A good friend of mine once said, while writing a book, that it's difficult to soar when all you seem to be doing is picking up laundry. I am not writing a book, but I do seem to be picking up an awful lot of laundry. Much of this laundry takes the form of trying to produce graphs and figures that are clear, informative, and as much as possible, beautiful. I fiddle with little bits of code in python and R that produce these graphs, and it often seems like 90% of the effort goes into the last 10% of the final output. Things that ought to be incredibly simple, like aligning one graph with another, or making sure the axis ticks point in the right direction, usually require the frustrated perusal of undocumented source code, endless attempts to come up with the right set of keywords for a web search that might pull up someone else's solution to the problem, and the use of ugly, gimmicky hacks that will probably break whenever the next version of the plotting software comes out.

Of course, in most cases it would be easier to just produce the plots the software was written to produce, and then fiddle with the tick marks and colors in Illustrator. This is usually what I wind up doing for things like posters and talks, where I'm almost always working with limited amounts of time, and no one is actually going to look all that closely at the graphs. But a paper will go through many rounds of revision, and it saves a world of grief to have the mechanism for producing the figures be as automatic as possible.

I'm relieved to be at this stage of the writing, though. Last week the data were still formless and void, and I saw only hints of order. Much of that order was artificial, imposed by my hypotheses and less-than-hypotheses about how this system is working. All of that false order has to be discarded in order to approach the true order of nature. Indeed, the only way we can approach nature is through the process of discarding our false ideas about it.

It irritates me to no end to hear otherwise intelligent people call the failure to confront one's cherished assumptions "faith". If it is faith, it's bad faith. But it seems more to me like plain ol' laziness.