16 January 2012

What Language Do You Spook?

Drew Conway is my kind of guy: a spook. Now, before any of the uber-PC folk get their backs up, an alternate definition of the word: colloquial for intelligence operative, origination unknown. I don't always put it on my resume, but I spent some time in the 1980's in Jack Anderson's shop. Officially, an intern; I did get paid some money. That's likely because I brought in a two column story (a story getting more than one was highly unusual) on the CIA running guns from Argentina (if memory serves) to Ghana. Corky Johnson worked on it with me. This was the time of Iran-Contra and the like. The story falls into the "like" category. We could never figure out why the Post didn't follow-up. I still have the galleys.

So, I was surfing through R-bloggers looking for background using R with Powerpoint; I know, yucky mucky. But I'm supposed to chat up some folks about that today, if they bother to call. In the search results is a long piece by Mr. Conway on proper data visualization. Comes out against pie charts. Good for him. I highly recommend it; he manages a bit of humor, when offering that a graph should have a 140 character footnote. Such a twit!!

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