ubertakter

Hence my first sentence, "It seems like you are complaining about graphics in the article, but I'm not sure."

First you said, "I can't count the number of times I've looked at a data visualization and wished I could sit down with the person who made it and read an Edward Tufte book to them."

I was and am 100% on board with this comment. I think the same thing often.

Then you said "There's just so few good examples out there of data visualizations that respect basic principles of visual communication, like the ones outlined in this article."

I agree, the article does a pretty good job.

Then, "They generally seem to aim more for visual impact (like the useless 3D display in the article, which you've gotta admit is striking) than for clarity, which I guess is understandable but is still too bad."

I was uncertain about this statement. The previous sentence you start by stating "There's just so few good examples..." and end with "...like the ones outline in this article", which made it a little unclear if the one's in the article were good or not, but as I was reading it I was leaning to the good side. Then this sentence started with "They generally seem...", and since the end of the previous sentence ended talking about the "ones outlined in the article", I associated "They" with "the ones in the article". And this sentence that started with "They generally" was negative.

Then I contributed some miscommunication. When I used "you" in the sentence I was thinking in general terms (including myself) and not you personally. I think that might have been better stated as "If one reads the article...".

Anyway, I was initially confused by your statement. Now I see what you were going for.

Edits: grammar, missing words

It seems like you are complaining about graphics in the article, but I'm not sure. If you read the article, it specifically talks about why those are not good visualizations and gives pointers on developing good ones.

For the 3D one specifically, right under the graphic, the article says: "3D has a time and a place. It can be a really useful way to encode thematic data on the z-axis and make something useful. But extruding Hubei compared to the rest of the areas just doesn’t work. It’s gratuitous and adds nothing. It’s really hard to make any sense of relative amounts and that’s before we even deal with foreshortening and occlusion."

The end result reminds me of Julia. Enough to make me wonder if there's something like it underneath Julia somewhere, or if that's how it started (unfortunately I don't have time to really dig in to it right now).

I've been learning and using Julia the last few weeks (coming from an OOP background). I highly recommend it. I mainly write highly mathematical programs and utilities to process some data or another. So far I've knocked out some smaller programs and started translating a larger library to learn about the type system. I haven't dug in to UI bindings yet.

Whew, glad it's not just me. Agree 100%. Although I had some minor underlying issues that seemed to make it worse (better now though).

This reminds me of a saying I picked up from some (very much) older engineer: Segal's Law: A man with one watch knows what time it is. A man with two watches is never sure.

I feel like information overload is like this sometimes. Which is probably why I try to reduce information that shows up automatically on my phone...

Take a cue from what my friends and I do: we generally agree to do whatever in general terms, say, visit a place Saturday after lunch. That's it. We might coordinate on a start time, but after that, it's whatever we feel like, no set schedule. We occasionally do this for longer trips, where we rent a cabin somewhere for a few days and then just do whatever we feel like. There's some planning involved in order to get to the correct area with the correct equipment (whatever is needed for the activity), but there's no strict timeline.

By the way, my wife is a "planner", so this drivers her crazy, not that she is going with us anyway. So a conversation might be like this: Wife:"What time are you going to the brewery?" Me:"Eh, after lunch" Wife:"So what time?" Me:"Maybe 1300?" Wife:"After that?" Me:"We'll get dinner somewhere" Wife:"Where? When?" Me:"Somewhere, whenever we get hungry. We'll decide on-the-fly." Wife:"Arrrggghhh!!" I have to confess I get a lot of amusement out of her reactions.

Normally I try not to contribute useless comments, but I found this to be a particularly hilarious, laughing-out-loud at my desk observation.

Two replies mention licensing, with two different answers (It's easy, people just don't understand! It's hard, people just don't understand!). Personally, I've tried a couple of times to read the license information on the Qt site and sort out how the licensing really works. I still only have a rough understanding. It seems like information on the Qt site is intentionally vague so you'll be more inclined to buy a commercial license just to feel "safe" using it. Unfortunately, any commercial projects I work on can't justify the commercial license price.

Anyway, the point is, people may not want to use Qt without being absolutely certain about how the licensing works and they (like me) probably don't have the time to try to understand the poorly organized information on the Qt site.

Slight typo there: "thousands of km per second", you probably meant "thousands of meters per second". Low orbit is on the order of 7-8 km/s. I did find the typo humorous.

No. Next question please.

You could add inertia by including a flywheel (or multiple) connected to the wheels of the coaster. Not sure how easy that would be at small scales though.