A few weeks ago it was announced that NASA’s James Webb space telescope would see its launch delayed again. The successor to the Hubble telescope was originally supposed to launch several years ago, but now it won’t fly until at least 2021. Thankfully xkcd covered this slipping launch date.
Credit for the piece goes to Randall Munroe.
Well, football is not coming home. But the World Cup continues. And should we get another final match tied at the end of extra time, that means penalty shoot outs. Thankfully, the Economist did a nice job detailing the success rates on goal by placement of the ball.
The only thing I am unsure about is whether the dots represent the actual placement or just positioning within the aggregate zone. The colours work well together and the graphic of the goal is not overpowering.
Credit for the piece goes to the Economist Data Team.
Today is the semifinal match between England and Croatia. I could have posted this yesterday, but the US Supreme Court selection seemed more important. But today’s post is a simple scatter plot from FiveThirtyEight. It is part of a broader article comparing the four semifinalists of the World Cup. (Spoiler alert, France won its match.)
In terms of design, we can contrast this to yesterday’s dot plot about Kavanaugh. There the highlighted dot was orange with a black outline. Here, same deal. But yesterday, the other justices were shown with black dots and an empty dot for retiring Justice Kennedy. Here all the other countries in the World Cup are orange dots.
I wonder, given the orangeness of the other countries, maybe a solid black dot would have worked a little better for the four semifinalists. Or to keep the orange with black outline dots, maybe a lighter orange or grey dots for the other World Cup teams. (I think black would probably be too strong in this case.)
Overall, it shows that today’s match between England and Croatia will be tough. And should England advance, a match against France will be even tougher.
Credit for the piece goes to Bobby Gardiner.
Last night President Trump nominated Merrick Garland to fill the seat left by Anthony Kennedy. Just kidding. But he is up for a vote in the Senate. Also just kidding.
No, instead, President Trump nominated a very conservative judge for the Supreme Court, Brett Kavanaugh. How conservative? Well, FiveThirtyEight explained in a piece that plotted the judge against his probably peers on the bench, based upon one measure of judicial ideology. And it turns out, spoiler, Kavanaugh sits just to the left of Clarence Thomas. And he sits pretty well to the right.
The graphic itself is an evolution of a piece from last Friday that looked at what were thought to be the four main candidates on Trump’s shortlist.
The final piece, with only Kavanaugh plotted, removes the other potential candidates. And it functions well, using the brighter orange to draw attention from the black dots of the sitting bench and the open dot of the vacant seat. My slight issue is with the predecessor graphic that shows the four candidates.
I probably would have just left off Barrett as she did not have a score. While I have no doubt that she would score to the right based upon all the reading I have done over the past several days, it feels a bit odd to place her on the graphic at all. Instead, I probably would have used an asterisk or a footnote to say that she did not have a score and thus was not placed.
Credit for the piece goes to Oliver Roeder and Amelia Thomson-DeVeaux.
For much of the last two weeks the world has followed the drama unfolding in Thailand, where a youth football team has been trapped underground in a partially flooded cave complex. This weekend, rescuers, who had overcome a daunting challenge of simply finding them, began extracting the boys. And this graphic from the BBC shows just how challenging their extraction will be.
In particular I like this map. It illustrates both the path of the cave, but also shows how uneven the interior structure is. It does that by showing select cross sections with a person to scale. Some parts are so small and narrow that people can barely squeeze through.
Credit for the piece goes to the BBC graphics department.
When I lived in Chicago, karaoke was definitely a thing I did. Billy Joel’s Piano Man was among the songs in my repertoire. And this Friday, well, we made it to another weekend. So raise a glass, toast Indexed, and forget about life for a while.
Credit for the piece goes to Jessica Hagy.
As most of you know, I am what would have been called a loyalist. That is, I disagree with the premise of the American Revolution. People often mistake that as saying I think Americans should be British. No, although I personally would not mind that. Instead, America would likely have been a lot more like Canada and it would have obtained its independence peacefully through an organic, evolutionary process leading to, likely, some kind of parliamentary democracy.
Every year, somebody digs up articles people have written about why the Revolution was a bad idea. I have seen a lot of them. But I had not seen this Washington Post article that looked at constitutional monarchies. It was published during the whole royal baby buzz back in 2013. It examines why constitutional monarchies are not so bad, and might even be better than presidential republics.
The above graphic is far from great. The same goes for the other graphic in the article. I probably would have added more emphasis on the constitutional monarchies as they get overwhelmed by the number of non-constitutional monarchies s in the scatter plot. That could be through a brighter blue or keeping the pink and setting the rest to a light grey. I perhaps would have added a trend line.
Credit for the piece goes to Dylan Matthews.
Today is a great World Cup day. The two teams for which I am rooting are playing—thankfully not yet against each other. Later this afternoon England takes on Colombia. But this morning Sweden will play Switzerland. (Neutrality is no longer an option.) And in the spirit of Sweden, I figured I would return to my winter trip to Stockholm and dig out a graphic. This one seemed particularly relevant.
It may be difficult to read, because it is in Swedish along with being large, but it shows medieval trade routes connecting Sweden to Europe. For example, Stockholm received cloth from East Anglia in modern-day England and from Bruges in Flanders, beer from modern-day Germany, and wine from modern day France and Spain.
Even in the Medieval period, international trade was vital to the economies of the emerging European cities and states.
Credit for the piece goes to the Medieval Museum design department.
Late last week I was explaining to someone in the pub why the World Cup matches are played beyond their 90 minute booking. For those among you that do not know, basically the referees add up all the stoppage time, i.e. when play stops for things like injuries or people dilly dallying, and then tack that on to the end of the match.
But it turns out that after I explained this, FiveThirtyEight published an article exploring just how accurate this stoppage time was compared to the amount of stopped time. Spoiler: not very.
In design terms, the big takeaway was the dataset of recorded minutes of actual play in all the matches theretofore. It captured everything but the activity totals where they broke down stoppage time into categories, e.g. injuries, video review, free kicks, &c. (How those broke out across an average game are a later graphic.)
The setup is straightforward: a table organises the data for every match. The little spark chart in the centre of the table is a nice touch that shows how much of the 90 minutes the ball was actually in play. The right side of the table might be a bit too crowded, and I probably would have given a bit more space particularly between the expected and actual stoppage times. On the whole, however, the table does its job in organising the data very well.
Now I just wonder how this would apply to a baseball or American football broadcast…
Credit for the piece goes to David Bunnell.
Today is Friday. We all made it through yet another week. So let us look up into the evening sky tonight and see the Hertzsprung–Russel diagram in action. Or, we can take xkcd’s expanded version and just enjoy ourselves.
Credit for the piece goes to Randall Munroe.
