The T-14 Armata

Or the post’s sub-title could be something like, Boys with Toys, because I have long enjoyed diagrams of military hardware, like these examples. Today’s post is about Russia’s new main battle tank, the first new design since the 1970s: the T-14 Armata. It premiered in last year’s parade and is expected to enter service soon. This BBC article from last year’s parade shows the various new models expected to enter the Russian Army.

Russia's new toy
Russia’s new toy

Credit for the piece goes to the BBC graphics department.

Where is Normal America?

Not every graphic information graphic is a sexy chart or map. Sometimes tables communicate the story just as well. Maybe even better. Today’s post comes from FiveThirtyEight, which examined a claim about what places represent “Normal America”. Turns out that when one looks at the data, here age, race, ethnicity, and education, Normal America is found in the eastern half of the country. And it includes some big cities, notably both Philadelphia and Chicago. The whole article is worth a read, as it goes on exploring states representing Normal America and then places that represent 1950s America.

Where is Normal America?
Where is Normal America?

So where is Normal America? New Haven, Connecticut.

Credit for the piece goes to Jed Kolko.

Trump Knocks out Cruz

Donald Trump will be the Republican Party candidate for President of the United States.

Last summer I never imagined I would type those words in all seriousness, but after Trump won a majority of the votes in Indiana and likely swept all the delegates there, Ted Cruz suspended his campaign.

Two graphics strike my mind to best capture the story. The first is from last summer when FiveThirtyEight added Donald Trump to an existing graphic that loosely mapped out which candidates belonged to which factions of the Republican Party.

Trump was the exception in so many ways…
Trump was the exception in so many ways…

You can clearly see Donald Trump falls as an outlier at the extreme end of the Tea Party circle. This would be the argument that Trump is not a true conservative. But how did that argument play out over the following months?

Well this New York Times results map breaks down results to the county level. And you can see a lot of Trump red.

Results as of 4 May
Results as of 4 May

It started with wins in New Hampshire and, more importantly South Carolina. Candidates try to win Iowa and New Hampshire and whatever other states there are prior to Super Tuesday, because Super Tuesday requires a ground game that is expensive to maintain. And early victories lead to donations. But Trump’s crushing victory in South Carolina led to a series of wins in the deep Republican red South.

Importantly for this last phase of the contest, the Cruz campaign had bet on winning those very same southern states, the Bible Belt. While Cruz won Texas, it was his home state, he lost almost every other state. The map above shows just how wide and diverse Trump’s victories were. From liberal Massachusetts to Alabama and as far west as Arizona. The final one-two blow, however, came in the above map’s deepest reds: a swath from Rhode Island through Connecticut and New York into Pennsylvania then south into Delaware and Maryland. Trump was favoured in the Northeast and Mid-Atlantic, but most had not expected those margins. The second blow, look at the deep red in Indiana. Cruz needed to win Indiana. He lost it big. And now he has stepped aside.

Donald Trump will be the Republican Party candidate for President of the United States.

The Quadrants of Trump

My apologies to you for the blog being down the last week and a half. This is what happens when I get 33,000 spam comments in the span of 24 hours: the blog crashes. Rest assured, I have lots of things to post.

But for today, we are picking up after a yuuugge night for Donald Trump so let’s get on with the data visualisations. Trump decisively won Connecticut, Delaware, Maryland, Pennsylvania, and Rhode Island with a majority of votes in every state. As he made sure to point out, winning 50–60% in a three-way race is quite difficult to do. Simply put, Cruz and Kasich got destroyed.

Why is that? Well a few days ago—can you tell I meant to post this then?—David Wasserman over at FiveThirtyEight posted an insightful article about the various counties thus far contested and how, when divided into quadrants based on socioeconomics and conservativeness, Trump has won three out of four quadrants. The whole article is worth the read.

The Quadrants of Trump
The Quadrants of Trump

Credit for the piece goes to David Wasserman.

Where’s the Cold Weather?

I prefer colder weather to warmer weather. I like to feel a bit of chill on my skin rather than a bit of warmth. This makes me that asshole who says “it’s great out today”, when the temperature is 5ºC (41ºF). (I also enjoy grey, cloudy days, but that’s a different matter entirely.) Anyway, thanks to a friend of mine I could take a look at some temperature maps of the contiguous United States.

High temperatures between 32º and 60ºF
High temperatures between 32º and 60ºF

The Pacific Northwest or the coast of the Mid-Atlantic and New England would be great along with the desert and the mountains. But, don’t deserts get hot? Because the whole point would be to not live somewhere too warm. So here’s a map of the number of days where I prefer to sit inside and crank the air conditioning.

Way too hot
Way too hot

Basically I should avoid the South, the deserts and the plains states of the Midwest. Chicago looks borderline uncomfortable. (And from experience, summers typically are.)

Credit for the piece goes to Christopher Ingraham.

Impeaching Rousseff

Who is Rousseff? She is the president of Brazil and both she and her government are currently mired in a corruption scandal. Yesterday a parliamentary committee voted in favour of proceeding with impeachment, the first step in a lengthy process. What is that process? Thankfully, we have a BBC graphic to explain it all.

Brazil's impeachment process
Brazil’s impeachment process

Credit for the piece goes to the BBC graphics department.

Design and Data Visualisation

Today’s piece features a critique of the data visualisation world from Christopher Ingraham at the Washington Post. It centres on the difference between these two maps. The one on the left is Ingraham’s and the one on the right from the Pew Charitable Trusts.

Spot the difference
Spot the difference

I do not want to spoil or ruin the article for you—it’s a short read after all. But the crux of the argument, which I believe extends beyond maps, is that despite the proliferation of tools to visualise data, one still needs to understand the principles behind it to create meaningful work. Anybody can put words to paper—look at this blog after all—but the truly great writers have the education and the experience to move and motivate people. And the same holds true for designers of data visualisation. And designers even more broadly.

If I have to add one design critique to Ingraham’s work, I would also add that design decisions like colours and map type also play a role in creating legible pieces. The grey lines in the Pew map versus the white lines in the Post’s make it difficult to read the colours in the smaller, eastern counties of the United States.

Credit for the Washington Post piece goes to Christopher Ingraham.

Credit for the Pew Charitable Trusts piece goes to Pew’s graphics department.

What Comprises Planet Nine

Well, to start, we don’t really know for sure. We also don’t really know Planet Nine exists for sure. But, you plug its existence into mathematical models and it explains some of the quirks we see in the Kuiper Belt, the cloud of dust and ice at the outer reaches of the Solar System. A team of intrigued Swiss scientists then created a model exploring the range of characteristics Planet Nine might exhibit. The BBC published an article that featured an image of the interior characteristics of the plent.

The possible interior of the possible Planet Nine
The possible interior of the possible Planet Nine

Credit for the graphic goes to Christoph Mordasini and Esther Linder.