Works of art that are about themselves
I watched Citizen Kane (for the umpteenth time) the other day and was again struck by how it is a movie about itself. Kane is William Randolph Hearst, but he’s also Orson Welles, boy wonder, and the...
View ArticleTony nominations mean nothing
Someone writes: I searched up *Tony nominations mean nothing* and I found nothing. So I had to write this. There are currently 41 theaters that the Tony awards accept when nominating their choices. If...
View ArticleMiscreant’s Way
We went to Peter Luger then took the train back . . . Walking through Williamsburg, everyone looked like a Daniel Clowes character.
View ArticleResemblance
They’re playing My Morning Jacket on the radio. I think Off the Record sounds just like the Ramones, but nobody agrees with me. Please tell me I’m not insane.
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Calling all cats
Those of you familiar with this blog will have noticed that it regularly features cats. For example the majestic cat featured last week, this lover of Bayesian data analysis here and even my own cat,...
View ArticleCome up with a logo for causal inference!
Stephen Cole, Jennifer Hill, Luke Keele, Ilya Shpitser, and Dylan Small write: We wanted to provide an update on our efforts to build the Society for Causal Inference (SCI). As you may recall, we are...
View ArticleCoding and drawing
Some people like coding and they like drawing too. What do they have in common? I like to code—I don’t looove it, but I like it ok and I do it a lot—but I find drawing to be very difficult. I can keep...
View ArticleThomas Basbøll will like this post (analogy between common—indeed,...
There’s a saying in art that you have to draw things the way they look, not the way they are. This reminds me of an important but rarely stated principle in statistical reasoning, the distinction...
View Article“Pictures represent facts, stories represent acts, and models represent...
I really like the above quote from noted aphorist Thomas Basbøll. He expands: Simplifying somewhat, pictures represent facts, stories represent acts, and models represent concepts. . . . Pictures are...
View ArticleQuino y Mafalda
Obit by Harrison Smith, full of stories: She was a wise and idealistic young girl, a cartoon kid with a ball of black frizz for hair, a passionate hatred of soup and a name, Mafalda, inspired by a...
View ArticleBest comics of 2010-2019?
X linked to this list by Sam Thielman of the best comics of the decade. The praise is a bit over the top (“brimming with wit and pathos” . . . “Every page in Ferris’s enormous debut is a wonder” . . ....
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From the Archives of Psychological Science
Jay Livingston pointed me to PostSecret, which I’d never heard of before, and the above image, which apparently first appeared in 2011. P.S. The image and the title of this post do not quite align. My...
View Article“Maybe the better analogy is that these people are museum curators and we’re...
Someone sent me a link to a recently published research paper and wrote: As far as any possible coverage on your blog goes, this one didn’t come from me, please. It just looks… baffling in a lot of...
View ArticleLuc Sante reviews books by Nick Hornby and Geoffrey O’Brien on pop music
From 2004. Worth a read, if you like this sort of thing, which I do, but I guess most of you don’t.
View ArticleMeg Wolitzer and George V. Higgins
Regular readers of this blog will know that I’m a Meg Wolitzer fan (see here and here). During the past year or so I’ve been working my way through her earlier books, and I just finished Surrender,...
View ArticleThe Tall T*
Saw The Tall T on video last night. It was ok, but when it comes to movies whose titles begin with that particular character string, I think The Tall Target was much better. I’d say The Tall Target is...
View ArticleThe revelation came while hearing a background music version of Iron...
I just read “Elevator Music: A Surreal History of Musak, Easy-Listening, and Other Moodsong,” written by Joseph Lanza and published in 1994, around the same time as V. Vale’s and Andrea Juno’s cult...
View ArticleWho’s afraid?
Reading this Palko post reminds me of when I saw a performance of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf at a local theater. It was ok, although even then it seemed very old-fashioned in its construction, much...
View ArticlePittsburgh by Frank Santoro
Last year we discussed a silly study, and that lead us to this interesting blog by Chris Gavaler, which pointed me to a recent picture storybook, Pittsburgh, by Frank Santoro. The book was excellent. I...
View ArticleThe Alice Neel exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art
This exhibit closes at the end of the month so I can’t put this one on the usual 6-month delay. (Sorry, “Is There a Replication Crisis in Finance?”, originally written in February—you’ll have to wait...
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Computing with muffins
This is Jessica. Florian Echtler put together a list of weird human computer interaction papers that’s too good not to share. Urinal games, robots powered by household pests, and closeness with your...
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Review of Art Studio, Volume 1, by James Watt
As a blogger with a moderate-sized readership, sometimes I get books in the mail, or emails offering me books to review. Recently I was contacted by the publisher of Art Studio, a series of books on...
View Article“Citizen Keane: The Big Lies Behind the Big Eyes”
I was listening to the radio and they played a song by Keane, which sounded good, so I went over to the website of the public library to see if they had any CDs I could check out. While searching I...
View ArticleNew blog formatting
We needed to update the blog because the old theme was no longer being maintained by WordPress, and we were having security problems and issues with the comment screening. So we replaced it with this...
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TFW you can add “Internationally exhibited” to your resume
This is Jessica. Recently a museum in Italy approached me about contributing some images and a short essay on uncertainty visualization, for an exhibit they were planning related to uncertainty. The...
View ArticleBeing Alive
We saw Company on Broadway last weekend. It was the day that Sondheim passed away, so it was very sad. The show itself was directed in a broad, over-the-top sort of way. Later we found a version on...
View ArticleAn important skill for woodworkers and social science researchers
Adam Cohen writes: Inspiration for your blog readers: “Making accurate measurements is one of the most important skills to acquire if you want to achieve good results.” p. 7, The Complete Practical...
View ArticleWhy do we prefer familiarity in music and surprise in stories?
This came up in two books I read recently: “Elements of Surprise,” by Vera Tobin (who has a Ph.D. in English and teaches cognitive science) and “How Music Works” by David Byrne (Psycho Killer, etc.)....
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This is a great graph: Plotting y(t) vs y'(t), tracing over time with a dot...
Gwynn points us to a new book, “Slow Down: The end of the Great Acceleration – and Why It’s Good for the Planet, the Economy, and Our Lives,” by Danny Dorling. The author is a geographer, so I assume...
View ArticleA Cure for Gravity
I just finished reading the above-titled Joe Jackson autobiography from 1999. I was charmed right away on page 12 with this passage: The first of our three 45-minute sets is uneventful, but this is...
View ArticlePen and notebook recommendations?
Current state of my art It’s an all Japanese line up. Maruman Mnemosyne A5, 5mm dot or square pads, side or top bound Sakura Sigma Micron 0.1 pens I’m curious if there are people that have tried these...
View ArticleExhibition of illustrations at the Society for Illustrators on East 63 St.
The Museum of Illustration at the Society of Illustrators is proud to present Illustrators 64, an annual exhibit featuring the most outstanding works of the year by leading contemporary illustrators...
View ArticleAm I the Cookie?
From Elle O’Brien comes this amusing example of a classification problem using data downloaded from the internet, with lots of detail on how to download and work with the data. Could be good for your...
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“Film Dialogue from 2,000 screenplays, Broken Down by Gender and Age”
A commenter points to a analysis by Hanah Anderson and Matt Daniels, “Film Dialogue from 2,000 screenplays, Broken Down by Gender and Age.” Anderson and Daniels write: We Googled our way to 8,000...
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“Data Knitualization: An Exploration of Knitting as a Visualization Medium”
Amy Cohen points us to this fun article by Noeska Smit. Here’s the description of the above-pictured fuzzy heart model: The last sample I [Smit] knit is a simplified 3D anatomical heart (see Figure 4)...
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How Music Works by David Byrne, and Sweet Anticipation by David Huron
1. Byrne The other day I shared a passage from the book, How Music Works, by David Byrne, which motivated a long discussion about why we prefer familiarity in music and surprise in stories. I enjoyed...
View ArticleMy Das Boot story
My dad and I saw it when it came out. When it ended I said, That was intense. My dad replied, At least it had a happy ending. And he meant it!
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What rule did Louis Menand use to select what went into book on U.S. “cold...
I’m a big fan of Louis Menand (see also here), so when his new book, The Free World: Art and Thought in the Cold War, came out, I immediately bought and read it. It had lots of interesting stories and...
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Some things, like cubes, tetrahedrons, and Venn diagrams, seem so simple and...
I know I’ve read somewhere about the challenge of Venn diagrams with 4 or more circles, but I can’t remember the place. It seems like a natural for John Cook but I couldn’t find it on his blog, so...
View ArticleOK, I know you were all waiting for this one: My review of the 1995 album,...
It all started last month when I was talking with my social media consultant about planning our next Greatest Seminar Speaker competition. We were going through a few possible categories—I’m actually...
View Article--- Article Not Found! ---
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The more I thought about them, the less they seemed to be negative things,...
This is Jessica. My sabbatical year, which most recently had me in Berkeley CA, is coming to an end. For the second time since August I was passing through Iowa. Here it is on the way out to...
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Tom Lehrer puts himself in the public domain—and here, for a limited time,...
Paul Alper points to this site and writes: Most of the material is familiar but some are far more obscure. Lehrer will be 95 on April 9, 2023. And, draw whatever conclusions you feel like, his...
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“Several artists have torn, burned, ripped and cut their artwork over the...
I’m tinguely all over from having received this exclusive 5D invitation, and I just have to share it with all of you! It’s a combination of art museum and shredder that’s eerily reminiscent of the...
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Our Bayesian predictions for the Oscars . . . using Stan!
Ahhhh, just kidding. Didn’t really do it. We did see Tar and The Fabelmans and liked them both. Actually liked The Fablemans better, so that would be my vote. Yeah, yeah, laugh at me all you want....
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“The hat”: A single shape that can tile the plane aperiodically but not...
Z in comments points to a new discovery by David Smith, Joseph Samuel Myers, Craig Kaplan, and Chaim Goodman-Strauss, who write: An aperiodic monotile . . . is a shape that tiles the plane, but never...
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Tile wars! The hat vs. South America.
Yesterday we wrote about Smith et al.’s amazing set of 1.5 tiles that cover the plane aperiodically: And this reminds me of Munroe’s approximate map of the world’s land masses using a single tile:...
View ArticleRecent book reviews
Colorado Train, by Inker: Grim. Stephen King’s The Body minus the nostalgia. Drawings and story complemented each other. Les Insulaires, by Garnier: First novel I’ve ever read in a foreign language. It...
View ArticleArtificial intelligence and aesthetic judgment
This is Jessica. In a new essay reflecting on how we get tempted to aestheticize generative AI, Ari Holtzman, Andrew, and I write: Generative AIs are objects that produce creative outputs in the style...
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