Thoughts on Guys, Failure and Data Visualization

Guys Being Guys - Hilarious clip from an old episode of the Totally Rad Show that captures the essence of a beer-fueled fit of laughter among good good friends. TRS is my favorite show on Internet television network Revision3. Check it out for more good times with these guys.



Failure by Honda - Like Michael Jordon's famous failure commercial for Nike, this bit of inspirational wisdom is about the the opportunity of failing. Specifically, about Honda's culture that allows drivers, designers and engineers to draw upon failure to motivate them to succeed.



Doug Meacham, a rockstar from Richmond, had some interesting thoughts about the short film. He says that, too often, failure doesn't support the short term, high performance expectations of the average publicly traded company. And that failure is necessary for success for above average organizations. Reminds me of this interesting discussion between Best Buy's Robert Stephens, Steve Bendt and Gary Koelling.

So Many a Second - A visualizer that shows world statistics on a human scale. Depicting the ongoing stream of events, this application tries to get the user in touch with the emotional actuality of these objective data. For example, every second 4.2 babies are born and 1.7 people die, making the population growth 2.5 people per second. This helps visualize that idea.

Data visualization is a pretty popular subject right now. It really helps to understand the meaning of complex issues through the graphic interpretation of the data. Presentation Zen is also a great resource to learn more about making presentations more effective, for example this impressive presentation.