Interesting Links for 28-07-2022

[andrewducker]

1. Wildfires Are Setting Off 100-Year-Old Bombs on WWI Battlefields

(tags:wwi explosives fire weather europe war )

2. What does Johnson have to say (and not say) about meeting with ex-KGB members?

(tags:russia spying BorisJohnson )

3. Meta trying to decide if Facebook should have more harmful health misinformation

(tags:fraud health Pandemic Facebook )

4. Bar charts as imagined by an AI in a variety of styles. My favourite is tentacles

(tags:graphs ai viaPatrickHadfield )

5. West London faces new homes ban as electricity grid hits capacity due to data centres

(tags:london data electricity computers housing )

6. The world has become less colourful

(tags:colour visualisation )

7. Colour & Shape: Using Computer Vision to Explore the Science Museum's Collection

(tags:history colour Technology )

Comments

[simont]

#4: the bar chart made out of cake should, of course, only be used to communicate untruthful information.

(Perhaps those "Winning Here" charts you see on electoral campaign leaflets)

[andrewducker]

Trust the cake. The cake is your friend!

[melchar]

You mean it's both delicious and moist?

... I also liked the tentacles chart best. ^_^

[jack]

I have good news for you about statistics :)

[armiphlage]

"5. West London faces new homes ban as electricity grid hits capacity due to data centres"

Interestingly, my factory just landed a deal to build a household device that will mitigate this issue (like the Tesla PowerWall, but actually available).

[qilora]

"6. The world has become less colourful"

you might be interested in reading "Through the Language Glass", it discusses how different cultures perceive and describe colors <3 bs"d

[weofodthignen]

Reading "The world has become less colorful", I noted, as the commenters largely didn't, that it was based on the Science Museum study you linked next. I don't have the background to critique the validity of that study, though I suspect there may be selection bias in the choice of objects that have made it into the collection, making the data on older objects less reliable. For one thing, won't there have been many objects used in daily life in earlier times that weren't interesting from a scientific-technical point of view, while whatever superseded them was more likely to be? And that's the other thing, the Twitter thread is really about the colours of manmade objects encountered in daily life. There's nothing there about the colours of nature; the paint colours bit isn't even about what people are living and working with, it's hopelessly skewed by what designers are pushing and by the vast amount of repainting (interiors white, exteriors greyscale or beige) that goes on as a condition of the estate agent taking the listing. That's lazy research, it wouldn't be too hard to factor in data on the real environment, not just sales and ads; and the clickbait presentation misses a lot of interesting stuff, like regional/class differences in clothing colours and that uptick in white cars as opposed to black cars in recent years (the connotations of black cars may be part of that, but I wonder whether the people who would have bought light green or yellow have started to buy white as their last good option, and just wear sunglasses while driving to cut the glare).

Anyway, sorry to run on, but I don't think that's a good ad for that guy's Friday newsletter :-)

[andrewducker]

I totally agree that a lot of this is down to societal changes and bias, and what's being marketed.

But having repainted our living room recently, I can assure you that there are very very many colours available in any paint shop, and that they will mix paint to absolutely any colour you fancy. Cars, of course, are another matter. Although lots of them are available in other colours if you want, but you'll have to wait. There's definitely been a move towards less strong colours though.

The older colours in the map being orange/brown is mostly down to a lot of wood things, looking at their photos. And the excess of colour in the 60s/70s/80s is down to the technology arriving to make it much easier to produce things in other colours, and people being very excited by that. We seem to have calmed down a bit since the days of "LOOK! WE CAN MAKE IT BRIGHT YELLOW!"

[penta]

The 1970s: Just because you can doesn't mean you should.

[andrewducker]

Oh yeah. But it's fun to experiment with new things and see what works for you.

[danieldwilliam]

1) I think wildfires blowing up WW1 ordnance might be an okay thing on balance. If the fire is happening anyway having it de-mine a parcel of land is not awful.

But a sobering reminder that there is tonnes and tonnes and thousands and thousand of unexploded devices littering the world from WW1, WW2, Korea Vietnam and the various Afghan wars.