
Visual Information Theory (2015) - less_penguiny
https://colah.github.io/posts/2015-09-Visual-Information/
======
Rainymood
Love this article. It makes statistics enjoyable and accessible. Most of
Olah's old stuff is also really good, especially the one on manifolds and
neural networks [1]

[1] [https://colah.github.io/posts/2014-03-NN-Manifolds-
Topology/](https://colah.github.io/posts/2014-03-NN-Manifolds-Topology/)

~~~
m3at
You might like to check distill [1], it's a journal with a limited amount of
content for now, but of very high quality, and C. Olah is one of the editor.

[1] [https://distill.pub/](https://distill.pub/)

------
chrisweekly
Nice post: author has good communication / teaching style, and firm grasp of
the material. The visuals help make some of the concepts more intuitive.
Bookmarked.

~~~
z2
On an unrelated tangent, the way the page formats when printing is one of the
best I've seen. No weird navigation cruft, and it seems there's even a style
defined that sets book-style margins, such that the left and right margins
alternate in length.

~~~
colah3
Thanks! This particular article went through pretty extensive feedback with
colleagues where I'd print the article out, share it, and get hand written
feedback. This necessitated investing in print formatting. :)

------
bcheung
Love how the probability distributions are presented. I wish those diagrams
were in the material when I was first learning probability. Would have
communicated the concepts so much faster and easier.

------
samch93
Nice article. For those who are more interested in mosaic plots, statisticians
have already done a lot of work on this issue. For R there are many nice
solutions, e.g. the strucplot framework which allows to visualize complicated
relationships between multiple qualitative variables
([https://www.jstatsoft.org/article/view/v017i03](https://www.jstatsoft.org/article/view/v017i03)).

------
boazbarak
Love this blog post!

One minor nitpick: the event that it rains next week is probably rather
correlated with the event that it rains this week (in particular it's
correlated with the season), so I don't think this is a great example of
independent variables. Maybe you can separate by distance: the event that you
wear t-shirt vs the event that it rains in city Y vs the event that it rains
in city Z.

------
kensai
The referenced 1948 paper was recently cited by Max Hodak at the presentation
of Neuralink recently. Pretty amazing piece of work!

~~~
glup
There's a followup on properties of English which is also good fun:
[https://www.princeton.edu/~wbialek/rome/refs/shannon_51.pdf](https://www.princeton.edu/~wbialek/rome/refs/shannon_51.pdf)

------
lonelappde
The visual presentation in this article is very similar with how small
children are taught the theorems of multiplication and distributivity and
simple series sums like triangle numbers.

------
alberto_ol
previous submission

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10388799](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10388799)

------
meuk
This visualization is also very useful when trying to understand Bayes'
theorem.

------
171243
bookmarked

