Author: Brendan Barry

  • The UK’s Most Popular Baby Names

    —

    by

    Brendan Barry
    in ,

    Today’s piece comes from a BBC piece that visualises the most popular baby names in the UK along with the largest winners and losers in name popularity. The article leads with the doubling of babies with the name Dua, from a singer named Dua Lipa, and more than doubling those with the name Kylo, from…

  • A Foot by Any Other Name

    —

    by

    Brendan Barry
    in ,

    Measurement systems are important. They allow us to compare objects, buy and sell goods, and get from Chicago to Philadelphia. The latter, according to Google, is 759.6 miles. Or 4,010,688 feet. But what feet? In this piece from the New York Times we get a look at the two different foot measurements used in the…

  • Double Your Hurricanes, Double Your Fun

    —

    by

    Brendan Barry
    in ,

    In a first, the Gulf of Mexico basin has two active hurricanes simultaneously. Unfortunately, they are both likely to strikes somewhere along the Louisiana coastline within approximately 36 hours of each other. Fortunately, neither is strong as a storm named Katrina that caused a mess of things several years ago now. Over the last few…

  • Reducing Postal Sort Capacity

    —

    by

    Brendan Barry
    in ,

    For my non-American audience, the United States uses a federal system under which its constituent states retain the responsibility for organising and executing elections. And so we have 50 different electoral systems. A select few use the United States Post Office (USPS) to distribute blank ballots to voters and collect them when completed. Five states…

  • Is Covid-19 Surging in New Zealand?

    —

    by

    Brendan Barry
    in , , ,

    Yesterday, President Trump claimed that Covid-19 was “surging” in New Zealand, a country widely lauded as having successfully contained and suppressed their outbreak. That has allowed Wellington to reopen large swathes of their economy without incident. Until this surge. And by surge we mean something like 30 cases in 3 days. So, let’s compare that…

  • Covid-19 Update: 16 August

    —

    by

    Brendan Barry
    in , , ,

    So here are the charts from the last week of Covid data in Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Delaware, Virginia, and Illinois. When we compare last week’s update to today’s, we can see that Pennsylvania did indeed bottom out and is back on the rise and the same can probably be said for Delaware. Although a fair…

  • Space Force Logo Pt. II

    —

    by

    Brendan Barry
    in

    Happy Friday, everyone. We’ve made it to the end of the week. Yesterday, I departed from the usual data visualisation discourse and delved into some branding/identity work. Spoilers, that’s a good part of my career as well. But I thought it would be interesting to take a look at how the armed forces branch could…

  • So Cutting Edge

    —

    by

    Brendan Barry
    in

    Space Force. Yep, that’s still a thing. I’ll spare you all the long history of Space Force, because we’ve all pointed and laughed at that enough. So much so there is a Netflix show about it. There was an old logo for Space Force, which basically was the logo for Starfleet Command. You know, the…

  • When Is an Opener Game in Baseball Really Just a Bullpen Game?

    —

    by

    Brendan Barry
    in , ,

    Whenever someone not named Eovaldi or Perez starts a Red Sox game in 2020, that’s when. We all know the Red Sox are the worst team in the American League. They have only two starters, maybe sometimes a third. And then the last two days of the regular five-day rotation cycle, manager Ron Roenicke throws…