Danyel Fisher

philogb.github.ioNicolas Garcia BelmonteMyriahedral Projections: Unfolding the Earth

These are both incredible tools for thinking about how projections work.

Tamara Munzner@munzner.bsky.social

Perfect timing, map projection lecture is this coming week, will demo this in my grad class. I love that I can make the projection point wrap around from positive to negative infinity. Just the right companion to the philogb.github.io/page/myriahe... demo that goes with the paper they're reading.

torahmap.orgTorahmapA Visual Concordance of the Hebrew Bible.

I've been enjoying tracking different patterns in the map. This is a fun one: we're looking at the word 'Moses' highlighted in blue. The backdrop is the Torahmap for the book of Leviticus, the third of the Five Books of Moses. torahmap.org?search=moses...

Danyel Fisher@danyelf.bsky.social

I'd love if you had a chance to try it out -- torahmap.org. This project embodies hundreds of design decisions -- I'd love to know what you see!

View full thread

It turns out that (almost) all the chapters of Leviticus start the same way: "GOD spoke to Moses, saying:" I think it's pretty cool how that textual pattern pops right out of the interface.

Sure, it's something you can find by reading -- but it's a gratifying sense of how visualization can tell a vivid story about data.

torahmap.orgTorahmapA Visual Concordance of the Hebrew Bible.

Danyel Fisher@danyelf.bsky.social

I'd love if you had a chance to try it out -- torahmap.org. This project embodies hundreds of design decisions -- I'd love to know what you see!

We have a few different codings here. Each (right aligned) line is a chapter of the book; each square is a verse. The first verse of each chapter are aligned along the right side. The color corresponds to verse length: short verses are dark; long verses bright.

The first verse of almost every chapter is dark, and has a little blue square around it. They are short verses, and Moses is referenced in almost every one of them! What's happening? The Book of Leviticus heavily focuses on a divine legal code: God speaks to Moses, who passes on the law.

The states of Louisiana, Arkansas, and Alabama started their brief with “This case arises from one of the most serious interstate aggressions in our Nation’s history.” I can name another serious interstate aggressions in our nations history, and it wasn’t a complaint about mailing pills.

Susan Rinkunas@susanrinkunas.com

Here is the states' request for SCOTUS to take this case as a trial court and consider the constitutionality of telehealth shield laws that allow clinicians to prescribe abortion pills across state lines. There are nearly 15,000 shield law abortions a month storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.us...

nytimes.comOpinion | A.I. Shortcuts Are Ruining How We Think (Gift Article)Anything worth remembering came from a person who did not know where she or he was going until arriving.

Excellent essay from Giorgia Lupi on the steps of craft -- and how AI *can* be used to support it. AI can be a powerful tool to accelerate some kinds of work -- but only with careful attention to what we lose each step of the way.

Alberto Cairo@albertocairo.com

Lovely and deep visual op-ed by Giorgia Lupi: "A.I. is a different kind of technology, because it can deliver an end result before creative thinking has happened at all" www.nytimes.com/interactive/...

I combined my love of #datavis with a different passion -- the rich text of the Hebrew Bible, or Tanakh. The Torahmap places every verse of the Tanakh in a fixed spatial position, then plots overlays over it. You can play with it at torahmap.org

View full thread

This work was directly inspired by Brad Paley's TextArc, and Keim& Oelke's (2007) Literature Fingerprinting, two works which have sat with me for years.

torahmap.orgTorahmapA Visual Concordance of the Hebrew Bible.

I'd love if you had a chance to try it out -- torahmap.org. This project embodies hundreds of design decisions -- I'd love to know what you see!

The site tries to be usable on a phone, although high density visualization on a tiny screen is still not my favorite modality.

Building with Agentic Coding has meant that I was able to iterate through bad ideas (so many bad ideas!) and failed approaches rapidly, and meant that I could afford to put some polish on a niche visualization that may have an extremely tiny audience.

One of my long-term questions was about what texts the Talmudic rabbis had ready-at-hand. Were they able to cite just anything, or were there some gaps in their knowledge? Painting a heatmap over the Torahmap shows that their knowledge was broad -- but there were favorites.

I built a 'storytelling' mode, with both an introductory tour and a set of hands-on stories that show off interesting aspects of the data. This is a useful feature when your users might not share all your domain knowledge!

This was purely a passion project -- one that came of looking at reference books, and wanting to cross-reference sources, and deciding to take on the itch-scratching.

The project starts with a base map. Consistent locations for every verse in the Tanakh. You can zoom and filter, but, like a cartographic map, location stays consistent.

27 Aug

The secret to immortality found: a ten percent increase in tree canopy cover.

Michael Hobbes@michaelhobbes.bsky.social

This week in P-hacking

nytimes.comZale Parry, Aquatic Hollywood Star and Early Acid Tripper, Dies at 93A diving feat landed her on the cover of Sports Illustrated and led to a film and TV career. She also took part in one of the first LSD studies.

21 Aug

Don't we all sometimes wish our lives could be summarized as "loved to scuba dive and take acid." (I recognize her accomplishments were actually quite substantial, both in acting and in diving technology.) www.nytimes.com/2026/08/16/a...

29 July

At last, the Rob Reiner / Chris Nolan connection we’ve all been searching for.

19 May

- Folkloristics - Story structure - microeconomics - statistics - social media technologies as information systems (in 2000!) Fascinating exercise to look back at those!

This post is unavailable.

6 May

Proving that Poes Law predates the internet, I genuinely have no idea whether this letter is a ribbing or tongue in cheek pride.

NY Times Pitchbot@nytpitchbot.bsky.social

Breaking character: In memory of Ted Turner, the amazing letter his dad wrote him when he decided to major in the classics. Yankees just can't write this, my friends. www.bu.edu/arion/files/...

I want to talk a little more about discoverability. I often find that the creators of AI-driven services have a very specific set of scenarios in their minds -- but then advertise extremely broadly. Unlike a button on a UI, there's no way to know what the creators have in mind!

Danyel Fisher@danyelf.bsky.social

This is a guessing game -- "can the user guess the scope of the tool?" It's the opposite of good discoverability! Worse, the user needs to type an entire sentence -- "please book me a plane flight on Wednesday from Dallas airport...", so its inefficient! (And it's almost always slow.)

The AI told me that I should pick an airport, a departure and arrival date, and that its "travel agent" functionality was because it could give me a list of things to see in my destination city. Oh. It's a chatty copy of Lonely Planet -- not what I think of as a travel agent.

The risk with an AI UI is that there's no external way for the user to know how to translate your marketing copy into a prompt.

Danyel Fisher@danyelf.bsky.social

Not long ago, I used a travel booking tool that advertised itself as an AI "digital travel agent." I gave it the sorts of things that I miss doing with a real travel agent: "Hey, I'd like to figure out a schedule that passes near either Picos de Europa or southern Spain near the eclipse..."

"... I could fly into Madrid, but open to something else -- Barcelona, perhaps, or even a smaller airport in northern Spain if there's a good window. Figuring about ten days on the road before and after, and I'd love to add in a few days of rock climbing, if I can pass by a good area for it."

20 Mar

I'm interested in Anthropic's Qualitative AI study, with lots of questions about both what they learn and how to use the results. www.anthropic.com/features/81k... But from a visualization point of view, there's something I noticed that's bothering me. Those dots are impressive.

The map also shows India with uniform dots. Apparently, while the US is broken into states, it's uniquely so. We can also learn about the survey by seeing just a few dots in Mongolia, and none in China; Japan, Korea, and Taiwan each are densely filled. South America tells its own story.

20 Mar

Where does this leave us? Anthropic's report is very interesting, and there's a lot to work through in the data. I'm excited to read it. But the visualization suggests a little bit of playing fast-and-loose with the results -- and that instantly diminishes their credibility a little.

They give a sense of real science -- look, we got people from all over the place! They're also deceptive. See that clear California border? People are not uniformly distributed across the state of California -- they live mostly in the greater Los Angeles and San Francisco areas.

20 Mar

Naively, I would expect this map to be a population map: more people live in populated places, and so respond to surveys. The designers seem to have made a different choice -- one that sort of shows population, while also making lots of intentional decisions.

Dumb heart. Barely spins a yarn, much less telling a tale.

Jesse Clark@modusponens.org

Don’t even tell me about the letter unless it’s purloined

404media.coWhat’s the Point of School When AI Can Do Your Homework?The creator of the AI agent “Einstein” wants to free humans from the burden of academic labor. Critics say that misses the point of education entirely.

25 Feb

Um … we don’t have children practice handwriting because there’s a shortage of the letter ‘a’ in the world. We don’t have them learn times tables because the economy needs a piece of notebook paper that says “4x3=12.”

404 Media@404media.co

Quote from Advait Paliwal, Brown dropout and co-creator of Einstein: “I think about horses. They used to pull carriages, but when cars came around, I'd argue horses became a lot more free... It would be weird if horses revolted and said ‘no, I want to pull carriages, this is my purpose in life.’”

trib.alHow Do We Rebuild After Trump? - The American ProspectMany Trump critics are focused on what he is doing to our basic democratic compact. But there’s a reason that all the presidents who led us through our worst previous crises also had an aggressive program of reform—including public provision and ownership.

3 Nov 2025

I’m less enchanted with the question “what does a lefty with the power of Trump” look like, because the best possible outcome is a world where every few years we lurch between lefty utopia and corrupt dictatorship.

The American Prospect@prospect.org

Lefty think tank @cmmonwealth.bsky.social is homing in on Democrats' response to the affordability crisis and figuring out what a future Democratic president must do to pick up the pieces once the Trump administration is out of the White House. From @ryanlcooper.com: trib.al/a5JDVBG

3 Nov 2025

I care much more about the question of “what does it take to build an institution that can’t be destroyed in a few months by a petulant tyrant and a compliant Congress.” The federalist papers assume Congress will be jealous of its power and will guard it fiercely.

3 Nov 2025

What do checks and balances look like in a system that works less by handshake and more by enforcement?

danyelfisher.infoAnswering a Useless Question with the Degree-Degree Map — Danyel Fisher - Visualization and User ExperienceA friend of mine was traveling in northern Europe, and posted a picture: “68 degrees and 68 degrees. One is latitude, the other temperature.” That made me wonder — is that common? how often is the ...

12 Aug 2025

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/

Danyel Fisher@danyelf.bsky.social

Last, this blog entry talks through the process of creating the visualization, and what I learned. It was a fun data science exercise! danyelfisher.info/blog/2025/8/...

12 Aug 2025

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.

11 Aug 2025

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

11 Aug 2025

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.