Author: Brendan Barry
-
21st Century Prohibition
This map comes from the BBC, which investigates prohibition in the 21st century at the local level, as the national policy ended in the early decades of the 20th century. Credit for the map goes to John Walton, Harjit Kaura, and Nadzeya Batson.
-
The Science of Cherry Blossoms
The Washington Post explains the science—or is it art—of the cherry blossom in D.C. though an illustrated video. Certainly this is literally more illustrative in concept than some other posts here, but the illustrations nonetheless match the audio explanations and parallel nicely with the aesthetic qualities of the cherry trees. Drawings by Patterson Clark and…
-
Heritage Maps
From FlowingData comes a post to an interactive piece by Bloomberg that looks at the geographic distribution of different heritage—read heritage, neither race nor ethnicity—groups. (Its choice of groups, however, is slightly contentious as it omits several important ones, including African-Americans.) I would say that a typical map like this would simply plot the percent…
-
Bringing 19th Century Mapping Techniques to the 21st Century
Charles Booth was a 19th century social scientist living in Britain. He famously investigated poverty and mapped out which parts of London were teeming with vicious, lower-class criminals or well-to-do upper class folks. Today, one might use a simple choropleth style to paint whole swathes of London by postal districts or constituencies or some such.…
-
Happy St. Patrick’s Day
A day early given the weekend…so yeah, I’m (mostly) Irish-American. So this post is for the (extended) family.
-
What’s Your Drug of Choice?
Over at the Guardian, people are playing with data about drug use. The data comes from the Global Drug Survey, and Ian Taylor and the Guardian worked together to create this interactive piece that lets you either browse drug use comparisons between Americans and Brits or compare two specific drugs between our two peoples. It…
-
Busting Bunkers
There is quite a lot of talk these days about the possibility of Israel, either with or without American assistance, launching an attack on Iran to halt the further development of its nuclear programme. The trouble is that Israel may not have the weapons necessary to carry out a successful attack, but the US has…