constant crises

i've realized in the past few weeks that i am in need of intellectual stimulation. i never really thought of myself that constantly need to "think," but considering that the most strenuous thinking i do these days is determining pot vs. implied odds and measuring my table image, i've been feeling rather stupid. so, to rectify the situation, i've done a couple of things: - i bought a couple of malcolm gladwell books. i started reading Blink yesterday. it's a book about the human mind's ability to structure and comprehend large amounts of sensory data within the subconscious, and to do it much more quickly than conscious thought. it seems to be a great read so far. plus the topic is actually somewhat related to... - i've started subscribing to blogs, finding papers, and reading about my favorite academic topic: information visualization. simply put, information visualization is the science/art of representing large amounts of data in a visual way. because the human mind can interpret visual data so much more concisely than written or numerical data, the visualizations can bring interpretations and conclusions for the viewer that he would have a hard time understanding from just the data. they can also be incredibly beautiful. what the hell am i talking about? information aesthetics has a good one posted up today from ibm research: email content visualization. for the more sports-oriented mind, visual i|o also has a cool demo one for understanding when to pull a pitcher.

tags: malcolm gladwell, blink, information visualization, baseball