Business coke dialect Innovation maps pop porn presentation soda the-internet-is-for-porn The Internet tufte Web Design

Pop vs. Soda vs. Coke

Scenario: you are in a restaurant in an unfamiliar town. You've been seated for just a minute when the waitress walks up. "What'll you have to drink?" It's too early for an alcoholic beverage and you're not in the mood for coffee or tea. Water is for cheapskates and juice is for hippies. But what do you call those sugary carbonated beverages that go perfectly with a burger and fries? Depending on where you are in the country, asking what kinds of "pop," "soda," or "coke" they have on tap has a 66 percent chance of earning you a dirty look. Don't call it pop in Massachusetts. Don't call it soda in Toledo. And now you can see what to call it no matter where you are in the nation: Soft drink dialect The graphic above, from the Pop vs. Soda Page, demonstrates an interesting phenomenon. The United States is permeated by a ubiquitous popular culture. We all watch the same TV, listen to the same radio, and see the same movies. Yet regional differences remain. Even the Web, which spans the globe and threatens to make English the international language, can't stamp out these sorts of things. The Web can make it easier to study them, as the chart above shows. For some verification of the map above, check out the results of Prof. Bert Vaux's Dialect Survey: pop, soda, coke, soft drink (soda is in red, pop in blue, coke in green, and soft drink in orange) People in the northeast and California generally say soda, with outposts surrounding St. Louis and Milwaukee. The rest of the Great Lakes and Midwest region say pop, and so do the Plains and the Pacific Northwest. The only people who say Coke when they point at root beer and Pepsi are Southerners. Coke is based in Atlanta, so maybe that has something to do with it. Or maybe it's related to these maps. The Dialect Survey also answers other questions such as whether you mow your lawn or cut your grass and how to pronounce thespian. I think the most important finding of all this research is clear: about 6 percent of Americans actually call pop "soft drinks," proving that 6% of Americans are annoying jerks.

Sick of PowerPoint Slides? Here’s a Better way to Present Data

If you design web sites, write reports, or do presentations, you should probably take a look at the work of Edward Tufte. One of his best-known essays tells how your typical PowerPoint presentation can obscure information more than it helps illustrate. So what do you do if you have a ton of numerical data and just two and a half minutes to present it? Well, if it's data about the pron industry on the Internet, you could do something like this: (Might be NSFW) [youtube]QOFTQpNhsWE[/youtube] Thanks to TechCrunch for digging up the video. The video might seem like just a punchline, but seriously, this is the perfect way to present this data and I think it could be translated to other subjects as well. Obviously it would take a bit of creativity, I don't mean to say that your quarterly sales data should be sharpied across your significant other's backside. A simple example: if I had data about food, I might capture my audience's attention with pie charts made out of, well, actual pie. Tufte is not really a fan of pie charts, and I admit this example is more about capturing attention than effectively conveying complex data. Can you think of any novel, but amazingly appropriate, ways to present facts and figures? And in case you need the executive summary (read: no data) of the above presentation, here it is: [youtube]QtiGd58J0bY[/youtube]