Google's homepage doodle today, in honor of the 180th birthday of John Venn, creator of the Venn diagram, is, in a word, awesome. Hit play to interact with the doodle and see all the clever combinations.
Venn diagrams, if you don't remember from school, show the correlation(s) between distinct items. To take two examples from Google: Vegetation + Cone-shaped = Pine tree. Musical + Thrives in cold = Ice cream truck.
Venn diagrams helps us visualize data in often surprising, clever ways. Yet they're also very logical. (I took my daughter, when she was in PreK, to a chidren's museum once where they had a computer game of Venn diagram puzzles. Without having been taught how these diagrams worked, she was sorting animals into the right circles and solving the puzzles. That was eye-opening.)
Here's a diagram about data science, posted on iPython.org:
An apt one from Dave Hoffman on Flickr:
A Venn diagram about hipsters, care of The Meta Picture:
And perhaps my favorite Venn diagram [source unknown]:
Read more of Melanie Pinola’s Tech IT Out blog and follow the latest IT news at ITworld. Follow Melanie on Twitter at @melaniepinola. For the latest IT news, analysis and how-tos, follow ITworld on Twitter and Facebook.