On Humans And Our Love of Data

Our brains love patterns. They help us make sense of the world, define our realities and understand where we are. Mathematics is a language, eloquent and as valuable, and informative to us as words, written and spoken. We use math and language to tell stories and stories become narratives which becomes our realities. All of this is driven by data. Patterns. Equations. The creation of data has been a fundamental aspect of human societies going back, as far as we currently know about 19,000 years to what is sometimes called The Great Baboon. It was, it is thought, a calculating tool made of a baboon bone called the <a href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Ishango_bone#/media/File:Ishango_bone.jpg" rel="noopener ugc nofollow" target="_blank">Ishango bone</a>. It was very popular because you could easily carry it around, no batteries were needed, and if someone disagreed with your calculation you could also bonk them on the head with it. <img alt="" src="https://miro.medium.com/v2/resize:fit:457/1*uAFvL8xyGmFkU_fXivqApA.png" style="height:487px; width:457px" /> Courtesy <a href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Ishango_bone#/media/File:Ishango_bone.jpg" rel="noopener ugc nofollow" target="_blank">WikiMedia</a> Commons All technologies, as I’ve written before, are a double-edged sword. It is important that we understand both in order to make technologies do the stuff that actually makes our lives better. As a society, we started to really get into data, primarily statistics, in the mid 17th century when <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Graunt" rel="noopener ugc nofollow" target="_blank">John Graunt</a>, a hat maker, had a rather morbid interest in collecting data regarding deaths in London. Hats off to him. It turned out to be a revolutionary idea that influenced how we use medical data to this day and he’s considered the father of demography. Arguably, he was the first person to use data analysis to understand and then solve a problem. That honour, though, probably goes back to the Egyptians or Greeks. We also ought not to forget Florence Nightingale, for if Graunt started the whole medical data and demographics thing, Florence, in my view, and many others, was the <a href="https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-florence-nightingale-changed-data-visualization-forever/" rel="noopener ugc nofollow" target="_blank">mother of data visualisation</a>. And data visualised, tells a much more interesting story, as anyone who’s combed through endless columns of a spreadsheet can attest. Thank-you Florence. Who doesn’t love a good infographic? <a href="https://gilescrouch.medium.com/on-humans-and-our-love-of-data-624502dc5224">Read More</a>