I’m pretty pissed, and I’ve dug this far down

so I figure in for a penny, in for a pound!

Tim Minchin

I wanted to write a book called Coming to Terms with Being a Terrible Person about the process of understanding what one did as a child and why children should be considered a separate species from adults.

I wound up changing the name to The Consequences of Dissonance.  It was a very geeky story that ran along similar lines while somehow managing to be structured in sonata allegro format.  Very, very geeky.

When I was in elementary school, we were made to read several books that were intended to broaden our horizons when it came to disabilities. We even went on field trips to…I believe it was the Boulder Museum of Health, where we learned about how the eye works, got to play wheelchair basketball, and basically just did all those constructive learning+fun exercises that were in vogue at the time.

All of these experiences affected me in ways that I don’t think were originally intended by our teachers. After the wheelchair experience, I wanted – desired – craved – to be in a wheelchair. I would ponder jumping out of my second story window and landing straight-legged on the driveway to see if that would break any bones. I would tie the string from yo-yos around my legs to see if that would cut off circulation enough to cause damage. I would try binding individual fingers for hours on end to see if I could function without what was considered to be an essential part of my body.

I checked out a book from the library along the same vein of “look at how well disabled people get along in society” and it only strengthened my resolve. In the book, the writer had been shot by her mother’s jealous ex-boyfriend and had their spine severed enough to paralyze their legs. After meeting an step-uncle who was in a wheelchair from a spine injury, I thought long and hard about the best way to accomplish such a wondrous feat myself.

After reading a book called Follow My Leader about a kid who was blinded by a firework thrown by his friend, my focus shifted on becoming blind. In the book, the main character had to learn how to read braille, learn to walk with a cane, and eventually wound up with a seeing eye dog. I would fantasize about waking up in the hospital with bandages over my eyes, just as in the book: the doctor would unwind the bandages slowly and then stop; I would ask him to remove the last of the bandages, and he would say he had. Blind blind blind.

I stared directly at the sun every recess for a few days after finishing the book. I was too afraid to go fully blind, so I only used one eye. Rather than causing me to go blind, however, I wound up damaging a very small portion of my left retina, which eventually healed. The damage, however, included a small spot of blood within the vitreous humor of my eye, blocking vision in that region. To this day, I am indeed blind in a very small spot out of my left eye. It’s about the size of a letter at comfortable reading height (say 14pt. at monitor distance, 10pt. at book distance, a few inches at sign distance). Additionally, when I get migraines, which is relatively rarely, I lose a portion of my vision on the left side and it feels like someone is pulling a hot wire through that spot to the base of my skull.

I was a manipulative little brat.

When I was in elementary school, I was part of a super secret club called The Boonkies. No kiddin’. The members were me, Amanda C., Nick C., and Ryan C.. There was also a member-by-way-of-ostracization named Matt D. The whole point of this club was that we made made these little creatures with our hands that would interact with the world around us. Boonkies.

Additionally, we seemed to latch on to one thing a year to adopt as our task of membership. Sketchbooks one year. Jumping off the swings the next. One year, we watched the movie “Tremors” at Nick’s house, and we all became obsessed with burying our tightly curled fists under the sand, then opening our fingers to let the sand form a crater as it dribbled down into our palms. Tremors. Another year, we found out that you could drag a magnet through the sand of the sandbox and collect iron filings. I collected 21 film canisters of the stuff, more than all of my friends. I even purchased a block magnet and two neodymium rare earth magnets to collect iron filings.

Beside the Boonkies, I hung out with Sarah T. She and I played three games: reenacting scenes from The Phantom of the Opera where Raul was the bad guy and the Phantom was the good guy; playing “the kitty game”, which as far as I can remember involved pretending to be cats; and bringing in our musical instruments so that I could feel bad when everyone found her violin so much more interesting than my saxophone. This extended into dance for about a week: one day, we gave a dance performance for our parents on a balance beam where I was the Phantom and she was Christine.

Finally, there was Daniel R. We played “the mousey game”. It was exactly like “the kitty game” except we were mice. I once kicked him in the face while swinging, though. The blood poured and poured from his nose, so that the teachers in my preschool were forced to call his parents.

I was manipulative because I did my level best to control every one of these individuals. I would force Ryan, Amanda, and Nick to tell the playground teachers that other kids were picking on me so that I would be the victim. I would play Sarah off her other friend Catherine D. in order to try to poison their friendship. I did my best to control every single aspect of my friendship with Daniel, down to scheduling distinct hours of playtime with him.

In Freud’s concept of developmental psychology, there are certain stages one goes through as one is growing up. When one is born, one has the primal instincts required to keep oneself alive. These instincts are totally selfish and aim only to further existence. This is the id. Soon, the ego develops, which goes one step further by taking time into account: in this case, furthering the self in order that a good outcome will happen in the future as well as in the present. Finally, the superego develops. The final stage is the stage where one can take other individuals into account.

When I finished elementary school, I moved to live with my dad and finish elementary school a second time. In my mom’s district, fifth grade was the final year, but in my dad’s district, sixth grade was. In sixth grade, I forged both parents’ and both step-parents’ signatures in a “Friday folder”, which was a sort of weekly report card. This was the only time my dad ever struck me.

In seventh grade, I lasted one quarter at junior high. I ran away from my dad in October. I had gotten my quarterly report card, which my dad demanded to see once he got home from the bar where my step-mom worked. I stole a few dollars in quarters, put on my jacket, and grabbed my bike. The only place in town I knew where to ride to was Wal-Mart, so I rode there and hid behind the building. After an hour or so, I rode my bike two miles up the wrong side of a highway to a bus stop where I spent the night outside the federal center. I’m surprised no one pulled over to pick me up or accost me at a bus stop

In the morning, I took the bus from Lakewood to Boulder, then rode my bike to a park to watch the sun rise. From there, I rode to a book store, and my mom found me outside.

I ran away and my mom found me outside a bookstore. Yikes.

I told my parents I ran away because my dad spent all his time at the bar with my stepmom. My dad cleaned my room over the next few days as I stayed with my mom. He found a notebook that I had been using as a diary, where he read my thoughts on age (“I wish I was younger”), sanity (“I had another breakdown today”), and sexuality ([REDACTED]). In all, it was my most elaborate, meticulously planned manipulation of all.

I moved back to my mom’s after that.

I don’t think I grew up until my first third or fourth year of college. Throughout high school and into my first years at CSU, I acted out a script. It wasn’t the script I wanted to act out, nor the one my parents wanted for me. Especially not the one my parents wanted. I came out as gay to my mom and never told my dad. I waffled between linguistics, computer science, and biochemistry as a potential career. I spent an incredible amount of time on the computer making friends across the country. I went to university away from my parents, but close enough to drive home. I switched from biochemistry to music education in my first semester of college.

I grew up in the summer of 2007. Not into adult-hood, quite, but I grew up into myself.

I took a summer class for music education called “Literacy and the Learner”. At first, I rolled my eyes; the teacher didn’t even know what to do with the music students. Then I realized it was a course on how to abide by the No Child Left Behind act. Finally, I realized that a good portion of my major was about how not to get sued by parents. The crowning moment was when I understood that I had become a cynic about the world around me. I didn’t like the world, but I didn’t like who I had become, either. That’s when I stopped being a kid and started being me, I suppose.

After running through a few rather interesting interviews (one of which involved rewriting the Java collections API from scratch, one involved a shortest path graph traversal with some added edge-weights), I wound up with a new job the Monday after finals week at bConnected Software in Louisville, CO, where I’ve been working for the past four months or so.  I’ve had an absolute blast so far, doing a ton of Grails UI development, and I’ve learned a lot about user interface and experience design.  The company deals mostly with health insurance, which is proving to be a nicely complicated problem to solve, and I’ve gotten in at the right time, what with all the legislation surrounding the topic.  There has been quite the focus on Health Care Exchanges here, and we’ve been really working on defining the process of those in terms of both backend and UI/UX.

There have been a few little problems with the job so far.  The biggest by far is the commute – the drive averages about fifty minutes each way and is costing quite a bit, what with gas and tolls.  Since I was not a very smart kid over the last six or seven years, I’ve got quite a bit of credit card debt to pay down, so I wind up with relatively little money left after paying for the commute and paying down the card’s balance.  Other than that, corporate life is taking some getting used to: seventy hour weeks and business rules especially.

In other news, I did another experiment with rapid prototyping in Django and came up with http://characters.openfurry.org/ which is a good deal more complicated than my last experiment which proved to be pretty fun.  I wrote it after watching several furry artists deal with different ways of accepting information from commissioners regarding what they want drawn.  The result is a site which lets you manage a hierarchy of information about characters, from the characters themselves, to different morphs (basically a combination of species and gender), to potentially several descriptions of those morphs.  The site will also let you attach characters to different locations – places on the ‘net such as MUCKs and chat clients – and attach images to just about anything.  As an afterthought, I added a means for activity to be logged so that you could see what the owner has done recently with their characters/morphs/descriptions.

I had originally intended to use this site as a playground for Angular, a nifty new Javascript library that I’m quite taken with.  I ran into some snags, however, and did not get that implemented in my allotted time span, so it will have to wait, perhaps until this weekend.  In the mean time, I’ve been slowly poking through d3, the successor to Protovis, in order to provide some visualizations for the site, using this as a learning experience.  It’s proven tougher than I had thought, but definitely a lot more flexible because of it.  Another new thing I’ve been playing with is the Golden Grid System in order to lay the page out in a flexible manner without having to think about it too much.  Once I get some time, I’d like to get the Angular interface running, and maybe also play around with Twitter’s Bootstrap to make this a much prettier site than it is currently; though I’m partial to minimalist designs, as it stands now, I know a lot of people like flashier sites.

Finally, here are some thoughts from a commuter’s perspective:

• No one who drives a Saturn is happy to be on the road.
• Most people who drive Priuses and work trucks are pretty predictable drivers – I like that.
• Most people who drive Mazda 3s and 6s, Infinities, and Audis are pretty unpredictable – I don’t like that.
• “Arrest-me red” is a real color.
• Pickup drivers are usually somewhere on a scale from angry to smug SOBs; usually, the older, beat up pickups are smug SOBs and the brand new, super clean, very large pickups are angry SOBs.  This is not necessarily the rule, though.
• Audiobooks are awesome.  News radio is depressing.

Rather than be coy about my education, however, I’m combining the fact that much of my applying for jobs happens online with my resume into a visual resume that offers all the same information while show-casing my design and visualization abilities.

There’s a lot of conflicting information on how to structure a resume these days – should it be restricted to one page?  How personal should you be?  Avoid using ‘I’? Should you have an overview or skills section?  While I can’t say one way or the other what’s best for a personal resume (personally, I keep it to one page, have short overview and skills section, use ‘I’ while still being professional), I had a little more freedom working with visual resume.  Not only would it be divided up into separate pages  for clarity’s sake, I could take a little more time on each page to talk myself up and explain the accompanying graphics.

This project used, of course, Protovis, but I also included a map using OpenLayers and with CloudMade tiles.  It was nice to get back into the swing of mapping again, as I haven’t really touched that in a while with the library maps project being shelved.  And of course, it was fun to work with Protovis as always.  The biggest problem came up when I had finished the whole project, though, and started checking it in other browsers.  Chrome: great.  FireFox: great.  Safari on iOS: great.  Internet Explorer: …nothing.  Neither Protovis nor OpenLayers would work properly in IE8 64bit.  This could prove to be a problem.  The solution I’m working on is to export the graphics generated by Protovis (SVG format) to a format that IE does recognize and have an IE version of the page (done unobtrusively, of course, using IE’s browser-specific tags).  The plus side to this is that, since I will have the graphics already exported, I’ll be able to pull together a paper version of this resume that I can print out on glossy and use in some circumstances in person.  The down side being that I lose almost all the interaction that I have in place currently in the other browsers.  Ah well.

The smaller of the two projects was a very fast (about two hours) visualization of data regarding a disturbing punishment discrepancy between heterosexual/non-heterosexual teens by both the justice system and schools.  You can see in the vis that, in some cases, non-heterosexual teens can be two to three times as likely to be punished by schools or police.  Some reasons for this are debated in the original article that was pointed out to me.  The comments section on the article is rather distressing, I should warn.

The second, larger project has taken up most of my energy over the past few days.  A friend pointed me toward the results of the Furry Survey, which I hadn’t seen before.  The furry community differs from society at large in several very important demographic areas, from gender to sexual orientation (or at least openness regarding the same), to mean age.  With these important differences, I felt that a series of visualizations was almost necessary.  I’ve pulled those together into a dashboard that displays each visualization in miniature (not just thumbnails – the visualizations are reconstructed in miniature within the dashboard).  Check it out and find out some neat things about the furry fandom.  If you don’t know what furries are… well, Google carefully.

FurAffinity.net is a neat site full of neat artists and good community.  However, the statistics they provide for each user’s art are not only private, but rather lacking, being simply a list of numbers.  Sounds like a good job for visualization, though!  The numbers FA provides are views, favorites, and comments per submission.  Not only did I display those, but averaging them and normalizing for those averages gives a pretty good idea of relative popularity of each submission.  Users can view all four statistics in a steam chart, and also each alone in a bar chart.  I figured this was a good way to divide things up: trends are visible in general over time and one can explore specifics for each set.

There’s still some work I’d like to do, and I’m planning on collating the data I collect into a general graph of submissions on FA, but that’s for later.  It’s fall break and I’m still on the job!

You can see the result here.

I like it when data is already fairly organized, and I like it when it winds up being hierarchical.  I think we, as humans, are attuned to dealing with hierarchies as it is, so it makes sense when we can work with data that’s organized as such.  We’re also pretty good at spatial recognition, so it’s neat to play around with using area charts in a way that people wouldn’t normally expect.  This led to the natural conclusion of the tiered pie chart, or ‘Sunburst’ as it’s been called.  The fact that all of this is all so easy to work with in Protovis (their documentation aside, but no rants on that this time), certainly made this visualization easier!

I’ll be doing most of these challenges and posting their results here, along with any other little projects I can think up for learning this whole concept.  I’ve got a few ideas planned for when I’ve got the time!  They’ll all be archived at that new site, too, http://vis.mjs-svc.com

Many of those things can be considered ‘greater than the sum of the parts’.  When you look at politics, for instance, you can look at it as being different levels – federal, state, county, city, and so on – but you if you take all of those politics together, you get something that’s much more complicated than just the sum of the levels.  When thinking about legalizing marijuana, you can see that Colorado and several of its cities are all okay with the issue, and so medical marijuana dispensaries have popped up everywhere.  However, marijuana is still illegal at the federal level. Instead of it it just being two different laws, an interaction between the two laws occurs, with federal agents acting under the marijuana-is-illegal law and state agents acting under the marijuana-is-legal law.

The same goes for partisan politics: while states may have several republican elected officials, counties and the country may have more democratic elected officials.  The result is far more complicated than many people attempt to reduce it to.  Instead of this current election being a fight between socialism and free-market liberalism as the media is putting it, it’s much closer to being a fight between a loose amalgam of left-of-center ideas and a loose amalgam of right-of-center ideas.  Neither extreme – though they are represented – will win out due to the fact that the sum of the parts being much more complex than any of the parts would like to believe.  In other words, this is not good and evil (I’ll let you pick which is which), this is abstract thing and abstract thing.

Perhaps the reason that so many are so okay with talking so much about those things when they know so little is that they have a tendency towards behaving as fractals.  That is, you can start with the big picture and a general understanding of the concept – enough to form (and thus voice) an opinion – but you can drill down almost infinitely deep to find that the issue does not become clear cut, but instead becomes more and more complex with more and more magnification.  This is sort of the opposite of the previous point, leading to a weird sort of feedback loop: each of the parts is probably just as complex, if not more so, as the whole system.

A big theme in finance seems to be the discussion between those who are interested in macroeconomics and those who are interested in microeconomics.  With macroeconomics, the focus is on the flow of need and want through the entirety of the economy.  If you drill down, you get to microeconomics, which focuses on scarcity and how that affects decisions made by households, firms, and individuals.  Most stop there, but you can focus on scarcity itself and the concept of limited goods, or look at the concept of money as a representation of labor, or look at society as a collection of actors with needs and abilities and how they interact with each other, or even look at how each individual has a different internal representation of their worth to themselves, their family, their friends, their community, their country, and the world at large.  Needless to say, the entire concept of the financial system just gets more complicated the closer you look, and while self-similarities appear here and there, perhaps the actual complexity is just as infinite as the length of a fractal’s border.

Finally, it seems that it’s easier to form strong opinions about something the less you know about it, rather than the other way around. Perhaps due to seeing both sides of the issue, whether through research or exposure, it gets harder to be one-sided about an issue.  With the previous point in mind, one can look at the Mandelbrot set and generalize it as looking like a fat, spiky bird as seen from the top, but zoom in and change that generalized image as one goes, and of course this differs from person to person.

When I grew up, I was raised to think of religion as being a mildly malevolent group of forces determined to get people to act the same under the cover of benevolence.  Most of this concept came from my mom, who had had a difficult time with her family’s religion growing up.  However, the more I researched, the less I was willing to just believe this out of hand: it seemed that a good many religions focused on social justice, and even those where social justice wasn’t evident in the religion itself, schisms and portions within the religion had lead to groups that focused on social justice.

It’s easy to see how that would work from the other side as well, though.  Someone who was brought up in a religion that provided everything they needed for all of their life finally realizes that certain things about the scriptures or certain stories in the news don’t add up to a completely benevolent organization.  One of my good friends, John Wright, went through something like this with the LDS church: while much of the religion and many of the people provided the spiritual outlet that he needed in life, certain things began to irk him about the texts the church used and the way the institution was run.  Finally, after his first year of college at Brigham-Young University, he moved to Fort Collins to go to CSU and filed his apostasy officially with the Mormon church.

It’s difficult to say where this study leads us, since on the surface it appears to end in ambiguity about the things we know most about.  My composition professor, Dr. David, believes that it leads to the desire to study the issue more – specialization – and finally production or implementation of the ideas that remain, some of which are likely to be very impressive indeed.  Thus, a beginning composer might write a two minute piece in the style of his favorite composer, which he considers the best there is, but an experienced composer might write a twenty-minute large-ensemble work that incorporates new ideas formed in the process of his study of the subject.

Until the point when you know enough about something to form real ideas and not just blind opinions, though, the previous article stands: it’s a thing.

Anyhow, I’m an avid reader of FlowingData, because Nathan Yau, the man behind it, does some pretty awesome stuff.  His visualizations are clear and still aesthetically pleasing, and his concepts are always nice.  Of particular interest to me, when I first started reading, was your.flowingdata which is a means to track your own life through Twitter – for example, you can tell it when and how far you ride your bike every day and have it automatically generate a visualization of distances ridden over time.

Recently, however, he posted a little challenge of sorts.  Given a dataset, we, the readers, were to visualize it our own way and draw some conclusions from our visualizations (that, after all, being the point of visualizations).  I’d never done anything like that before for various reasons.  I didn’t want to learn a new domain-specific language such as R that would then require me to edit my results in the form of an image in some other program such as Gimp or Inkscape.  Also, Gimp and Inkscape have some quirks that I’m still learning, and I didn’t want to have to chose between learning those and buying Adobe CS.  However, I have been working quite a bit with Javascript recently, so it seemed to make sense that, when I found two libraries – Flot and Protovis – for visualization in JS that I go ahead and use one of these ‘Visualize This’ challenges to learn one of them.  It’ll definitely be helpful in the future.

The most recent challenge was visualizing data from the National Survey of Sexual Health and Behavior.  Given a small set of data – percentage of respondents in different age groups admitting to engaging in nine different behaviors over the past year – I worked hard to learn Protovis from scant documentation in order to pull together a visualization.  Since it takes place over three ‘slides’ and has text to go along with it, I’ll let it speak for itself here.

I think I did fairly well, given the fact that I wound up doing exactly what I didn’t really want to – learn a new DSL.  Granted, this one will be useful in my web design in the future!  With the time limitation of a due date and the fact that I was learning as I went, I didn’t quite pull off exactly what I wanted, and the trends I was interested in looking after weren’t as apparent I was hoping.  The problem was mostly due to inadequate documentation on Protovis – much of the documentation that wasn’t simply API documentation was either examples or brief write-ups about concepts in statistics as the applied to Protovis.  I learned most from the examples, after I learned some of the basics from the API docs.

I’ll probably find another dataset somewhere that interests me in order to visualize it soon, but I also expect that I’ll be implementing the visualization process in my own projects as well.  I’ve got lots of ideas.