we’ve been grappling with data a lot lately at mozilla, trying to understand more and more about the world we’re living in and building. i look at charts & graphs about what’s happening every single day. i’m hearing that sentiment just about everywhere on the web lately.
one place i found a quote from the guy who invented the kelvin scale (figuring out where to put zero turns out to be an extremely meaningful insight) that captures it:
When you can measure what you are speaking about, and express it in numbers, you know something about it; but when you cannot measure it, when you cannot express it in numbers, your knowledge is of a meager and unsatisfactory kind: it may be the beginning of knowledge, but you have scarcely, in your thoughts, advanced to the state of science.
John's Blog 