Dinhternet

If a geek is just a per­son who’s really into one spe­cific thing, I don’t think I can really call myself a geek. My inter­ests are pretty damn eclectic.

How­ever, no mat­ter the topic, I have an over­ar­ch­ing desire to under­stand how and why things are the way they are. I sup­pose that’s why I ended up with a degree in psy­chol­ogy with a sta­tis­tics empha­sis. If, as I have said before, psy­chol­ogy is the appli­ca­tion of sci­ence to philo­soph­i­cal under­stand­ing, then sta­tis­tics is the foun­da­tion of the empir­i­cal method of doing same. It is the analy­sis of obser­va­tions of glean mean­ing out of the seem­ingly ran­dom and/or overly com­plex nature of the world.

And to those who would claim that math and sci­ence is soul­less, I would argue there is some­thing amaz­ing about an ele­gant proof to a com­pli­cated prob­lem. Like­wise, graphs, the visual form of sta­tis­tics, can make incred­i­bly com­plex data imme­di­ately under­stand­able and relate-able.

Here are some of my recent favorites:

(from HIMYM, Marshall’s pie chart of his favorite bars and bar graph of his favorite pies.)

(from SFoodie, an actu­ally baked Venn dia­gram of pies.)

(from The Expend­ables, a movie poster with the pre­vi­ous kill counts of all the stars of the movie.)

For more fun graphs like these, check out Graph­Jam. For a more seri­ous dis­cus­sion of stats, try 538.

But that last pic­ture really got me. The orig­i­nal poster with just the action stars of my child­hood is already pretty damn bad-ass, but adding their kill counts just gives it so much more depth. That’s why I can’t wait for aug­mented real­ity tech­nol­ogy to become viable. In the mean­time, I’ll just have to set­tle for Google Goggles.

OK, now to run before the vio­lence geeks find me.

I often went to Dis­ney World as a kid (my fam­ily went to Florida a lot more than we went to SoCal) and loved it, but if Star Wars Land really existed, I’d jump in the Great Pit of Carkoon for admis­sion. I won­der if that would be a ride/attraction at this park. Per­haps a sarlacc-themed diner?

For more Star Wars good­ness, check these links:

• If you take Episodes 1–3 as the original/canon, this re-interpretation of Episode 4 makes sense. For those of us old enough to know oth­er­wise, it’s a bit of a mind-fuck.
• This blog has a lot of ran­dom, amus­ing, and/or inter­est­ing Star Wars non sequiturs. (And non-Star Wars, if you check go to the main page, I just linked the Star Wars-tagged archive.)
• Can some­one (a design/philosophy double-major, per­haps?) explain this to me?
• Like­wise, can an art history/film stud­ies major explain this to me?

(I always hated sym­bol­ism. I remem­ber hav­ing to dredge through books in high school to mine all the hid­den gems my Eng­lish teach­ers insisted were buried in every clause. No author/director is THAT meaningful.)

Prob­a­bly because he is quite the gen­tle giant him­self, HIMYM’s Mar­shall is a bit obsessed with the Loch Ness “Mon­ster” and prov­ing that it is a gen­tle creature.

I bet he’d want this poster (from Fam­ily Tree Design); at least until he got a pic­ture of the real thing.