I had breakfast with Nicholas Felton of both the Feltron Annual Report and Daytum to discuss creating the data visualization style guide for Hello Health. When a doctor or patient looks at any sort of data within Hello Health, it’s got to be more than just data. It’s got to be immediately understandable and beautiful…a doctor’s understanding of the situation can literally be the difference between life and death.

I asked Nicholas if he’s ever been totally surprised about seeing something visually about himself. I know I have been. I’m fascinated with my last.fm profile.

I’m embarrassed about being such a The National groupie. I never realized how absurd it is for me to listen to them so disproportionately to everything else.

And then to think that I, nor anyone else, have any goddamn clue how many calories they eat and where the vast majority of those calories come from. How awesome would it be for every single thing you eat to be bar coded and scanned by your iPhone so that, at the end of a week, you know exactly what you ate. And then the next week you could adjust your diet accordingly.

I think we’d all be surprised as I was:

But then again I’m surely not going to stop listening to The National.