Author: Brendan Barry
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Big Beautiful Ballroom
Last week the BBC published a look at the new White House ballroom promised by President Trump. The ballroom required demolishing the existing East Room. Instead of focusing on the legality of the move, I want to focus on the ever increasing cost of the project. The article does include a great before/after photograph of…
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USAI! My Eyes!
Of all things, this came to me through social media I follow for news about the Red Sox. But it’s Friday and after seeing this I definitely need a drink. The AI-made map purports to show the locations of World Cup home bases for the various competing teams. It certainly shows…uh…something. It does not take…
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Keyholes to the Memory Holes
For those who have yet to read 1984, my favourite book by my favourite author, memory holes are what the government dump data and documents into to incinerate them and remove all record of their existence. Where is your proof that chocolate production is down this year? The government then points to fabricated replacement data…
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Pain at the Pump Across the Pond
Over the past week I did a bit more driving than usual. Every single day I watched the digital display at the local Wawa tick up by a penny or two. But I read the news and see reports of fuel shortages and restrictions, especially in Europe and Asia. This morning the BBC reported on…
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Vexing Vexillology
Happy Friday, all. As a young child, I always loved flags. I collected international ones from random places in the US. I no longer collect them, but I still love their design and was fortunate to live in a city that has a good one: Chicago. (Philadelphia and Pennsylvania, sadly, do not have good flags.)…
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Unnecessary Extra Labelling
I frequently criticise labelling the data values on bar charts, a style seemingly everywhere on the internets. Labels provide precise values, but if you need to see the precise value in a graphic, you don’t really need the graphic—you need a table. Enter this interactive graphic in an article from the BBC exploring hotel bookings…
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Board of Modern Religious Architecture
Yesterday evening I received an e-mail about some of my work over on my Ganister website, where I try to capture, record, and preserve the history of the small quarry town in western Pennsylvania whence my grandfather came. The e-mail’s contents led me back to some old photographs I took from my trip to the…
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Maple Syrup Monday
This morning over breakfast I was reading an article in the Philadelphia Inquirer about Pennsylvania maple syrup production. My breakfast was oatmeal with maple syrup, cinnamon, and all space along with orange juice and a cup of tea. They talked about Pennsylvania’s production and compared it to Vermont’s, which made me want nothing more than…
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The Long, Winding Road
At the beginning of the week I wrote about a table as a chart, for which I designed a light-duty interactive bar chart. Tables can be great, when used well, but they are not ideal for showing trends in data—hence the term data visualisation. But today is now Friday and we made it to the…
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Rise of the Nutters
For most of my life I have been interested in British politics. I can recall talking with my mates about Tony Blair’s Prime Minister’s Questions (PMQs) in high school and at university. During the Brexit debate, my American friends would frequently ask me just what was going on across the pond. Through that point in…