Michael Friendly

GitHub Actions are Forever

Title page of Nouvelles Methodes pour la Determination des Orbites des Cometes

This portrait is claimed to be that of Adrien Marie Legendre, but is disputed in other sources.

#TodayinHistory #dataviz #Onthisday #OTD 📊
📅Mar 6, 1805 Adrien Marie Legendre introduces least squares in his Nouvelles Methodes pour la Determination des Orbites des Cometes

The Upshot is hiring a data graphics/multimedia editor. Come work with us and make weird things that help people understand the world!
job-boards.greenhouse.io/thenewyorkti...

Artistic portrait of William Oughtred in front of a slide rule. The large X refers to multiplication, not a social media platform

#TodayinHistory #dataviz #Onthisday #OTD 📊
🎂Mar 5, 1574 William Oughtred born in Eton, England 🇬🇧

~1620: Along with Edmund Gunter, he invented a calculating device with logarithmic & trigonometric scales, an early form of slide rule for mariners.📏

Some sample nestedLogit plots.

Yes, another quirky favorite of mine

Release Add vignettes & plotting enhancements · friendly/nestedLogit nestedLogit 0.4.0 This is a major release of the package adding considerable functionality for plotting and other features add gators data, food choice of alligators from Agresti added a vignette ...

A major release of the nestedLogit package now on CRAN.
Enhanced plotting methods, several new vignettes...
[Work on this a tribute to John Fox, who did the heavy lifting on the package, in both theory & code]
Release notes: github.com/friendly/nes...
Docs: friendly.r-universe.dev/nestedLogit

Here's another bendy-bar chart, from the Album de Statistique Graphique, (Emile Cheysson, 1886), D'Epenses de Premier Etablissement des Chemins de Fer du Monde en 1883.

#dataviz #history
I like the idea of network diagrams trying to show the influence of people in different area (philosophy / science / art) on each other. Does anyone know of any good things in this category?

Agree entirely. Mercator solved a problem for
european navigators. He wasn't concerned so much for geographic 'equity' of representation. And, he left a whole bunch of interesting problems for other geographic geometers to deal with.

A digital CAPTCHA verification window titled "Select all squares with PIPES" against a plain white background. The window contains a 3×3 grid of numbered squares, mixing literal hardware, smoking pipes, and programming syntax.

These captchas just keep getting harder #rstats

An early world map using the Mercator projection, which makes the northern hemisphere appear lager. It takes the form of two circular maps, one for N/S America, the other for Africa/Europe/Asia

Portrait of Gerardus Mercator

#TodayinHistory #dataviz #Onthisday #OTD 📊
🎂Mar 5, 1512 Gerardus Mercator born in Rupelmonde, Flanders, Belgium 🇧🇪

1569: he Invented of cylindrical projection for portraying the globe on maps, to preserve straightness of rhumb lines
(for better or worse, but it helped Europeans navigate the seas)

#TodayinHistory #OTD 📊
Marey's studies of motion look so modern!
He solved the age old Q: Why does a cat nearly always fall on its feet?

Étienne-Jules Marey, The Graphic Method “These views have taught us to discern the appearances of reality.”— Étienne-Jules Marey, 1878 OverviewÉtienne-Jules Marey revealed to the human eye what it cannot naturally see; changing not only sci...

#TodayinHistory #OTD 📊
🎂Mar 5, 1830 Etienne-Jules Marey born in Beaune, France 🇫🇷
In 1878, Marey made the first attempt to survey, describe, and illustrate available graphic methods for experimental data
& pioneered the study of animal motion. He was a giant of #dataviz
Get the book: bit.ly/41AfMEK

Can't wait to dive into this 2nd Ed. of a really great book.

Hard to believe CRAN accepted a package with such a similar name to the widely used 'colorspace' 📦

B/W photo of Alban William Housego Phillips

Plot of the rate of change of wage rates on the Y axis vs. unemployment. The inverse relation suggest a tradeoff

The cyclic relationship becomes clearer when the points are connected in time order

#TodayinHistory #dataviz #Onthisday #OTD 📊
💀Mar 4, 1975 Alban William Housego Phillips died in Auckland, New Zealand 🇳🇿

1958: The "Phillips Curve,'' a scatterplot of inflation vs. unemployment over time shows a strong inverse relation, leading to important developments in macroeconomic theory

Credit Where Credit is Due: Mary Eleanor Spear Exploring the life and work of an overlooked mid-century dataviz pioneer who may have discovered the Box Plot 17 years before John Tukey.

#TodayinHistory #dataviz #Onthisday #OTD 📊
🎂Mar 4, 1897 Mary Eleanor Spear born in Jonesboro, Indiana, USA 🇺🇸

A data vis specialist at the Bureau of Labor Statistics, she pioneered the boxplot and wrote books on effective graphic techniques (done by hand!)
👀 bit.ly/4baeFSY

WOW!

This is a great find!
1828-- Not long after Dupin published his first b/w choropleth (1826)
The use of color is subtle; uses what looks like a nice color ramp, but actually colored patterns. Great detail shown
I never heard of the cartographer -- F. von Doring

^0.5 --> ^0.57 makes a bigger difference than one would think.
But remember, you can't say much about what is "better" for #dataviz without specifying the TASK. A lot of the recommendations (following Cleveland/McGill) come from magnitude estimation: How big is X?

#rstats RIP, John Fox
@yihui.org just published this lovely tribute to John Fox and his work

yihui.org/en/2026/02/j...

YES! Of course the Atlantic gave Minard a lot more room.
But his master stroke was to do these comparatively over time

A Few Claude Skills for R Users – R Works The community has come together to create some great Claude Skills that you can try out today.

I rounded up a few Claude Skills for #RStats users.

Huge thanks to the creators who developed them. They share Skills for everything from tidyverse code to brand.yml files to learning while using AI.

Hope the list is useful, and please let me know what I missed! 🧡

rworks.dev/posts/claude...

Wright's generic path diagram showing A as a cause of X, D as a cause of Y and B, C as partial causes of X and Y. (reproduced from Wright, 1920, p. 329)

Photo of Sewall Wright in front of a blackboard with mathematical symbols

#TodayinHistory #dataviz #Onthisday #OTD 📊
💀Mar 3, 1988 Sewall Wright died in Madison, Wisconsin, USA 🇺🇸
1920: invention of the path diagram to show relations among a network of endogenous and exogenous variables forming a system of structural equations.
Established idea of diagram thinking

Very nice collection. Bertin would love these

But people on all sides were finally thinking (and muttering) about their loyalties

Be extra careful with the Description: -- quote software names, beware of spelling, use proper DOI refs, ...

"Newbies" -- packages, not maintainers are put through a special room in CRAN-Hell 👿

R Birthday card generated by Claude Sonnet 4.6 R Birthday card generated by Claude Sonnet 4.6 . GitHub Gist: instantly share code, notes, and snippets.

Code for the R_birthday_card: gist.github.com/friendly/ca2...