Author: Brendan Barry

  • Covid-19 Update: 18 January

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    Brendan Barry
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    Last week we saw that in the weeks after Christmas, new cases and deaths rebounded in the five states of Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Delaware, Virginia, and Illinois. The question was how bad would things continue to get? Would these rebounds sustain themselves? A week later we can see a glimmer of good news in that…

  • Dove vs. Hawk

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    Brendan Barry
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    Earlier, I saw these two graphics floating around the Twitter. They each come from a major financial institution and attempt to place the voting (and non-voting members) of the Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) on a spectrum of doves to hawks or slightly less dovish. The FOMC, part of the Federal Reserve system, sets interest…

  • 2020 Election Results…

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    Brendan Barry
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    Via xkcd. It’s Friday and we’ve made it all to the end of the week. A little while back xkcd posted about the 2020 US election, showing where the votes for both candidates are approximately located. This isn’t quite funny like I normally might post on a Friday, but it felt appropriate after this week…

  • Impeachment 2: The Insurrection

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    Brendan Barry
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    Like many Americans I closely followed the outcome of yesterday’s historic vote by the House of Representatives to impeach President Trump for his incitement of an insurrection at the US Capitol in a failed coup attempt to overturn the 2020 election. Words I still never thought I’d write describing an American election. So at the…

  • Trump’s White Wall

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    Brendan Barry
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    I meant to publish this yesterday, but this piece also offers a reminder that the hardest part of a data-driven story is usually finding the data. I was unable to find a single source of data for all the numbers I needed by the time I switched on for work. And so this had to…

  • Covid-19 Update: 10 January

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    Brendan Barry
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    The last time we checked in on Covid-19 in the states of Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Delaware, Virginia, and Illinois, things were peaking across the five states. As I said then: If you look at the very tippy tip top of the curves in the other four states, we might just be seeing an inflection point.…

  • Needle Time

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    Brendan Barry
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    Yesterday was maybe the last election day for the 2020 US General Election. (There are still a few US House seats yet to be called, most notably a contested race in upstate New York.) These were a pair of runoff elections in Georgia for the state’s two US Senate seats (one for a full, six-year…

  • Difficult Descendancy Charts

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    Brendan Barry
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    The holiday break is over as your author has burned up all his remaining time for 2020 and so now we’re back to work. And that means attempting to return to a more frequent and regular posting schedule for Coffeespoons. I wanted to start with the death of Diego Maradona, a legendary Argentinian footballer. He…

  • Covid-19 Update: 13 December

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    Brendan Barry
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    So as begin to head into winter, where are we at with the spread of Covid-19 in the five states of Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Delaware, Virginia, and Illinois? Nowhere good. Let’s take a look. If you recall where we were at last week, also not great but better, cases had resumed rising post-Thanksgiving across the…

  • But What About New Zealand?

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    Brendan Barry
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    It’s time for another Friday just for fun posting. I once worked with a guy who could draw a map of the United States or the world on a whiteboard incredibly accurately. He then left it in the break room for the office to try and label correctly. This is kind of that, but in…