One Saturday afternoon in the late-1970s, I was watching the Pittsburgh Pirates on the MLB Game of the Week. Partway through the game, rain started falling at the stadium. Umbrellas sprouted in the stands, but play continued, the players seemingly unaffected. A few minutes later the rain appeared to be falling so hard you could barely see. Couples huddled under parkas or tarps, and some headed for drier ground in the concourse, but more than I expected were toughing it out in their seats. And the players remained seemingly unaffected. I didn’t understand why the umpires didn’t suspend the game with the rain coming down in sheets. The announcer must have read my mind, and his explanation has stuck with me all these decades since.
On the television screen it looked like a downpour when it was really only sprinkling.
You see, the centerfield camera is positioned a little more than 400 feet from home plate. Keeping the scene in focus requires a deep depth of field. Otherwise, the pitcher would be in focus but the batter, catcher, and umpire would be blurry. This also means that all of the falling raindrops are in focus as well. Imagine a rectangular prism extending from the centerfield camera to home plate. Every drop of rain falling through that three-dimensional space gets projected onto the two-dimensional television screen. It looks like a monsoon but raindrops seen together on the screen might really be separated by many feet. I learned that my perception was incorrect and with a change in perspective my understanding improved. I now view baseball game rain differently.
Once you recognize it, you see this concept of prisms and projection in many different places.
We have an eighteen-year-old in the house. Generation Z. The ones that eat Tide pods. Of course, previous generations did dumb stuff, too. It’s just that it was mostly not caught on video and certainly not posted to the internet. In my neighborhood, we had a thing for ramps. Ramps for sleds, skateboards, and especially bikes. Gen X talks about going home when the streetlights came on, but when ramps were involved, we would go home when someone needed first aid. Maybe previous generations did just as much dumb stuff, but back then we only saw the dumb stuff our friends did. We’d only hear about new dumb stuff when someone came home from visiting their older cousin in another city and shared the dumb stuff they did. Today, anything that anybody does anywhere is projected onto your two-dimensional Instagram feed. In reality, only about a hundred out of seventy million Gen Zs snacked on Tide pods. I’m sure the rest appreciate it.
Perception should be informed by perspective, not projection.
This summer in Memphis was relatively mild. The official temperature never approached a record high and never even reached 100 degrees. The previous two summers were warmer with several days in the triple-digits. The three summers before that were milder. Normally cyclic. But to see the news, heat records are the norm. It turns out that in 2024, heat records were set in cities in Texas, Maine, Illinois, Indiana, Nevada, Ohio, Tennessee, and California. The previous year, heat records were set in cities in Texas, Arizona, New Mexico, Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, Florida, and Alaska. The same can be said for storms and other weather anomalies. Something unusual is always happening somewhere, and when it gets projected onto your two-dimensional weather feed it seems like everything is always happening everywhere.
The same pattern applies to crime reporting. If you have some time, go newspapers.com and find a small town paper from more than 100 years ago. Now, imagine that was all the news you ever saw.
And friends’ vacations on your Facebook feed. Somebody is always on a beach somewhere. And I’m stuck here day after day, week after week, not on a beach. It can get depressing and even a little demoralizing. But except for those couple of days that they shared, they probably have the same day-to-day as you.
This weekend I’ll be attending my 40th year high school reunion. I’m sure I’ll get to talk with people I knew well back then, but haven’t seen in decades. Forty years of life will be compressed into a single brief conversation. Prisms can be projected through time as well.
My favorite presentation to give to high school seniors and college students is called The Real Curriculum. In it I talk about the concepts they should be learning in college that will be useful to them throughout their career. One of those concepts is Depth of Focus (like the centerfield camera). But in this context, it’s about seeing not only the big picture, but also breaking down the whole into more understandable little pieces. That often requires a change of perspective, but this time it’s not physical or temporal, but conceptual.
Just like the approach of evaluating metrics through the lens of Data Quality described in the Practical Data series, understanding prisms, projections, and perspective allows us to better see things as they are as opposed to the way they are presented.
