

Someone smart, when talking about the difference between data and information, once asked the question "how big is an acre?" The official answer is 43,560 square feet. But who remembers that sort of thing? And how useful is that number anyway? Unless you manage/design/build large buildings, do surveys, or love measuring things, the data isn't helpful.

A more useful answer? An acre is about the size of an American football field with the end zones cut off. For many people, that's far easier to understand.

So, today my colleague pointed me to this presentation by Jeffrey Veen, a designer who like Edward Tufte does a great job of helping people understand data through visualizations. Jeff tells a great story about how empowering people with software tools helps them make sense of large sets of data. There's a particular demo near the end that is particularly compelling. It combines four groups of data into one user-controlled visualization, through which you see the devastating effect of AIDS on Botswana.

If you're interested, I do occasionally tag interesting visualization resources like this one (also available as an RSS feed).

White House Tour

You gotta like a friend that takes the better part of his Sunday to show you where he works. And even more so when it's a day our kids (and us) will remember for a lifetime. The pictures, and the stories behind them, are here.

Saint Anthony must know a lot about us

Catholics know that when you really need to find something, like your car keys or that library book that was due last week, you say a quick prayer to Saint Anthony. I don't know how he became the patron saint of lost items, but I do know that he's helped me more than once.

I think I've used Google to find a few things too, what like maybe a million times since last Thursday, but they still haven't found my car keys. Who knows, maybe they're working on that too.

So where Saint Anthony knows what we've lost, Google, and other sites like it, really know what we're looking for. Google Trends is a perfect example. Take a bunch of search data and compare it to industry trends like car sales, home purchases, and such -- and voila, you can, as they say predict the present. Kudos to Google for doing the analysis and sharing the data!