So apparently a baby was born in London…as was another who is likely to become the future King of the Great Britain and Northern Ireland (not of England). But the British love their queues and so this infant will have to wait in line just like everyone else (in the royal line of succession). The Economist visualised just how long these waits have been for English and British monarch vis-a-vis their time spent on the throne.
Credit for the piece goes to R.L.W. and G.D.
I should be returning to Chicago this weekend. And if I were returning 21,000 years ago, that would be I would have been returning to a massive ice sheet covering the city. Would have been way worse in Montreal, though.
Credit for the piece goes to Randall Munroe.
As I have been blogging the past several days, today the Supreme Court will announce its rulings on the two gay marriage cases. But, I have already looked at that twice now. Today I want to look at the results of the Massachusetts special election for the US Senate, necessitated by John Kerry resigning from the seat to become Secretary of State.
This work comes from the Huffington Post. It offers the usual map fare with towns coloured by the victor and tinted by the share of the vote. Though do note the interesting—is this novel?—means of filling in the town with colour to represent the percent of the town reporting. My screenshot is a bit late, but check out Warren near Springfield or Boston and Cambridge—a bit harder to see because of their size and shape.
However, the fascinating thing is the use of the small multiples of scatter plots to look at historic elections. The designers included a small key in the upper-right explaining that dots above the line represent towns where Ed Markey, the Democrat who won, outperformed the historic Democrat. I have not seen anybody attempt to portray the data in this fashion before.
Credit for the piece goes to Aaron Bycoffe and Jay Boice.
We are (still) waiting for a ruling on many things this week from the Supreme Court, including the rulings on DOMA and Prop 8. Today, we look at an interactive chart by the Wall Street Journal that plots different ballot measures, legislative actions, and court rulings regarding gay marriage. Lines of best fit provide a general trend line, and as the default view shows, the trend is clearly in favour of legalisation.
The piece is quite nice. After the default view, you can change the view to look at events not by type of action but by geographic region. This is one of those instances where the regional data provides an interesting look at the story. Additionally, the headlines on the left expand to provide not just context, but highlight the events plotted from that era.
Credit for the piece goes to Randy Yeip, Colleen McEnaney, and Chris Canipe.
More formally known as Operation Chastise, the Dambusters Raid occurred just over 70 years ago on 16 May 1943. That night, 19 RAF Lancaster bombers flew over the English Channel with the objective of busting open three dams to flood and cripple the electricity- and water-supplies to the all-important German Ruhr industrial valley.
Canada’s National Post looked at the bombing raid not just because of the story but also because the unit consisted of not just British airmen, but also those from Canada along with Australia and New Zealand. Per usual, their graphics team did an excellent job illustrating the details of the raid. They traced the route, explained how the unusual bombs were carried, released, and detonated and then looked at the success of the mission.
Credit for the piece goes to Mike Faille, Andrew Barr, and Richard Johnson.
Dornier was a German aircraft manufacturer active during World War II. One of their more interesting designs was the Do-17 bomber, nicknamed the Pencil Bomber because of its unusually thin fuselage. All surviving examples of the aircraft were thought destroyed until one was found on the floor of the English Channel. Yesterday the Royal Air Force Museum raised it from the seafloor to preserve it and eventually display it as a museum piece.
The BBC created this interactive piece or illustration to explore the aircraft. The illustration is not the greatest, but this does appear to be a new type of interactive piece for their design team. Accompanying the piece is a bit of text asking for feedback.
Credit for the piece goes to Tian Yuan, George Spencer, Paul Sargeant and Mark Bryson.
Theoretical/hypothetical maps can be a lot of fun, as well as informative. Today’s post exemplifies both. Pangea was one of those super-continents where all the Earth’s landmass was mashed together into one giant continent. It broke up a few hundred million years ago into the geography with which we are roughly familiar. But I have always been curious which places were where. But thanks to this map, I no longer have to wonder.
Credit for the piece goes to Massimo Pietrobon.
Of 2048. Well, kind of. Lately the country has been talking a lot about immigration and its impacts because of this bipartisan desire to achieve some kind of result on an immigration bill working its way through the Senate. One of the common thoughts is that if we legalise a whole bunch of illegals or document most of the undocumented (I’ll leave the language for you to decide), the new American citizens will overwhelmingly vote Democratic and there goes the Republic(an Party).
Nate Silver—yes, that Nate Silver who accurately predicted the presidential results and a whole bunch of other stuff too—looked at a more complex and more nuanced set of demographic variables and found that the aforementioned argument greatly oversimplifies the results. The problem is not entirely the entry of newly documented or illegal workers. Instead, there are systemic demographic issues.
So here comes the New York Times with an excellent data explorer and forecast modeller. You can set the year to examine and then set the results of the immigration debate with how many immigrants are made legal/documented and then how many of them vote. After that you can begin to adjust population growth, voting patterns, &c. to see how those affect the elections. (The obvious caveats of acts of god, party platforms, candidates, &c. all hold.)
The fascinating bit is that if you keep the demographic patterns as they are currently, adjusting the immigration factors at the outset have very little impact on the results. The country is moving towards the current Democratic platform. Even if 0% of the undocumented/illegal immigrants become documented/legal, and if 0% of 0% vote, the result is still a landslide for the Democrats. The real changes begin to happen if you adjust the population growth rates of the legal/documented citizens and voters. But those patterns/behaviours are a lot more difficult to adjust since you can’t legislate people to have more babies.
All in all a fascinating piece from the New York Times. The controls are fairly intuitive, drag sliders to adjust percentages. The sliders have clear labels. And the results on the map are instantaneous. Perhaps the only quirk is that the ranges of the colours are not detailed. But that might be a function of forecasting the data so far into the future and having growing ranges of certainty.
Credit for the piece goes to Matthew Bloch, Josh Keller, and Nate Silver.
In a truly disturbing article, the New York Times detailed recent research by the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum to identify all the camps established by Germany in World War II, be them extermination camps, labour camps, ghettos, &c. At one point in the article, one of the principals behind the USHMM work stated he expected to find as many as 7,000 such camps across Europe. They have currently identified 42,500.
Two maps accompany the article. The first details the reach of ghettos for Eastern European Jews.
This second map plots the locations of the primary and secondary SS concentration camps.
Credit for the pieces go to the New York Times.
Hugo Chávez died yesterday. He was a controversial president to be certain. Some claim he was a dictator who tolerated no opposition. But he won four elections. Some claim he helped reduce poverty and ease the suffering of the poor. But he eviscerated the middle class and private enterprise. And he has left Venezuela in a precarious situation.
With only several hours’ time to research, design, and create this infographic, I can only offer a brief overview of the Venezuela that Chávez took under his stewardship in 1999 as compared to Venezuela today. But it’s a better starting place for the dialogue than nowhere.
