Brendan Barry – Page 85

London in Small Multiple Form

You all know that I love small multiples. And we have been seeing them more often as representations of the United States. But today we look at a small multiple map of London. The piece comes from the Economist and looks at the declining numbers of pubs in London. With the exception of the borough of Hackney, boroughs all across London are seeing declines, though the outer boroughs have seen the largest declines.

The only thing that does not work for me is the bubble in each tile that represents the number of pubs. That gets lost easily among the blue backgrounds. Additionally, the number itself might suffice.

Credit for the piece goes to the Economist graphics department.

Home Run Distance

Apologies for the lack of posts recently. Allow me to blame work, travel, and sickness. But let’s get back on track this week—for me now a short one—with this post from FiveThirtyEight about the distances travelled by home runs.

The piece uses data up to the All Star break, and looks at how far the home runs would have travelled. Of course, the data set is fairly recent in terms of tracking just how far home runs went. That is, there’s nothing for Ted Williams or Babe Ruth. But this screenshot from the article is Seattle slugger Nelson Cruz.

Cruz has left the yard. And also downtown Seattle

Personally, I would have loved to have seen one for David Ortiz.

Credit for the piece goes to Neil Paine.

Not Alone for Trivia

Well after the last two weeks of recording solo trivia performances, I decided that this week I would showcase a team effort.

And we finally placed, ending the performance tied for first place. But if you look closely you will see the final score has us at second. Why when we were tied with the same number of points? Because tiebreaker. And after I was selected to represent the team, I needed to respond, within three seconds, with the names of Tom Hanks films in a back-and-forth response.

I could name only Saving Private Ryan and Castaway. My competitor, she named three. They won.

Another Solo Pub Trivia Performance

This past Wednesday I once again ended up playing trivia at the pub solo. Once again, I decided over the final pint that I would attempt to visualise my performance.

One thing to keep in mind is that on Wednesday there were fewer teams competing—five instead of nine. And while I never placed higher than tied for third, this week’s bar charts show how I was incredibly competitive until the final music round.

Music and celebrity are clearly not my strong suits

Despite an abysmal performance at naming celebrities as they were as children, my near-perfect second round kept me only five points behind first place. And a perfect fourth round meant heading into that final round I climbed back to being only three points back. Thankfully I knew more of the songs this past week. And enough to not finish last. But, I was close enough that a perfect round would have been enough to still place first.

Super helpful that Lord of the Rings questions appeared a few times.

Clear the Cache

Some of the aforementioned work that has been keeping me busy is the design of a new part of a website. And one of the most common things I hear when I ask why something is not displaying as I intended is “Have you cleared the cache?”. And that is why this Friday’s piece from xkcd is super relevant to me.

I could have used this table earlier this week

Credit for the piece goes to Randall Munroe.

The Donald and The Donald Subreddit

I don’t use Reddit. But things begin to made sense for me in this article from the Economist as it explained the origins behind Trump’s weird tweet of himself beating up a CNN-headed wrestler.

Unfortunately I don't understand how Reddit works well enough to make full sense of these — Unfortunately I don’t understand how Reddit works well enough to make full sense of these

I think the thing perhaps lacking from the graphic is a line that tracks Trump’s approval or popularity. The article mentions that explicitly and it would be interesting to see that track over time. Although I certainly understand how stacking so many line charts above each other could become difficult to compare.

And my final critique are the Election Day outliers. They are above the y-axis maximum. But I wonder if there couldn’t have been a way of handling the outlier-ness of the datapoints while remaining true to the chart scales.

Credit for the piece goes to the Economist graphics department.

Confidence in the US President

From those surveyed around the world.

The Pew Research Centre surveyed international respondents about their confidence in Donald Trump vs. Barack Obama. The Economist took those results and visualised them. And the results, well they kind of speak for themselves. But make sure to click through the link for the rest of the graphic.

That's a lot of declining values — That’s a lot of declining values

Credit for the piece goes to the Economist graphics department.

Pub Trivia Performance

Wednesday night I had the dubious honour of playing the weekly pub trivia solo. Accordingly my team name was Hats Solo. (After I opted not to wear my fedora one night, another regular team called itself Where’s Your Hat?) I started strong, had a second wind, but still faded to a seventh place (of nine) finish. As I finished my G&T, I decided I would visualise the results. Here, two days later, are my results.

History and geography are usually my strong suits

Credit for the highlights, mine. The lowlights, someone else.

Brexit One Year On

I still remember where I was on 23 June 2016 as the Brexit referendum results were coming in—drunk at a karaoke bar (for celebrating the end of a softball season) talking with a guy from Manchester about how the hell Britain could be voting to leave the European Union.

Fast forward a year (and a week) and where is the United Kingdom today? Well, still in the European Union. Though Article 50, the formal mechanism by which a country leaves the EU, was invoked in March, the UK remains part of the EU for at least two more years. But the vote has had some effects.

The Economist put together a nice piece explaining these effects by pairing chart and explanatory text.

We're at T plus One — We’re at T plus One

I really like the concept and the layout. However, the charts themselves probably could use some additional vertical space—difficult to tell for certain—to allow the smaller variations to show. But that would almost certainly mean changing the layout to accommodate for greater white space around the text boxes. Tricky, but I think it would be an improvement.

Credit for the piece goes to the Economist graphics department.

High-rise Living

I was reading my print edition of the Economist last night and found this graphic—screenshot from the online version—about the rising importance of skyscrapers in the urban landscape.

The article was written after the Grenfell Tower inferno and looks at things that could be done to improve safety in high-rises.

Naturally, I was reading this on my 11th story balcony in the high-rise tower block in which I live.

Credit for the piece goes to the Economist graphics department.