What geeks can learn from a plague

This episode of Recovery is not brought to you by unfortunate war-and-revolution metaphors for what are, in the end, simply disagreements over operating systems, professional sports, reality television competitions, or other non-combat-related features of life in the developed world. May these be as close as these metaphors' creators ever get to enduring actual warfare.

Even if neither you nor I are ever apt to be invited to a TED gathering -- which brings together leaders from Technology, Entertainment, and Design -- the TED organization's Web site has a marvelous collection of video of presentations made at its conference over the years. It's a great way to spend ten minutes or so when YouTube's leaving you feel a little slimed and Hulu is... look, you cannot keep re-watching the Warehouse 13 premiere. They'll air another episode next week. Until then you will simply have to calm down, and I'm suggesting that you're better off with TED, and not least because it's... applicable.

Take, for instance, this clip of Steven Johnson discussing the events covered in his book The Ghost Map. Johnson told the story of Dr. John Snow, who used data analysis and social networking to pinpoint the source of a nasty cholera outbreak in London, and by doing so changed civil engineering, the nature of urban life, and... well, let's let him tell it. I'll meet you beneath the video in ten minutes.

Mr. Johnson believes, as you heard, that what we can take away from all this is that good ideas eventually prevail over bad ones. I love Mr. Johnson's completely unwarranted optimism. But I took from the story a number of different, more practical lessons, which any geek might readily apply to her or his own circumstances as we all make our way past the potentially infectious cesspools that line life's path. (See? Completely picturesque and overwrought metaphor that has nothing to do with warfare. Really, how hard was that?)

1. Collect that data! Collect it! Dr. John Snow had a theory long before the August 1854 cholera outbreak: He suspected that the disease was not airborne but waterborne. He'd pitched the theory to other scientists and been essentially ignored, but that did not stop Dr. Snow -- he just kept amassing data points, looking for his opportunity.

2. Carpe the damn diem. Most of us, when presented with an outbreak of a disease that kills you by explosive diarrhea in under a day, would head at great speed in the other direction. But Dr. Snow went right into that presumably appalling Soho neighborhood to talk to the locals. (There's some faith in his data right there; if he was wrong and cholera was airborne, now he's got all these possibly sick people breathing on him.)

3. Don't decline to use your social network. Snow didn't have Twatter or Faceplant or MySpazz (with thanks for two of those to a commenter early this week, BTW). But he had the Rev. Henry Whitehead, the assistant curate of the parish church, one of nature's natural connectors of men, and that most exquisitely rare of resources -- a person who's willing to change his mind when presented with superior data. Whitehead originally believed in the airborne (miasma) theory of cholera contagion. Before Snow convinced the scientific community, he convinced Whitehead, who could introduce him to the people to whom he needed to speak in the neighborhood.

4. Learn how to present your data. Geeks, PowerPoint is not persuasion, but neither is a huge pile of raw data. The reason Mr. Johnson's book is called The Ghost Map is that Dr. Snow had the wit to put his data into an amazing, easily understood map that shows where the deaths occurred -- specifically, where they were located in relation to a particular water pump. He presented his data and his map to local community leaders, and eight days after the beginning of the outbreak, they ordered that the handle be removed from that pump. The epidemic subsided very soon thereafter.

Those of you who have attended Edward Tufte's seminars on visual presentation of information can find a detailed account on pages 27-37 of Visual Explanations, and I'm happy to give you the excuse to crack those books again. (The rest of you must now figure out how to convince your bosses or significant others to pay for the daylong Tufte seminar, but I promise you'll be glad you did.)

If you are not currently possessed of your Tufte collection, the map is available as a PDF from Mr. Johnson's site. Look carefully at the area near the pump. The black stacked bars represent deaths at each address along the block, and it's one thing to read stats saying "one dead here, two next door, etc." and to see a stack of eighteen bars next to three next to four across the street from two next to three next to one next to four. Numbers make me want to do arithmetic; the map makes me wonder what life on that block must have been like with so many dead so suddenly. Proper presentation is powerful.

I don't think that good ideas necessarily triumph over bad ones; if they did, there would be at least a chance of me typing this in on a cutting-edge Commodore computer. But Mr. Johnson's ten-minute talk gives you a heck of a chance of improving your odds, and isn't that a finer use of your time this weekend than another viewing of "Play her off, keyboard cat?"

And now for something almost completely different: I mentioned Dave Carroll today in Now|Next, And it's possible that you've had "United Breaks Guitars" stuck in your head ever since. In case you don't:

Fun, right? But take a moment to visit his site and read the whole sorry saga. I'm glad for him that everything's working out, with fame and maybe fortune accruing from his highly entertaining response to the mess, but once again you've got to wonder if these companies ever really learn from this sort of thing. United Airlines says they have, but does anybody who's flown United in the past 15 years buy that? And what happens to dissatisfied customers (of United or any other customer-service-averse firm) who aren't witty singer-songwriters with video charisma? Mr. Carroll has, probably quite unconsciously, followed Dr. Snow's good example above. I don't, however, think that his excellent presentation of the facts will fix the current plague of bad customer service.

Let your geek flag fly and have a great weekend.