And why I was celebrated for it — On my first day at X, the moonshot factory, I listened to our Chief Operating Officer, describe why Xers (people who work at X) need to be “passionately dispassionate” while pursuing ideas that might become moonshots. …

Why (and how) to avoid perceptually non-uniform colormaps — Information is not knowledge. Information can be converted into knowledge if patterns underlying the information are well understood. In today’s day and age of fast-paced advances in science and technology, one of the key information sources is data. It is hardly surprising then that we produce a lot of it…

Bicycling on opening day- pictures, itinerary, and planning tips — Yosemite has always held a special place in my heart. From the mammoth granite peaks to the crystal clear alpine lakes, from the beautiful wildlife to the giant sequoia trees, from the starry nights to spectacular sunsets, each time I visit the park, it captivates me in a new way. …

History, Geography, and Cultures of Southern Utah explored on a bicycle — When we picture our planet Earth, we usually think about lush green forests, tall white mountains, vast blue oceans, or icy regions of the poles. But rarely do we think about high-altitude deserts. That might be because we tend to view deserts as largely unexplored, barren lands with barely any…

Graphical explanation of the squared Pearson correlation coefficient and coefficient of determination — Picture this- You are a stock analyst responsible for predicting Walmart’s stock price ahead of its quarterly earnings report. You are hard at work just when your data scientist walks in saying they discovered a little-known data stream providing daily Walmart parking lot occupancy that seems well correlated with Walmart’s…

Satellites + AI = Never-seen-before Information — Forest wildfire risk is increasing in the western United States. In the past five decades, large wildfire frequency and the area destroyed have risen by more than four and six times, respectively. …

Don’t make your audience squint — Have you ever sat in a presentation and squinted at the slides struggling to read charts with tiny text? Or worse, encountered a blurry figure in a poster making it impossible to read the axes? Too often people tend to reproduce the same figure across different mediums like articles on…