Bonus chart of the day: Annus horribilis in 3D
Over at Boing Boing, Cory Doctorow (BTW, have you picked up his book, Little Brother? It’s the perfect gift for any smart, tech-savvy teen) points to the work of Berlin artist Andreas Nicholas Fischer, who has rendered financial charts as wooden sculptures.
Below is a piece, fashioned from more than 150 laser-cut wood polygons, in which Fischer depicts the performance of the S&P 500, Dow Jones Industrial Average, and NASDAQ from January to November of this year.
Maybe it’s just me, but I find this chart less alarming than Mankiw’s. In fact, in its own way, it’s beautiful. It conveys a feel for the market as something that’s not a sterile catalog of numbers, but a live organism. 
It’s the most beautiful expression of “we’re f***ked” that I’ve seen in a long time.
I love that picture. It captures to me exactly how I feel about our business venture right now. It is expressive of how charts and graphs don’t tell the whole story and yet how the numbers go up down, sideways and loop around as various aspects of outside forces affect numbers. The economy, holdups in product, summer, christmas etc.
I didn’t link to my website but to my article on SHC or spontaneous human combustion. Because if the picture of that graph doesn’t change we may all have some SHC.
But back to this picture. I know it was meant to convey a positive thing the living dynamics of results.. .but I just picked up on all the variables that go into the charts and graphs and numbers. Thank you for the chart art. 🙂