Ishan Mukherjee > Recent Status Updates

A simply written, gripping story so far.

Most nonfiction books are so given to waffling that I find it hard to make it past one chapter. Good writing is rich in detail. Every sentence in this book is so brimming with Caro's deep research that reading it feels like a guilty pleasure. The first chapter was such a stunning portrait of Johnson's motivations.

Lots of sadness (porn) in the introductory Octavia chapter: her dad gets shot at for stealing plants from someone's garden, her friend Manny's dad assaults his wife (Manny nearly kills him; he also steals cars), and Octavia's mom and brother are killed in a car accident. I get that "the Native American experience is full of pathos" is part of the point, but man.

Hugh Carey's story of climbing up a mountain to rescue a child, then fashioning a makeshift silk glider to descend, then wandering through Central Asia in search for the child's nomadic parents, is so cool.

Ludo, aged six:

> I said, ‘Let’s take two people about to undergo 10 years of horrible excruciating boredom at school, A dies at the age of 6 from falling out a window and B dies at the age of 6 + n where n is a number less than 10, I think we would all agree that B’s life was not improved by the additional n years.’

... instead of a towel.

Absolutely hilarious, why aren't all novels like this.

> Your father is having a good day: a member of the Gideon Society has come to suggest placing Bibles in the rooms, and he has been able to state categorically that he is not having that piece of trash in his motel. Each bedside table, he explains, has a copy of Darwin’s Origin of Species in the top drawer. In fact it’s a really good day because that very morning one of the guests stole the Origin of Species ...

... in the dust and the dark. Sometimes a book can be called from the dust and the dark to produce a book which can be bought in shops, and perhaps it is interesting, but the people who buy it and read it because it is interesting are not serious people, if they were serious they would not care about the interest they would be writing thousands of words to consign to the dust and the dark.

Astonishingly good.

> There are people who think contraception is immoral because the object of copulation is procreation. In a similar way there are people who think the only reason to read a book is to write a book; people should call up books from the dust and the dark and write thousands of words to be sent down to the dust and the dark which can be called up so that other people can send further thousands of words to join them ...

In a "friendly", accessible graphic, labels are placed on the graphic itself, elaborately encoded colors are avoided, and *no legend is required*.

Tufte has a gorgeous example of text-graphic integration in Leonardo da Vinci's notebooks.

Tufte suggests that the segregation of text and tables/graphics is mostly an accident of the development of printing technology (and now, I guess, universal plotting software like matplotlib/plotly/R). I can see that integration would be good: imagine plots labeled in beautiful LaTeX in ML papers instead of pyplot's gross sans serif.

The same typeface should be used for graphics and text.

Tufte doesn't like references to figures like "See Fig 1". As much as possible, tables and graphics should run into the text. Morever, "[i]f a display is discussed in various parts of the text, it might well be printed afresh near each reference to it, perhaps in reduced size in later showings".

This is fairly unconventional advice but sounds solid.

Tufte prefers a "supertable" to "a hundred little bar charts". For what it's worth, I disagree. In a bar chart, you can visually discern how big a datapoint is *relative* to another. You can quickly notice a datapoint that's much larger, for example. Reading visuals is faster than reading numbers.

Tufte comes down strongly against pie charts:

> A table is nearly always better than a dumb pie chart; the only worse design than a pie chart is several of them, for then the viewer is asked to compare quantities located in spatial disarray both within and between pies ... Given their low data-density and failure to order numbers along a visual dimension, pies should never be used.

He even cites a 1981 Bertin book.

By simply throwing more data at you, sparklines help "find an approximate answer to the right question (rather than an exact answer to the wrong question)" (since you don't have to bet on the right summary statistic).

Incorporating sparklines into tables of financial data seems like a great idea. First, patterns are jusr easier to see visually than lexically. Second, tables can only show current changes, potentially causing recency bias. Sparklines "improve the attention span of tables".

The idea of sparklines as "datawords" is quite cool. They also look incredibly well-designed. The color choice connecting the last datapoint to the printed number, and the deliberate compactness, are especially pleasing.

Along with the "lie factor" and "data-ink maximization", the idea of high-resolution data seems like one of the most notable in the book.

Except Minard's chart of Napoleon's conquest that everyone and their mom fetishizes, of course.

Tufte prefers that graphics maximize data per area. This can be done in two ways. First, expand rhe "data matrix", ie, the matrix of variables and datapoints. Instead of summary statistics, show real datapoints, IQR, and min-max. Second, shrink the chart's size. This actually makes patterns easier to notice in the examples Tufte provides.

> The simple things belong in tables or in the text; graphics can give a sense of large and complex data sets that cannot be managed in any other way.

I got a sort of Tetris Effect from reading this book, where graphics I saw in real life became much more noticeable. Especially their data-"thinness".

Surprisingly, Exit West has elements of fabulism. The other Hamid book I've read, How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia, is a work of pretty matter-of-fact realism, somewhat like Adiga's The White Tiger.

The NSA has a surprisingly large remit for its operations. For example, snooping on the UN to get an upper hand in negotiations is perfectly legal. What's illegal is spying on American citizens, but "incidentally collected" data on them -- easy to come by on the world's interconnected networks -- is fair game.

"On Self Respect" is brilliant. Didion is a prose stylist and fills her essays with great ideas.

DNA is a case study in clever engineering. For example, H-bonds collectively make DNA very stable -- only boiling water-temperatures can separate it. How, then, does DNA replication occur at normal temperatures? Because H-bonds individually are weak, so unzipping a short length of DNA a few base pairs at a time requires little energy. Plus, A-T rich sites exist that are easy to pry apart and get replication going.