7 wonderful things MPJ ran across this week
Dishonest charts, crypto detectives, space-filling curves, shadow libraries, and a map of every book ever written.
hey lovelies
Have been working hard towards a new video release next Monday (two videos, actually!) and have not had the mental bandwidth to think out a cohesive narrative for this weeks chronicle, but I have been inspired by many things this week, so I figured I would share an allotment of them!
Defence Against Dishonest Charts
An article on FlowingData named Defense Against Dishonest Charts has been making the rounds on Bluesky (I’m @mpj.fff.dev in case you want to follow me) for good reasons.
It’s a very pedagogical walkthrough with some wonderfully canonical interactive illustrative examples built in d3.
Data Engineers hunting the Al Capones of our age
The Economist (I should really have some kind of partner deal with these guys because I push them a lot) published this fantastically inspiring piece: Cryptocurrencies are spawning a new generation of private eyes, a spin-off piece to their magnificent investigative podcast series Scam Inc. If you're considering a career in data, this might be a (hardcore) angle that you perhaps did not think of before.
I binged Scam Inc. this week and it is a spectacular piece of reporting by Sue-Lin Wong (@suelinwong.bsky.social).
I’m not really sure if I can say that I recommend it, since it's not for the faint of heart, but maybe for someone that considers a career in data, it might be mandatory listening.
Space filling curves
I was made aware of the concept of Space-filling curve this week, not sure what to use it for yet, but incredibly beautiful and fascinating.
Annas Archive and data scoundrels and rogues
When I read in the news that OpenAI were all sad about DeepSeek stealing their hoarded knowledge, I started wondering where OpenAI stole all it's hoarded knowledge, especially the papers and stuff.
This week, I randomly ran across the concept of Shadow Libraries, such as Annas Archive, which seems to be a Pirate Bay of books and studies.
From their datasets page:
“Our mission is to archive all the books in the world (as well as papers, magazines, etc), and make them widely accessible. We believe that all books should be mirrored far and wide, to ensure redundancy and resiliency. This is why we’re pooling together files from a variety of sources.
Some sources are completely open and can be mirrored in bulk (such as Sci-Hub). Others are closed and protective, so we try to scrape them in order to “liberate” their books. Yet others fall somewhere in between.”
I found it quite interesting that they have this statement on the datasets page:
“If you are interested in mirroring this dataset for archival or LLM training purposes, please contact us.“
I had not really thought about it before, but it makes sense that the information-wants-to-be-free crowd (copyleft?) would naturally really like broad OSS LLM ingestion, as it is massive evolution of the old and brittle “we just host hashes” defence against attacks from the copyright.
HUGE visualization of all the worlds books
The reason why I found myself in the above rabbit hold was that both of the concepts were referenced in this absolutely nutty data visualization: Visualizing all books of the world in ISBN-Space - phiresky's blog. It uses a dataset of a kabillion ISBN numbers and creates a visualization with bookshelves and fills them all with actual little books, and allows you to zoom in and out, Google-Earth style. Fun!
M5Stack Cardputer
In my quest to rekindle my love for computers this year, I find myself being pulled constantly to (not so) borderline silly hardware, like the M5Stack Cardputer: ESP32-S3 Pocket Computer. I mean, it’s like a silly little dog or something, it’s adorable and I want it.
Repurposing Epaper price tags for everyday needs
It’s subtle, but many, many stores these days use e-ink displays for prices. Once you look, you see it everywhere. These are really, really, really cheap displays, that are surprisingly capable (yes, yes it runs doom sort of) and you can update them easily over Bluetooth LE. When they run out of batteries, stores sometimes just throw them out and you can get them for free.
There are some geeks that have made a point of repurposing these for all kinds of silly personal uses and I just love it: Using e-ink (epaper) Price Tags (Shelf Labels) for everyday needs:
Yep. That's it.
Do find a source of wonder this Monday.
As always, stay curious 🧐🐒
Mattias Petter Johansson