Charts of RAW data

The Density Design Lab at Politecnico di Milano just released a cool new (free) web site, called RAW, for very simple data visualization. It’s roughly similar to products like Statwing, Tableau Public or DataHero, except this one gives you the entire d3.js source code on GitHub.

I made the following chart using some data downloaded from Charles Murray’s excellent book Coming Apart, that has income and college graduation information for every US zip code. I simply selected the spreadsheet data right in Excel, then copy/pasted it – as is – to the RAW web site. A few clicks later and I had this:

 

The rectangles are US cities with more than 15,000 families organized by state. The size of each rectangle correlates with the median family income, and the color represents the percentage of people with college degrees on a spectrum from blue (lower percentage) to red (higher percentage). That big brown square on the middle bottom is New York City, with a high median family income and a substantial percentage of college grads. The California cities on the far right are bluish-green because they have lower diploma percentages.

Pretty cool, huh? I have a long wishlist for additional features (additional chart types, labeling options, etc.) but you have to admit this is a pretty easy way to do impressive data visualization for free, with only a few mouse clicks.

The Clover of Brewing Machines

Five years ago, the Clover Coffee Equipment company was hand-assembling high-tech, excellent automatic coffee-making machines for the super high-end market. At tens of thousands of dollars each, they were intended for sale to boutique coffee shops, like Trabant and others, who could sell wonderful, precision-made cups of coffee to people who can appreciate the quality interaction of specialty beans, brewing times and temperatures.

Clover’s “factory” was an ordinary-looking building in Seattle’s Fremont district (very close to today’s MakerHaus by the way) and the founders were people who had a passion for the intersection of (industrial) design and the precision coffee experience. Those of us who knew the company and its products thought it was a great idea, and eventually Starbucks agreed when it bought them out.

How would you build something like Clover today? Well, I just saw the perfect example on Kickstarter: the PycoBrew Zymatic beer brewing appliance. At a high level, the hardware reminds me of the Clover: pumps, temperature sensors, relays, heating. Otherwise, instead of coffee beans, it uses grain and malt.

But the really exciting difference is the fantastic new business model that’s been enabled by Kickstarter. Whereas Clover had to be financed through (some deep-pocketed) angels and other traditional investors, PycoBrew can get its startup capital through its first customers. Through a pledge of about $1,500, the people interested in the product can help the new company financially right now, when it has no revenues.

Like the Clover founders, the people of PycoBrew seem very serious: their web site documents their progress through multiple generations of functional prototypes. To manufacture something that complicated, and then ship and support it around the country is a very big deal – the kind of business that in the past would have required (tens of?) millions of dollars up-front.

Think of a bread machine, only instead of bread you get beer. The basic idea is straightforward, and I personally know dozens, maybe hundreds of engineers who are entirely capable of building such a thing – or zillions of other similarly-interesting or useful products. But a great idea is useless without a profitable business to carry it out. Kickstarter and the wonderful set of internet-enabled ideas that go behind it, is lowering the costs and upfront hassles of actually starting and running the business side of ideas.

I can’t wait to see what additional new products we’ll see thanks to the new, really cool business innovation behind this.

[book] Adam Grant’s Give and Take

Seth Roberts blogged that this book is “the best in psychology in many years” and I think I agree. It’s similar to books by Malcolm Gladwell or Daniel Pink, full of easy-to-relate-to anecdotes backed by serious academic research. The claim is that success-minded people are divided into three categories: givers, matchers, and takers. The book presents evidence for why givers are the most successful in the long run – overly represented at the top of most fields – and how to avoid the mistakes that see givers overly represented at the bottom too: as doormats and pushovers.

Besides Seth Roberts’ blog, there is an excellent New York Times Magazine summary of the ideas, so I won’t bother laying out more details, but there was one concept in particular that interested me: the work of Amanatullah and Morris on negotiations. The women they studied weren’t particularly aggressive when negotiating for themselves, but got results as good as their male counterparts when negotiating on behalf of another.

If you’re a natural giver – you see yourself as doing things generally out of generosity or good will toward others – then one way to avoid being used is to imagine you are negotiating for somebody else. When the women studied were asked to negotiate a salary for another person, they ended up with much better results than when they negotiated for themselves.

Besides the obvious implication that I really should have my wife do all the negotiating in my family (which I already know is true), the easy trick is to approach any negotiation with the perspective that you are actually fighting on behalf of all the people in your life. You want a better salary or a good deal on a car, not for your own selfish gain, but because you want something better for your family. This idea of “relational accounting” is the purest form of giving, because you think through all the consequences of your actions, rather than simply demuring to the wishes of your counter-party.

The book is full of similar observations that make it well worth reading and I highly recommend it.

Don’t brush after mealtimes

Advice from the WSJ health column:

"When you eat or drink something acidic, the pH in your mouth goes down and can take some time to go back to normal." The ideal pH of a mouth is about 7, while a soda—even a diet one—can be as low as 2.5 or "about the same as household vinegar," says Dr. Cole. Acid demineralizes and weakens the tooth surface, making it more prone to decay.

Instead of brushing (which, more than once or twice a day is hard on your teeth), they recommend rinsing your mouth with water to neutralize the pH back to levels that aren’t so helpful to cavity-causing bacteria.

BodyMedia and Me

My data for the past week, presented using Excel's graphing functions.

Can't believe, after all these years, there's no easy way for Excel to save this in resolution-independent graphics.

Krugman on Microsoft and Apple

Paul Krugman is mostly correct:

Back in the 80s, Microsoft and Apple both had operating systems to sell; Apple’s was clearly better. But Apple misunderstood the nature of the market

He argues that Microsoft "won" in the 90s thanks to network effects it exploited when Apple's superior product was not opened to more hardware vendors. Similarly, the iPhone had an early technical lead that is sustained through network effects due to its large base of developers. Steve Jobs' controlling nature resulted in products that do some things very well and reliably, but quickly become difficult or cumbersome when you stray from whatever he thought was good for you.

My take: Complexity breeds sluggishness when promoting anything new. Apple misses plenty of niche markets they might have colonized with a more flexible approach, but they maintain agility to add new things to the existing platform -- and see them adopted. Whether this is a sustaining advantage depends much on their ability to continue picking market winners. During the 90s they lost their sense of which products were worth pursuing, under-investing in things like Quicktake digital cameras, for example, while over investing on existing products like Mac hardware (Powerbook) or OS features (OpenDoc) that proved to be less important.

By the way, I disagree with Daring Fireball on one point: although technically the Mac did ultimately succeed, that was the halo effect of iPod, etc. If Apple had focused just on the Mac, it would have remained a tiny niche.

Homemade sauerkraut

As already noted, I’ve become interested in the role of microbes in our bodies, including the value of fermented foods.  First yogurt (which I still make regularly), then cheese. Now I’ve decided to try sauerkraut.

This was a bit more complicated and time-consuming, though still pretty easy. Like most processes, if you do it a few times it becomes second nature and takes under an hour, total, to prepare.  You can find recipes all over the internet, but I followed the directions from famous fermentation expert Sandor Katz, whose book Wild Fermentation I highly recommend.  The excellent web store Cultures for Health has great information too, including a series of free ebooks with hundreds of detailed pages about everything you need to know. Their Lacto-Fermentation ebook is particularly good for sauerkraut.

Basically, you just chop up some cabbage, add lots of salt, and place it tightly in a covered container for a few weeks.  I did it using an old, heavy ceramic pot we have around the house, but if you don’t mind spending $150, you’d probably do best by ordering a Harsch Gairtopf Fermenting Crock Pot, which is specially designed for this.

I left mine sit for about 4 weeks and here’s what it looks like.  Seems pretty good, huh?

Actually, that’s after I carefully scraped away a ton of mold that had accumulated on the top.  See that whitish-gray stuff below?   Supposedly it’s technically a layer of kahm yeast, which is different from mold and apparently harmless.

Peel it off and you get this:

To be honest, whether it’s harmful or not, the layer on top was gross enough that it has me wondering if it’s okay to eat. All the books and websites assure me that it’s okay as long as it smells and looks like sauerkraut, which it sort of does. It’s not super-tangy or especially sweet-smelling.  I try a spoonful and it tastes very salty.

My Lithuanian farmer grandmother used to make and serve sauerkraut all the time, so I assume I’m just following the family tradition.  Should I eat the rest?