Jesus Christ, Silicon Valley breaks down various classifications of social media profile pictures. Pretty heavy on NSFW language, but they nail it.

Somini Sengupta, writing for The New York Times, on our willingness to trade information for goods:

OUR browsing habits, search terms, e-mail communication — even our offering of our ZIP codes at the supermarket checkout — reveal bits of information that can be assembled by data companies, usually for the purpose of knowing what sorts of products we’re most likely to buy. The online advertising industry insists that the data is scrambled to make it impossible to identify individuals.

Rob Isaac:

A Short Translation from Bullshit to English of Selected Portions of the Google Chrome Blink Developer FAQ

TwistedSifter shares really cool high-speed photographs from artist Alberto Seveso:

In his ongoing exploration with high-speed photography and colour, Seveso drops plumes of various inks into water, capturing the organic shapes that form with a high-speed camera. The results are breathtaking and the ongoing series continues to amaze.

David Rosenberg, Slate:

During the 20-year break Roger Minick took from documenting sightseers around the United States from the early ’80s to 2000, he noticed crowds and motor-homes increased in size, cellphones and cameras became ubiquitous, and more grandparents and foreign tourists popped up.

“But, like two decades earlier, sightseers were still showing up at the overlooks wearing vivid colors and looking into my camera with the same curious mix of awe and wariness,” Minick wrote via email.

Really great photographs.

In February, prompted by the Newtown tragedy, Periscopic released an emotionally powerful tool to visualize U.S. gun murders.

Alberto Cairo discusses that tool and the merger of objective data with subjective emotion:

The words “emotion” and “data” aren’t paired very often. That’s unfortunate, albeit understandable. For historical reasons, we assume that quantitative data are as objective as emotions are messy. In the simplest narratives of how the human mind operates, emotions are the source of the most prevalent cognitive biases¹, whereas the proper handling of data—gathering, experimenting, testing—is the most reliable antidote to them. There is grandeur in this view of knowledge; after all, it’s the foundation of the scientific method. But there may be exceptions sometimes.

Cairo notes several shortcomings in Periscopic’s data model, but notes:

In the meantime, I guess that it would be appropriate to just enjoy the creativity and beauty of projects like this, to quietly mourn the people behind the data, and to think about what the future of gun legislation should be.

This follows my thoughts at the time:

Resist the urge for the data to act as self-confirming toward your particular political leanings or views toward gun safety and control. Instead, help accomplish Periscopic’s goal by connecting to the data in a humanistic manner. Their Stolen Years metric should not be divisive, rather it should be as it is, horrific and deeply saddening.

(via: Dr. James Correia, Jr.)

Of course, you’ll want a beer with your steak.

Visual.ly provides a useful infographic about your favorite parts of a cow.

(via: The Loop)

In 1985, George Plimpton wrote a riveting tale of a wonder pitcher new to the New York Mets organization, named Sidd Finch, who could throw a fastball 168 miles per hour:

I never dreamed a baseball could be thrown that fast. The wrist must have a lot to do with it, and all that leverage. You can hardly see the blur of it as it goes by. As for hitting the thing, frankly, I just don’t think it’s humanly possible. You could send a blind man up there, and maybe he’d do better hitting at the sound of the thing.

Mets fans were ecstatic. Unfortunately, they didn’t realize it was one of the best public hoaxes in history. Beyond the article being published on April 1st, the readers missed a hint in the subtitle:

He’s a pitcher, part yogi and part recluse. Impressively liberated from our opulent life-style, Sidd’s deciding about yoga—and his future in baseball

Be sure to check out the accompanying photos.

Eytan Bakshy, a researcher on the Facebook Data Science Team, reveals interesting data that the company uncovered during last week’s Supreme Court hearings on marriage equality:

For a long time, when people stood up for a cause and weren’t all physically standing shoulder to shoulder, the size of their impact wasn’t immediately apparent. But today, we can see the spread of an idea online in greater detail than ever before. That’s data well worth finding.