Rad Nauseam · David Cole

I just picked up and have almost finished Edward Tufte's spectacular book on the visual display of quantitative information, the controversially titled The Visual Display of Quantitative Information. Besides offering an incredible amount of insight on the creation of graphs and charts and what-have-you, the book is a fantastic showcase of beautiful statistical images.

Above is E.J. Marey's famous train schedule, which is a key graphic in the book and one that is still dramatic, stunning and useful. Many others have updated Marey's idea for modern systems (including this one for BART) and it'll be a while before I start making dents in the statistical graphics community, but I couldn't resist taking his approach for a spin.

Unfortunately for me, Caltrain doesn't stop at every single stop — except on weekends, when it runs on a perfectly regular schedule. The resulting chart isn't nearly as charmingly mountainous as Marey's, but it was very fun to create. To me, the neatest things about this design is that as long as you know it's a train schedule, understanding it doesn't really require any further explanation.

Sometime, I'd like to revisit the idea of doing the weekday schedule, but I haven't quite figured out a good way to show the train not stopping at a station. Definitely a challenge worth tackling, though. Oh, and mine is set in various weights of Albert-Jan Pool's FF DIN, which seemed somewhat trainy (technical typographical word).

Click to view larger/loosely (& incompletely) interactive version.

A regular series of posts I'd like to do is on awesome records found for the price of one dollar. Most of these I had no clue about but took a chance on and was pleasantly rewarded. I hope to focus especially on albums I see at thrift stores on a regular basis, so others may be able to discover these gems.

I chose a pretty unassuming record to start with: Spotlight of Dancing Album No. 3: All-Latin Rhythms, featuring the music of the George Poole orchestra. Printed by Windsor Records in their Ballroom Records series, Spotlight on Dancing claims to "provide a well balanced library of fine dance music for your parties, your social events, your practice dancing and your plain listening pleasure." And it works perfectly well for the latter, which is usually my preferred approach as I don't even know what the cha-cha-cha looks like.

Not much information about George Poole is available besides what I have here on the back of the record (abbreviated):

The popularity of GEORGE POOLE and his orchestra is attested to by a date book that is filled for months in advance. When any club, organization, festival or convention in the Los Angeles area wants music that their people can really dance to, George Poole is their first thought and preference. Mr. Poole comes from a many-generation musical family and started playing violin at the age of 4, winning a place in the first violin section of the Omaha Symphony Orchestra at 14. Since then he has mastered the saxapone, clarinet, piccolo and the entire flute family -- playing all of these instruments with skill and effect. At an early age he shifted from concert work to popular and jazz music and has played in many of the finest dance bands in the nation. His talents include composing and arranging and he was a staff musician for the American Broadcasting Co. for over 14 years. He has been heard and seen on many top-notch radio and TV programs, including the Liberace show. He is a veteran of hundreds of recording sessions in the capacities of musician, leader, conductor, and director -- and has done a great deal of work for several of the major motion picture studios.

Though I was never alive for them, I have a strange sense of protonostalgia (or fauxstalgia as I prefer things) about the phenomenon of local celebrity, when someone could become incredibly famous but only in a single metropolitan area. It seems like the only people like that these days are local fanatics and/or homeless, like San Francisco's Frank Chu or Boston's recently deceased Mr. Butch.

Anyway, here's a sample, followed by the tracklist, for this delightfully simple and danceable record:

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

You can snatch it from me here! The record's condition is far from perfect and I'm still learning how to rip vinyl so apologies if the quality is poor.

I hope to find the other three records in this series as I've become quite enamored with this one, and the colors on the whole series are awesome. I know he's done a Hawaiian dance album as well, which would just be delicious!

I've been reading Michael Pollan's fantastic book on food and agriculture, The Omnivore's Dilemma. Almost all of the information is completely brand new to me and I'm finding it all extremely fascinating and definitely world-view changing (or should that be country-view changing, in this case?).

It helps that the book design is easy on the eye, as are the jackets of most of his other titles. The more recent ones have obviously been designed to fit together, and I think they look fantastic. The titles and subtitles are variably set in Rudolf Ruzicka's lovely 1939 Fairfield and something resembling Engravers' Gothic or Trade Gothic Extended, both of which are just fine by me.

Update, 12/20: The book was designed by MarySarah Quinn, who apparently has been the art director at a few different publishing houses. She also had a hand in this cute cover for Elements of the Table and this edition of The Stand which apparently fetches $4,000.00. Yow!

The first thing I read by Pollan was "You Are What You Grow" which ran in the New York Times in April. He references an experiment by a researcher named Adam Drewnowski:

Drewnowski gave himself a hypothetical dollar to spend, using it to purchase as many calories as he possibly could. He discovered that he could buy the most calories per dollar in the middle aisles of the supermarket, among the towering canyons of processed food and soft drink. (In the typical American supermarket, the fresh foods--dairy, meat, fish and produce--line the perimeter walls, while the imperishable packaged goods dominate the center.) Drewnowski found that a dollar could buy 1,200 calories of cookies or potato chips but only 250 calories of carrots. Looking for something to wash down those chips, he discovered that his dollar bought 875 calories of soda but only 170 calories of orange juice.

Besides being horrible, its the perfect kind of data to put into a chart or graph, which is something I've wanted to do for quite some time. While trying to think of small pixel art projects to ease me through the Mission Pie project (which, coincidentally, was where I learned about Pollan), this immediately came to mind as a great opportunity. I finished the drink comparison (below) and plan on doing the food comparison next. A little underwhelming after all that back story, perhaps, but the back story is more important, anyway.