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More by Mark Osborne was a short film nominated for an Academy Award in 1998. It was one of Osborne's first works. Posted to iFilm, it quickly became the site's #1 video for over a year. Osborne directed recent hit Kung Fu Panda last year.

It's an entrepreneur's story -- both the film and its creation.

Avoid chart porn at all costs: Mint Blog has great data but needs to stop hiding it with anti-minimalism

Hey Mint guys, you're doing great work. You've got great data. I love your product. Your blog is cool.

You've got to fix your infographics. It's just... really... not... OK. I spent years designing data visualization for a quant data analysis platform (Palantir Finance) so somewhere along the way, bad data viz became a huge if very geeky pet peeve.

Look at that example above. What is going on? Some things are big and some things are small. There's no legend. There's no common axes. This is chart junk... or maybe worse (better?) -- chart porn. It simulates the act of looking at statistics without actually giving the user any real insight.

Growth rate? Growth of what? Rate over what amount time? Heck, you don't even get the numbers. There's no time, date, footnote, asterisk. All the viewer ends up with is a question mark. It's happening over and over again, like this one I blogged about a few months ago.

This is not useful. You know what's a better visualization than a bunch of random images that are slightly bigger or smaller than each other with no labels? Ordered lists. That's the amount of information you're communicating if you don't give numbers and context.

Brilliant design thinker / statistician Edward Tufte would *hate* these infographics. In fact he would probably set it on fire. Tufte says: Minimize non-data ink. That is to say, don't waste your time on parts of a chart that don't convey additional message.

Data Ink Ratio = (data-ink)/(total ink in the plot)

This is minimalism at work in infographics. Data stands on its own. It does not need fancy images and gussied up fancy texture backgrounds.

Here's a case study from Tufte's work that I find fascinating. Chart junk of the worst order (not even qualifying for porn -- it's not pretty):

Yet when you apply a high data-ink ratio and a whole lot of ingenuity (designers thrive on constraints), what you can get can be dramatically better:

Look at that! Cut the crap and let the data speak for itself -- and the mundane / unintelligible suddenly takes on meaning and life.

The problem with chart porn is that it gets in the way of the message you're communicating. I'm a big believer in minimalism, and these charts are anti-minimalist. They are filled with lines and fury signifying nothing. (rather like life, some would say)

Oh, Mint. Please use your data for good, not for more chart porn.

The Joy of Minimalism: I removed something from my bike that I didn't need, and cycling got more awesome

For Christmas last year, my little brother built me a single speed / fixed gear bike. He was kind enough to add both front and rear brakes, so I could get up to speed with riding it without, uh, dying. I started riding single speed -- it felt like I always had the wrong gear. Too slow, too fast. I was bored.

Then I started riding fixed-gear. Its true what they say: You feel more in touch with the road and the bike. But I still had front and rear brakes -- and I used them quite a lot, even though I didn't need to. I still hadn't broken with my non-fixie habits.

Today, I removed the rear brake. I took off the whole mechanism -- cable, calipers, everything. (I kept the front brake just to be safe.) The bike looks a LOT cleaner. But that's not interesting. What matters: It changed my entire cycling experience. I'm right handed, and the rear brake handle was on the right side of the handlebar -- so now that it was gone, the urge to brake went away. I regulated my speed according to my surroundings. I didn't brake. I way more free to just roll naturally, as I had one less knob or control to worry about. It was liberating.

When it comes to software and products of all kinds -- think about what removing a rear brake might do. There are so many needless dialogs, radio buttons, menus, alerts, gradients, drop shadows, mouseovers, text, icons, lines, boxes, and so on. Its absurd. Every single element in a UI exerts some cognitive load -- some weight on the brain. Its slowing you down. You're trying to get to a destination, and all the inessential UI is just screaming for more of your precious brain power.

Get rid of the things you don't need. Keep the things you do. Yes, you can add to the experience by subtracting.

little. yellow. different. On living in the Mission

I still kinda feel like a stranger in a strange land when it comes to life in the Mission, an area of San Francisco that’s filled with hipsters and gang-bangers and crackheads and Vice Presidents of Product Development, all within close quarters, doing their best to ignore each other.
via littleyellowdifferent.com

LOL, this sounds like such an accurate description of the Mission, it's kind of funny. Luckily I am partially all 4 of those things -- hipster, gangbanger, VP of Product Development, and ... well, maybe 3 of those things.

Yep, I finally snagged an apartment in exactly the neighborhood I was hoping for.

Two blocks from this:

And half a block from this (Tartine, the best bakery in the galaxy):

How to keep things nice: Enforce rules. Be a train, not a bus.

Here are a set of tips on riding the SF MUNI from the tragic story of an 11 year old boy randomly stabbed by a vagrant while riding the bus in San Francisco. These tips could save your life. They would be comedic if they weren't true.
  1. Sit in the middle. The mentally unstable and homeless sit up front where they grope or panhandle at will. The hood rats sit in the back where they can punch people in the head on the way out just for kicks.
  2. Keep your purse jammed under your arm and the strap wrapped around your wrist, lest someone grabs it on the way out the door.
  3. If you listen to music, don't use the telltale white earbuds of an iPod - it's just asking for trouble. And never listen to music so loud that you can't tell what's happening around you.
  4. Finally, don't say anything to the three teenagers who are screaming at the top of their lungs, though they are just 2 feet from each other. To do so ensures you'll get jumped, and you won't get much help.

The MUNI bus system in San Francisco is a complete disaster. You are guaranteed to run into insane street people and misanthropic hoodlums.

Contrast this to Caltrain, the local commuter train system on the Peninsula. I've often felt unsafe on MUNI, but never even slightly threatened on Caltrain. Why? Caltrain has conductors. They roam the trains making sure people have correct tickets. They throw people off and fine them if they try to sneak free rides. They must be strict in enforcing rules and they patrol it with almost an air of tradition. You can't even put your feet up on the seats. That's disrepectful. That's how things are on trains.

Buses don't have this tradition. Nobody every yelled at you for putting your feet on a seat on a bus. In fact, if you give someone a the dirty look or talking-to they deserve for their behavior, you're liable to catch a beating. Why doesn't a bus driver have the same capacity to kick people out and command authority? They really should.

Damn it, people. Turns out you need law and order and authority to keep things from degenerating into anarchy. Or worse, MUNI. This applies to online communities as well. You need rules and restraint to keep bad things from happening. Like 11 year old children getting stabbed for no reason.

This Week in Startups (TWiST) Episode 14 now online (Wow, that was fun.)

via thisweekinstartups.com

Had a blast on Jason Calacanis' show yesterday -- and they got it online already! It was definitely a humbling, awesome experience to be in the same room with two of the most influential and knowledgeable startup luminaries in the world.

We got to talk about Posterous origins, YC, raising money, difficulty of working in large orgs, working 7 days a week, evilness of Apple vs Craigslist, Posterous theming, how Sachin added video in one day and tons of other stuff too. Moral of the story -- Posterous is just getting started, and we've got a long road ahead of us.

I wasn't too nervous was I? Mental note: use fewer filler words. When Dustin Curtis went on Net@Night with Leo LaPorte on TWiT, he took a shot of tequila. I will try that next time.

Much respect and thanks go to Jason and the sponsors of TWiST -- DNA mail, UStream, Webspy, and Audible.com.

Most unpaid internships are actually illegal violations of labor law. Mark Cuban hates it, but maybe its fair?

In order to qualify as an unpaid internship, the requirement is simple:  no work can be performed that is of any benefit at all to the company.  That is, you can not deliver mail, sort files, file papers, organize a person’s calendar, conduct market research, write reports, watch television shows and report on them, read scripts, schedule interviews, or any other job that assists the employer in any way in running their business.

Examples of internships that have been legal are where the job is a “dummy” job.  For example, there was a case of an internship for working on a train.  The company had the interns driving trains from one end of their yard to the other under close supervision.  The moving of the trains was completely unnecessary and was just being done to train the potential employees. As such, no “work” was being performed, so the internship was legal.  On the other hand, if the workers were moving the trains as part of the regular re-positioning of the trains, but were still performing it under close supervision, they would be required to be paid for the work.

Labor law via Mark Cuban's blogmaverick.com

Mark Cuban is pretty angry about this. He says unpaid internships should be 100% legal, and the government is being short sighted.

I could see where this law can be useful though -- in cases where workers start getting abused in various situations. It can be used as a way for companies to skirt minimum wages.

When running a business, you typically try to think about the value-accretive things in life, e.g. letting an unpaid inexperienced person get valuable experience... but when making laws, policy wonks must think about the base realities of how humans will exploit the laws and each other.