There are many like it, but this one is mine.

Edward Tufte does not mention Nightingale in his book on the history of graphics, and he says that this famous 1869 chart by Minard of Napoleon’s dwindling army as it marched to Moscow and back in 1812/13 may be the best statistical graphic ever drawn:

Minard’s diagram includes a temperature chart which misleadingly suggests that Napoleon’s army froze to death. It shows the falling temperature during the retreat from Moscow, but most of the army was lost during the advance (300,000 men, vs. 90,000 in the retreat). Nightingale herself studied this catastrophe, and concluded that Napoleon’s army - like most others - had died of disease.

Like Minard’s, Nightingale’s most famous graphics illustrated what she called the “loss of an army” - the British army sent to the Crimea. She published them ten years before Minard’s. Hers also were more topical and conveyed a call to action - they were prescriptive rather than descriptive. She used recent data to persuade the Government to improve army hygiene.

Instead of a list of changed user ids or URIs, we can represent the state as a sparse bit array corresponding to all of Flickr’s users. I don’t know exactly how many users there are at Flickr, but let’s be generous and estimate it at one million. One million bits seems like a lot, but it is only 977kB in an uncompressed array. Considering that this array will only contain 1s when an update has occurred within the last minute, my guess is that it would average under 1kB per representation.

I can just imagine people reading “sparse bit array” and thinking that I must be talking about some optimal data structure that only chief scientists would think to use on the Web. I’m not. Any black-and-white GIF or PNG image is just a sparse bit array, and they have the nice side-effect of being easy to visualize. We can define our representation of 1 million Flickr users to be a 1000×1000 pixel black-and-white image and use existing tools for its generation (again, something that is easily done outside the critical path by separate programs observing the logs of changes within Flickr). I am quite certain that a site like Flickr can deliver 1kB images all day without impacting their scalability.

Howard was the first place where I got snapped on for pronouncing “carried” as “curried,” for calling “Baltimore,” “Baldimore,” for calling a “pocket-book,” a”pockiebook.” The point isn’t that Howard was a bastion of upper-class condescension—it most assuredly was not. When you black, everyone gets snapped on, for everything, and I’ve always found great democracy in that. But my point is that I learned what it meant to be “ghetto” at Howard. But what I’ve never learned, what I’ve never quite gotten is the white equivalent.

I’ve been thinking about this all through this Sarah Palin fiasco. I think within days, people were debating over whether she was, essentially, ghetto…

Indeed that’s the point—I have no idea what the markers of “ghetto” are for white people. In fact, when I tried to point one out—eating moose—Matt, latte-sipping, Ivy-League elitist that he is, instantly rapped me and noted that eating moose, is in fact, a Northeastern elite delicacy.

The quest is necessary to set the stage for an epiphany. You can’t just say, “I was sitting around the house in my underwear trying to think of a business to start, and decided to make a food product that tastes good.” The particular quest here is carefully chosen to appeal to the company’s target market. It would be ineffective to say, “I had been slaving away on my food science dissertation for months. I had finally finished the last edit, when I had an epiphany…” It needs to be the same sort of activity that the target market dreams of doing.

After setting the stage, the story delivers the punch line. The trivial, obvious idea presented as novel, original, and ingenious. Make food that tastes good. If the idea was an epiphany for him, I’m just glad I never ate at his bakery. But the more trivial and obvious the idea is, the better the story sounds. Ideas like “make food that tastes good,” or “write software that’s powerful yet easy to use,” or “design clothes that make people look their best,” are powerful positive messages. And the implicit negative message about the competition stays in the reader’s mind too.