Today was my birthday! Which of course makes a nice day, when people message you and tell you how valuable you are to them, and when your family tries to call you and when your ex co-workers pose in front of Mars posters and create cake data vis for you.
And it was a good day! Besides getting messages to, I submitted my SRCCON talk, answered long overdue emails and read through data vis talks and “How do we form beliefs?” articles. For lunch, I had the best food truck food ever (so far): Sashimi Don with actually great rice. And I ate it in the sun outside of the NPR building, and the sun was shining, and it was the perfect temperature, and the podcast in my ear was good, and everything was fine and I thought to myself that my life is, indeed, quite excellent.
And in the evening I went to the DC Vizzards meetup (Vizzards! Get it? Get it??!!). I was surprised that they were only 15 people and that the expected background knowledge of the attendees was considered to be extremely low (“that’s what CSV means”) (I took very, very little away from the talks). But the discussions afterwards was nice and the people there definitely super lovely.
Afterward I had dinner with M and his friend J; we had Ramen and then walked around the forest close to the Rock Creek Parkway. Yeah, good day.
Input? 5
Output? 4
Learnings?
Both, stories and stats, can have a lot or very little context. Both can be close to the truth or far away.
Questions?
How are beliefs formed?
Why do we get attracted to stories so much?
What is politics? Is it every power dynamics between two or more people? Is every act political?