Ben Jones

Huge Congrats, Lisa! We appreciate all you do for the data visualization community!

🧵 I’ve talked a lot about disordered discourse, conspiracies, polarisation, denialism. But maybe the better question is: why does this keep happening? Why does our shared reality keep fracturing? What are the drivers I talk about as a dimension of disordered discourse?

There’s a Science Behind More High-Velocity Pitches, But There’s Also a Cost With athletes becoming stronger and better trained, the rise in pitching velocity began as a gradual evolution. But there has been a stunning leap forward in the past four years. Here’s why.

Interesting parallel on this side of the pond with MLB pitching: www.si.com/mlb/2023/05/...

The Trojans would've been stupid to reject the gift of the large wooden horse from Odysseus and the Greeks.

With ‘AI slop’ distorting our reality, the world is sleepwalking into disaster | Nesrine Malik A perverse information ecosystem is being mined by big tech for profit, fooling the unwary and sending algorithms crazy, says Guardian columnist Nesrine Malik

Concerning… www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...

Wow… from “A Gentleman in Moscow” by @amortowles.bsky.social, written in 2016.

I was in a weird slot, right between genX and Y, graduating in June 2000, right as the dot-com bubble was bursting. My 3 sons are graduating now (yep, we started early), and boy do they have it way harder than I did. Cost of living, instability, AI-madness in recruiting & job search, layoffs.

A century of U.S. face palm:

The Greatest Generation
↳ The Me Generation
↳ The Entitled Generation
↳ The Anxious Generarion

Intelligence, rigor, wisdom, compassion: neglect these at your peril.

I didn’t know April
Fool’s Day was lasting the entire month this year.

Buckle up…

Economic Crises and the Breakdown of Authoritarian Regimes Cambridge Core - Asian Studies - Economic Crises and the Breakdown of Authoritarian Regimes

So. I wrote a dissertation on how economic crises can lead to the breakdown of authoritarian regimes.

Here are three key point to keep in mind as you watch the news this week 🧵

Never accept the following in another: the inability to admit error, or, upon admitting it, the unwillingness to make it right. If this is an apt description of a person in your orbit, run.

NEW 🧵

A quick thread of charts showing how Trump’s economic agenda is going so far:

1) US consumers are reacting very very negatively.

These are the worst ratings for any US government’s economic policy since records began.

I think the word legit is overused.

Failures in AI translation:

My wife Becky just used Google Translate to ask our landscaper in Spanish to dump a bucket of weeds she had pulled, and he showed up at our front door wondering why she’s texting him about marijuana. 😂😂😂

Yes, I used the Atlantic author look-up app, too, and yes, I can see a number of my own books in LibGen. But mostly I just want to be this version of Ben Jones.

The ripple effects of the tariffs will hit everyone, and many are already feeling it. Small businesses with a high percentage of their revenue coming from cross-border clients will be the first to fall.

Lol, seriously.

Still just a theory, but yeah, we’ll take it. Glad @duvekot.bsky.social surfaced it - I was shocked too, Francis. Either way, it shows neither term has grown in search more than what “dataviz” used to be, for one reason or another. For the record, I stopped using either term, & use the full version.

So, in a nutshell, search for our favorite craft may have been overwhelmed by search for a company that made software for Palm Pilot back then. SUPER reassuring…

Also, if we compare the drop in relative search interest in dataviz to the rising interest in the full phrase “data visualization,” we see the topic itself has been on the rise.

Here are a couple links to check out:

1. The (very old school style)
company website: dataviz.com

2. The Wikipedia page about the company: en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/DataViz

Fascinating, and sobering, right? I have a theory though. There used to be a popular company called DataViz, Inc. that made products for Mac and PalmOS back in the late 90s and early 2000s. One of its applications was bundled with Apple products, but discontinued, and eventually sold to RIM in 2010.

So far 2025 has been a good reminder to me how much I loathe recklessness and arrogance, two vices that seem to go hand-in-hand. I'm all for decisiveness, and some decisions can be tough. But I believe strongly in the importance of listening, weighing options, and seeking the compassionate path.

Re-watching Reeve’s Superman series and wondering when we stopped cheering for the good guy.

Maybe, just maybe, the past two decades of unbridled obsession with the anti-hero here in the U.S. haven’t served us very well.

NEW: The actions of Trump and Vance in recent weeks highlight something under-appreciated.

The American right is now ideologically closer to countries like Russia, Turkey and in some senses China, than to the rest of the west (even the conservative west).

My column: www.ft.com/content/3046...

What a great story! Thank you for sharing, Staffan. It doesn’t surprise me to hear you looking back with such fondness. Even those of us who only briefly met him miss him greatly.

Enshittification