If the only thing you’re doing is coming up with a single number, then you’re doing arithmetic, not visualization. ... And I think that the goal of visualization is not finding elaborate ways to encode information. I try to encode as little as possible. ... But to me this feels like imposing a design on the data, and drawing attention to the design more than the data.

The whole thing is great, I'm glad I stuck with it past the first few images to see where he's going. These bits stuck out though and his work is so often things I wish I had thought of.