Examining How We Measure Our Lives
Commentary, critiques, and observations on information design and data visualisation
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Read on…: MH370 Found?
Last night (Central Daylight time), news broke that what might be part of the wing of a Boeing 777, which is the same type of aircraft as the missing Malaysian Flight 370, washed up on the French island of Réunion in the Indian Ocean. The Guardian was following the story last night and one of […]
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Your Average Daily Sunshine
Read on…: Your Average Daily Sunshine(Hint, it’s not me.) I was talking with someone the other day about how I dislike warm weather. Give me nice, cool, crisp weather any day of the week. And also how I am okay without sunshine—a cool, misty, grey day is lovely. Much of weather, of course, is determined by sunlight, energy, hitting the […]
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The Funding Sources for the 2016 Candidates
Read on…: The Funding Sources for the 2016 CandidatesWe are past the halfway point for summer in 2015 and that means the autumn 2016 presidential election is off and running. But running an election campaign, if even just for the primary phase, costs money. So where does each candidate receive its money? Well, FiveThirtyEight looked at the early reporting and identified four types. […]
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Water Level on Lake Michigan
Read on…: Water Level on Lake MichiganToday’s a little piece for those of you who follow me from the Chicago area. It turns out that in the last 30 months, the water level of Lake Michigan has risen three feet. Despite what some people think, Lake Michigan is not an ocean—I have overheard conversations in my neighbourhood about people who went […]
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What We Have Learned About Pluto
Read on…: What We Have Learned About PlutoAnd of course a week with awesome science-y space news is not complete without a little bit of xkcd. Credit for the piece goes to Randall Munroe.
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How We’re Talking to New Horizons
Read on…: How We’re Talking to New HorizonsSo New Horizons is long since gone from Pluto. But it will still take 16 months to send back all the photographs and science. Why so long? Because so far away. 3 billion miles away. Put another way, light from the sun takes eight minutes to reach Earth as it travels at, well, the speed […]
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Your Guide to the Solar System
Read on…: Your Guide to the Solar SystemAs New Horizons will soon begin sending back photographs of Pluto, Charon, and the other moons, I figured it would be a good to share a Wall Street Journal piece that looks at the other photographed bodies of the system. Credit for the piece goes to Jon Keegan, Chris Canipe, and Alberto Cervantes.
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New Horizon’s Flypast
Read on…: New Horizon’s FlypastA little after 07.30 EDT, New Horizons began its race past Pluto, what your author grew up learning as the ninth planet in the Solar System—the last planet to be explored. I recall thinking that when it launched back in 2006 I had no idea what I would be doing nine years later. Or at […]