Abubilla Music

Right and Left Brains and The French Invasion of Moscow

Written by Jimmy

wow.  What a blog title.  Wonder what that is all about! Well, the strange community of Abubilla Music splits along hundreds of fault lines – acting vs. music, young vs. wise, boys tribe-girl patronage, dogs and cats, etc… One of our more interesting Andraos faults is around left and right brained people (my device to remember, which is terribly unfair to right brains is ‘left-linear, right-random’ – unfair but I promise you’ll never mix them up now).    There are a couple of left brain folks amongst us – the extremes being Ed and Jimmy.  We delight in fancy graphs showing how website traffic is building, showing correlations between newsletters and page reads.  There are a lot of right brain folks amongst us — led by Louise — who find all that naff and boring.  But Ed and Jimmy persevere.

Which leads nicely to the French Invasion of Moscow!   For the left brains out there, good analytics is about quality of answer, quality of process to arrive at the answer and compelling communications (Whew, that’s a left brain on fire).   Good communication is often about the compelling display of data, which leads into the whole science of displaying data in the right way. And for those folks involved in this science, the most compelling example of a perfect graphic remains Minard’s graphic of Napolean’s Invasion of Moscow.   In one graph, you’ve got direction of invasion in/out, the loss of troops (as width of path to Moscow narrows), days in and average tempature and major battles.  And in one second you can tell – Napolean went in with tons of folks, travelled too far under appalling weather conditions and came out with nobody.   Extraordinary.  Features in every book on good analytic displays and you should take a peak.

Here’s one for the left brains!

Jimmy