(Roughly) Daily

Readers will have noticed that your correspondent is something of a sucker for information, graphs, and infographics.  Imagine then his delight in discovering this chart comparing the relative effectiveness of different kinds of charts:

From I Love Charts, where much more illumination awaits.

As we resolve not to serve pie unless our readers have lots of time to digest it, we might mark the passing of sociologist, criminologist and social psychologist Gabriel Tarde; he died on this date in 1904.  Tarde conceived sociology as based on small psychological interactions among individuals (much as if it were chemistry), the fundamental forces being imitation and innovation; he conceived “the group mind” (sometimes advanced to explain so-called herd behavior or crowd psychology), and economic psychology (in which he anticipated a number of modern developments… indeed, he may be spinning in his grave to have become, as his work did, an inspiration to the “Chicago School” of economists).  But Tarde’s fame was posthumous; his thinking was overshadowed at the time by Émile Durkheim and his conception of society as a collective unity.

Gabriel Tarde (source)