Danyel Fisher
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danyelf.bsky.social
Danyel Fisher
@danyelf.bsky.social
Data visualization; user experience with data analysis; general joyful data nerdery
It's, perhaps, more useful to look at metrics like "room temperature." Room temperature -- defined as 20-22 C -- is pretty common across most of North America during spring and summer months.
August 12, 2025 at 5:13 PM
I carried out the same exercise in metric, too: the number of hours during which the temperature (in C) is the latitude. Cooler equatorial oceans -- and a long span of northern Africa and south America.
danyelf.github.io/degree-degree/
August 12, 2025 at 4:32 PM
I realized I had almost no intuition about what that would look like -- sure, the poles and equator were out, but what about the rest of the world?

I built a visualization to see what it looks like.
August 11, 2025 at 9:03 PM
A friend posted a photo, sunbathing from Scandanavia a little bit ago, captioned "60 degrees at 60 degrees!" That made me wonder how often that really happens -- where on earth is the temperature the same as the latitude, and how often? I answered that at danyel.github.io/degree-degree
August 11, 2025 at 9:03 PM
Three hours in, it's just producing noise at this point. "36 have adainI want need help with the same as an expert system arvPetrax"

"I am considering buying behaviorism, as a'm,我是一名 mechanical question: The American carpallo I need to"
August 4, 2025 at 6:04 AM
Two hours in. I have no hypotheses of what this is doing.

"I’m interested in learning more on a problem androgenic.ai,\”The interest nterceptor (a) 歡迎!我想为:我 have to do something you.ai"

"Iainne bought a little mystery and I’m looking to build a C++ program that allows users from the prompt."
August 4, 2025 at 6:04 AM
"Assistant: I’m considering getting into a dream or something about 3D Sockets of interest from scratch"

"II am considering buying an existing answer (the one that was given to you for free from Monday 23:01 Aang wants to ask if it’s a bit different."
August 4, 2025 at 6:04 AM
It spent some time thrashing. The words "But wait" and 'let me stop" each appear 16 times in the think track. About an hour in, something has gone off the rails.

"Human’tm interested in learning how to become a developer who is trying to access the latitude and zillow, so let's do it."
August 4, 2025 at 6:04 AM
Then it started getting insecure. (I don't mean to anthropomorphize, but this is definitely second guessing itself).
August 4, 2025 at 6:04 AM
It started off pretty well, although it seems to be parsing the question a little more carefully than I might want. (It seems quite sure that I am picky about the period in the name deckgl). It started to give me some usable instructions!
August 4, 2025 at 6:04 AM
The other day, I watched a (small local) LLM melt itself down. I was testing out Ollama with the 8b Deepseek model. I gave it a moderately-challenging technical question -- how to make a Javascript and Python package talk to each other -- and hit "go". Three hours later...
August 4, 2025 at 6:04 AM
Reminds me of the COVID Times covers a bit.
April 11, 2025 at 6:09 AM
I believe Differential Privacy will be a key technology for data analytics, so I'm really happy to see it taken seriously as a viz technique. I'd prefer to see a conversation about DP for exploratory viz -- that's the one that worries me more -- but this is a great start.

osf.io/b5zvn/
November 1, 2023 at 10:21 PM
"Fitting Bell Curves" explores how well users can draw the best-fitting bell curve over a dataset. There are systematic failures -- the authors refer to the "umbrella effect" of people wanting to cover all the points. I'm unsure what the task models though.

users.umiacs.umd.edu/~elm/project...
November 1, 2023 at 9:56 PM
It warms my heart that researchers are looking at distributed trace visualization. At Honeycomb, I spent a lot of time thinking about how we visualize traces; I'm glad to see a look at gaps and opportunities (even if I disagree with some).

people.mpi-sws.org/~jcmace/pape...
November 1, 2023 at 9:26 PM
Interesting study at arxiv.org/abs/2308.13321 plays with order, grouping, stacking of bars. It's either brilliant or obvious -- but I'm glad to see someone laying down this work. (I wonder if a GOMS-like approach would let us quantify how much "mental math" a person has to do to interpret a message)
November 1, 2023 at 7:01 PM
"Let the Chart Spark" is a hilarious and surreal use of LLM image synthesis to generate images that are -- well, classic chartjunk. I don't know if this is good (clever!), bad (putting designers out of work!), bad (hard to read!), or something else. But it's fascinating.

arxiv.org/abs/2304.14630
October 27, 2023 at 9:24 PM
A few that catch my attention.

"Semi-Automatic Layout Adaptation ..." is looking at how to automatically split up or reconfigure multiple views from desktop to mobile. But there's no reference to brushing or crossfiltering -- this feels like a major gap.

ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/100...
October 20, 2023 at 5:49 PM