Peak Rationality

This is the first of a series of semi-weekly visualisations. “Semi-weekly” in this case is ambiguous, like bi-weekly is, so like whenever. It will be depictions of a concept or thought (or even actual data) when time and inspiration coincide. 

View a bigger, better, d3-ier version here: https://www.limn.co.za/dev/wv/1/

Having recently dealt with the combination of being weirded out by people younger than me do stupid things and annoyed by people older than me doing stupid things, I started to wonder if everyone who is not me is being irrational. Or maybe its an age thing. You don’t see pictures of 45 years olds hanging precariously off tall buildings for no reason.

This is probably also bad for your cholesterol levels.

And arguing with a 90 year old with almost zero eyesight as to why they shouldn’t be driving is less fun that it sounds.

At 45, have I reached peak rationality? People either older or younger than me seem to irrational.

The younger me was certain he was being rational, and the older me will think the same thing. Frankly I’m surprised to have made it to this age considering some of the stupid, irrational things my younger self did. And I’m likely to want to carry on driving well past where its considered rationally safe. I assume we have this moving window of perceived rationality that move with us as we age. And everyone not in my age group is wrong 🙂

D3 learnings

A couple of new d3 capabilities learned making this:

  1. http://d3-annotation.susielu.com/ for highlighting specific data points
  2. http://bl.ocks.org/phil-pedruco/88cb8a51cdce45f13c7e for plotting a bell curve
  3. https://github.com/d3/d3-shape/blob/master/README.md#area_defined to limit the area plot to specific regions

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