And with such a nice organic pie chart!
(Enjoyed your article)

And, with error bars, no less

Flashback: Your Weekly History Quiz, April 18, 2026 Can you sort 8 historical events?

Flashback for April 18, 2026

28 points
🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩

Play here:
www.nytimes.com/interactive/...

Thx for this!

Chalkboard with math symbols on it

Math wasn't always +, −, ×, ÷, or =—these symbols took centuries to develop. Next time you write an equation, give a little nod to history! magazine.amstat.org/...

#MathHistory #STEM #FunWithNumbers #StatsSky

This is beyond mere-mention-important. I've always hated SQL as bloaty, with shades of COBOL; not how I want to ask for analysis or graphics.

But, the idea of reformulating #rstats ggplot graphics for SQL with a VISUALIZE verb is quite heady, worth attention. Kudos @thomasp85 👍

These look great! I love the little textures!
📊

He does look something like an undertaker

The map of Canada should really only show Quebec as "banned in some contexts"

The Worst Justice Ever His attack on progressivism last week was the last straw

I’ve long assumed that Samuel Alito was the worst Supreme Court Justice in recent history. But I’ve come to revise my view in light of recent comments made by one judge in particular. Let me explain... robertreich.substack.com/p/the-worst-justice-in-m...

friendly/vcdExtra | DeepWiki The `vcdExtra` package provides a collection of datasets, statistical methods, and visualizations designed to extend the capabilities of the `vcd` (Visualizing Categorical Data) and `gnm` (Generalized

I tried deepwiki.com on my vcdExtra #rstats 📦.
The result was impressive (for no extra work) 👍
And there's some guy named Davin who wants to chat about it 👬

deepwiki.com/friendly/vcd...

Looks very nice!

2/ He had been arguing with William Feller (1906-1970) who insisted it should be called a "random variable", Doob wanted "chance variable”. He said “We obviously had to use the same name in our books, so we decided the issue by a stochastic procedure. That is, we tossed for it & he won.”

Portrait of Gustav Theodor Fechner

Graphic illustration of Fechner's Law. It plots intensity, I, of a stimulus on the horizontal axis vs. the strength S of the sensation on the vertical. The curve shows Fechner's Law, S = k log I

#TodayinHistory #dataviz #OTD 📊
🎂Apr 19, 1801 Gustav Theodor Fechner born in Groß Särchen, Germany 🇩🇪

Oct 22, 1850: Fechner's Law: the subjective sensation is proportional to the log of stimulus intensity -- used as an early idea for accuracy of graphic elements -- length, angle, area,..

Nice!
This kind of reverse log scale is the way to go in visualizing history over such a long time span.

Screenshot of grid of some of my quarto extensions in a grid layout

If you are doing any #quarto slidecrafting, i have been trying really hard to keep this page updated with everything I have done
emilhvitfeldt.com/project/slid...

Charactacture portrait of John Graunt

Cover of John Graunt's _Natural and Political Observations ... upon the Bills of Mortality, 3rd Edition, 1665

One page from the Bills of Mortality listing the number of deaths by cause, for one week in London. In two columns, going from "Abortive", "Age" down to "Winde" and"Wormes". Plague was the greatest cause of death.

#TodayinHistory #dataviz #OTD 📊
💀Apr 18, 1674 John Graunt died in London, England 🇬🇧

Feb 05, 1662 John Graunt --- "Natural and Political Observations.." was published in London; It is considered the founding text of both statistics and demography & origin of survival analysis, annuities, ...

I was sort of kidding. There is the concept of "seed-hacking" -- trying different seeds to see which gives you results you like.

Love these hand-drawn mushrooms! 🍄🍄 Some look dangerous

I found this little book in "Le Trouve Tout du Livre", a fabulous & charming bookstore in Le Someil along the Canal du Midi. Worth a detour.

Self-portrait of Leonardo da Vinci as an old man. Drawn in redish-brown ink, with only wavy lines around the outside of the face suggesting hair and beard

da Vinci's Arno Valley drawing, using accurate 3D perspective into the distance for the first time

A set of three drawings by da Vinci showing horizontal and vertical coordinate axes around an inclined plane down which balls are rolled

da Vinci's 1502 aerial image of Imola, Italy, drawn so accurately it might have come from a satellite image

#TodayinHistory #dataviz #Onthisday #OTD 📊
🎂Apr 15, 1452 Leonardo da Vinci born in Vinci, Italy 🇮🇹

1470: His Arno Valley drawing is considered the first to use true 3D perspective in art
1500: He used rectangular coordinates to analyze velocity of falling objects
1502: Aerial view of Imola 🇮🇹

Looks useful. But why hate set.seed(42)?

- `set.seed()` with date-time, never 42

Looks very handy-- generate method docs for generics

Love the playground here! Quite a nice thing in pkg documentation 💯

Great tutorial!

#TodayinHistory #dataviz #OTD 📊
🎂Apr 15, 1730 Moses Harris born in England 🇬🇧

1776: "The Natural System of Colours"--
Diagrams developed to represent color systems in terms of complementary colors. His color wheel uses Red, Yellow, and Blue as the primary colors (for paint)
See: bit.ly/4cvgjyy

East German (DDR) 20 pf stamp commemorating Leonhard Euler. It contains a figure of a 3D solid with Euler's formula relating he number of vertices, edges and faces of a 3D solid have to satisfy the relationship e - k + f = 2

3D diagrams showing X, Y, Z coordinates and rotations around different axes

#TodayinHistory #dataviz #Onthisday #OTD 📊
🎂Apr 15, 1707 Leonhard Euler born in Basel, Switzerland 🇨🇭

One of the greatest mathematicians of the 18th C.
He introduced the notation (x,y,z), giving a name and address to every possible point in 3D space, and rotations

pak::pkg_deps_tree() seems really handy

#dataviz 📊
My Dinner with XYZZY?

If you could have dinner with any important person from the history of data visualization, who would you pick? Why?

What would you talk about? Tell them from their future? Ask their thoughts about?

Huygens' chart of mortality, plotting proportion alive on the Y axis vs. age. Vertical lines at age 20 and 36 show how to read off the proportion at that age.

Portrait of Christiaan Huygens

#TodayinHistory #dataviz #OTD 📊
🎂Apr 14, 1629 Christiaan Huygens born in The Hague, Netherlands 🇳🇱

In 1669, he created the first graph of a continuous distribution function, a graph of Gaunt's life table, and a demonstration of how to find the median remaining lifetime for a person of given age

Nicely designed annotations make the point effectively!