This weekend I read a neat little article from the BBC about astronauts’ lives aboard the International Space Station (ISS). This comes on the heels of two NASA astronauts being left on the station due to some uncertainty about their Boeing spacecraft’s safety. The article featured a number of annotated photographs and illustrations, but this was my favourite.
The designers do a nice job of highlighting the particular components/sections of the station. This was my favourite as they darkened the non-relevant sections—looking at you solar panels.
Credit for the piece goes to the BBC graphics department.
For those of you living under a rock, 2024 is a presidential election year in the United States and the campaign for the November election truly kicks off post-Labour Day. And post-Labour Day here we are.
Tonight features a presidential debate between the two candidates, Vice President Kamala Harris and former president Donald Trump. Harris looks to be the first sitting vice president to win election since 1988 and Trump the first non-consecutive, two-term president since Grover Cleveland, who lost his election in 1888 only to return to office four years later.
Philadelphia has long played an outsized role in the constitutional construction of the nation given the city’s primacy in the 18th and early 19th centuries. But despite the city’s hosting of the debate, its first opportunity in nearly 50 years, the Commonwealth, a critical swing state in the electoral college, will be won in the suburbs and the smaller cities.
Enter this article about the growing role of Harrisburg’s suburbs. Harrisburg sits on the left bank of the Susquehanna River, one of the world’s oldest rivers, and is the Commonwealth’s capital, despite hearing innumerable times when I lived in Chicago that the capital was either Philadelphia or Pittsburgh. After all, someone has to referee between the East Coast in Philadelphia, (arguably) the Midwest in Pittsburgh, and the Commonwealth’s middle. A middle described at times as Pennsyltucky or sometimes as Trumpsylvania, but forever best known by James Carville’s quote, “between Paoli and Penn Hills, Pennsylvania is Alabama without the Blacks” or simplified to Pennsylvania is Philadelphia and Pittsburgh with Alabama in the middle.
Harrisburg, located within Dauphin County, is one of the few growing regions of the Commonwealth. And as I pointed out in my 2020 piece about Trumpsylvania, Dauphin County is one of the few counties in south-central Pennsylvania bucking the trend of the Trumpification of Pennsyltucky, the T that sits across the top of the Commonwealth. I have not updated my analysis since the 2020 election, but just venture west of Paoli, as Carville suggested, and you will see the reddest of red counties. But not in Dauphin.
The Inquirer’s article examines the shifting electoral demographics in detail, focusing more on Cumberland County, which sits across the Susquehanna from Harrisburg in a far redder county. Granted, as my analysis showed from 2000 to 2016, Cumberland moved significantly Democratic, but in 2024 I think it best considered a stretch target.
In this choropleth map we can see the change in results at the precinct level. Anecdotally from stories I hear in Philadelphia, this makes sense given the growth in the suburbs around Harrisburg. And given Pennsylvania’s rural population continues to shrink and its urban and suburban populations continue to grow, the long-term success of Democrats will likely be tied to getting places like Dauphin to deepen in their blue and Cumberland to become a bit more purply of a red.
Credit for the Inquirer piece goes to Aseem Shukla.
For the last few weeks I have been working on my portfolio site as I update things. (Note to self, do not wait another 15 years before embarking upon such an update.)
At the University of the Arts (requiescat in pace), I took an information design class wherein I spent a semester learning about the electricity generation market in the Philadelphia region. This became a key part of my portfolio when I applied for 99 jobs at the beginning of the Great Recession, had 3 interviews, and only 1 job offer.
That job offer lead me to Chicago and Euromonitor International where one of the first projects I worked on was a datagraphic about throat share, i.e. what drinks products/brands people in different countries drank. Essentially, I took what I learned about visualising the share of electricity generation in Pennsylvania to the share of drinks consumption across the world. Thus a career was born. Fast forward 15 years and I wanted to see how that electricity generation had changed. And I can do that because I used a public source in the US Energy Information Administration.
Anecdotally, Pennsylvanians know fracking for natural gas has been a boon to the former coal and steel parts of the Commonwealth, which really is a lifeline. But overall, Pennsylvania has long been known as a nuclear power state. More on that from a personal standpoint in a later post. Back in the uphill both ways to university day, I did not look at the United States overall. But now I can.
Largely this fits with the narratives I know. Coal has plummeted both in the Commonwealth and more broadly as natural gas has largely taken its place. No, that’s not great from a climate change perspective, but natural gas is definitely better than coal.
Renewables, nationally speaking, are now about 20% or 1/5th our net electricity generation. But in Pennsylvania, whilst this Monday morning might be a bright and blue sky day great for solar power, the nights are getting longer and we get a lot of clouds. We do have some hydroelectric dams—it helps to be a partially mountainous state. And, yes, we do have the wind farms along the Allegheny Ridge, one of the windiest spots along the East Coast, but for context one of the two nuclear reactors near to which I grew up is equal to almost the entire wind power electricity generation in the entire Commonwealth.
But for all the supposed growth in renewables, we just are not seeing it in Pennsylvania, at least not at a scale to supplant fossil fuels. And unfortunately, it is not as if demand is falling. And that might be why we are seeing quiet talks about reactivating some of Pennsylvania’s shuttered nuclear reactors. If you could bump that nuclear share of electric throat back up to 40% or even 50%, you could cut down that natural gas usage significantly.
Congratulations on making it to Friday. Though it was a short week for my American audience.
Now that the State’s Labour Day holiday has passed, the 2024 electoral season can begin in earnest. And to begin the insanity we have a helpful graphic from xkcd.
Clearly I’m not cut out for high office with a name of seven letters.
We’re about to go into the sportsball realm, readers. Baseball, specifically.
Tuesday night, Atlanta Braves batter Whit Merrifield was hit in the back of the head by a 95 mph fastball. Luckily, modern ballplayers wear helmets. But at that velocity, one does not have the most reaction time in the world a number of other batters have been hit in the face. And generally, that’s not good. Merrifield went off in post-game interviews about the lack of accountability on the pitchers’ side. From my perspective as an armchair ballplayer, back in my day, when I walked up hill through the snow both ways to get to my one-room schoolhouse, if you hit a batter, our pitcher was hitting one of yours.
I have noticed in ballgames, however, I see hit-by-pitch (HBP) more often—and I score most ballgames I attend, so I have records. But I also know a handful attended per year makes for a very small sample size. Nonetheless, I know I have talked to other baseball friends and brought up that I think pitchers throw with less command, i.e. throwing strikes, than they used to, because I see more HBP in the box scores. And when I go to minor league ballgames, which I do fairly often, HBP seems on the rise there, which means in future years those same pitchers will likely be in the majors.
So yesterday morning, I finally took a look at the data and, lo and behold, indeed, since my childhood, the numbers of HBPs has increased.
There is one noticeable sharp dip and that is the 2020 COVID-shortened season. Ignore that one. And then a smaller dip in the mid-90s represents the 114-game and 144-game seasons, compared to the standard 162 per year. Nonetheless, the increase is undeniable.
There is a general dip in the curve, which occurs in the late 200s and early 2010s, with its nadir in 2012. Without doing more research, that was probably the peak of pitchers, who could command—throw strikes—and control—put their strikes where they want in the strike zone—their pitches at the sacrifice of velocity.
2014 saw the rise of the dominant Royals bullpen, which changed the course of modern baseball. Stack your bullpen with a number of power arms who throw 100 mph and just challenge batters to hit the speedball. Problem is, not everyone who can throw 100 knows where that speedball is going. And that leads to more batters being hit.
Merrifield is correct in his assessment that until pitchers and teams face consequences for hitting batters, we are not likely to see a decrease in HBPs. Or at least not until velocity is de-emphasised for some other reason. What if there were a rule a pitcher who hits a batter from the shoulder up is immediately ejected? What if a long-term injury for a batter is tied to a long-term roster removal for the pitcher? If, say, the batter hit in the head is out for a month with a concussion, the same pitcher is on the restricted list for a month?
Have I worked through any of these ideas in depth? Nope. Just spitballing here on ye olde blog. But as my chart shows, it does not look like this potentially life-changing problem in the game is going away anytime soon.
Yesterday I wrote about a BBC graphics locator map that was perhaps not as helpful as possible. Well today I want to talk about another BBC map, though not in as critical a fashion.
I landed upon this map whilst reading a series of updates about last month’s anti-immigrant riots throughout the United Kingdom—principally England.
The graphic uses small multiples of a cropping of the United Kingdom, excluding most of Northern Ireland and a good bit of Scotland. Red dots highlight where, on a particular date, far-right riots erupted. As the reader moves further into time, the red dots become a dark grey.
In general, I think this graphic works really well. The designer does not label every city and town as it’s not necessary so long as you hit the big and most notable ones. Nonetheless I have two peccadilloes with the graphic.
First, and the minor of the two, is the grey dots could perhaps be toned down a wee bit. Or fade as tints as they recede into the past.
Secondly, the note at the bottom of the graphic indicates “[t]here were no recorded incidents of unrest on Thursday 1 August”. Correspondingly, the graphic lacks a map for 1 August. If I had designed the graphic, I would have included a blank map for that date, because its emptiness could tell part of the story as sometimes nothing is something.
A blank map on Thursday could show that a brief flare up after the incident in Southport had, at best, burned out or, at worst, cooled to a simmer. Something then happened likely Friday night—after a day with only two reported incidents—or Saturday morning, which prompted a weekend of riots and destruction across the United Kingdom.
What could that be? Social media. Surprise, surprise. The BBC had a good article about the potential inflammatory aspect of social media posts on the reignition of the hatred the weekend of 3–4 August. Imagine a blank map for 1 August and a caption that notes a series of posts on, say, 2 or 3 August, followed by the red dots all across northern England.
As I said at the outset, however, I like the piece overall. Just a few small tweaks and the piece really could have hit home on just how bad things were in parts of the United Kingdom at the end of July and early August.
Credit for the piece goes to the BBC graphics department.
In the grand scheme of things, this graphic is not the end of the world. On the other hand, it is probably more than half of the world. In particular, I am talking about this graphic from a BBC article about a recent helicopter crash on the Kamchatka Peninsula in Russia’s Far East.
As you can see, Kamchatka extends from the eastern tip of Sibera at the Bering Strait southward towards Hokkaido, the northern-most large island of Japan.
But the thing is…this map is supposed to locate Kamchatka and the crash site of Vachkazhets, but if you look closely at the inset map of the world in the lower left, you can see that the audience is being zoomed into…more than half the world.
I am left to wonder about the efficacy of the map in clarifying the precise location of the crash site. To be fair, Kamchatka is very, very far away from Moscow, probably the city of reference most readers would recognise. But what if instead of a map including India and the Sahara Desert—not at all close to Russia—the map simply cropped in tighter on Russia? Yes, you lose the Kaliningrad Oblast, the little bit of Russia cut off from the rest of the country by the Baltic states, but contextually I think that acceptable.
Or, what if the map took a different approach and omitted Moscow as the point of reference and instead highlighted another global city, like Tokyo, Seoul, or Beijing? After all, those are also all far closer than Moscow.
Ultimately, however, the map irked me because of a glaring error. No, the map does not colour the Crimean Peninsula yellow despite its annexation by Russia. I am perfectly fine with that given the illegality of said annexation, however, after a decade of administration I think there is an argument to be made that Crimea is now administratively more Russian than Ukrainian.
No, all the way in the east, the very edge of the Eurasian continent is grey. But that is also part of Russia. I crudely coloured it—along with part of a larger island—in for you to help you see. There may be some smaller islands that are also grey—most certainly are—but the resolution of the map makes it too difficult to tell for certain.
All in all this just seems like a sloppy locator map. So sloppy I am not sure it even adds value to the article.
Credit for the piece goes to the BBC graphics team.
Back in autumn 2023 I shared a map with which I keep track of where I’ve visited (and driven/ridden through). In the months since I’ve visited a few new places and decided to update the map.
Most importantly, last autumn I visited Keane, New Hampshire for a day and so crossed the state off the list—not that visiting all 50 states has been or is today a goal of mine. Additionally, I came upon a photograph of me as a young lad in Wilmington, North Carolina. Can I recall being there? No. But I definitely was. So I added that county to the map.
Finally, in terms of new counties visited, I travelled out to Erie, Pennsylvania this past spring to witness the solar eclipse. I had never been to the far opposite corner of the Commonwealth and so coloured that eponymous county purple.
Of course on the day of the eclipse, the sky opened up and rain fell throughout breakfast. Consequently I got into my car and drove west like any proper young man until I found blue skies overhead and Ohio underneath. The eclipse was fantastic and those long-term readers should know that I have a card waiting to go to press, but am waiting for the funding of employment before going into production.
Finally, on my return from Erie, I purchased tickets to enjoy some Red Sox minor league baseball in Reading, Pennsylvania. I opted to enjoy a scenic drive instead of taking the interstates with which I am very familiar. And with that I coloured a number of western Pennsylvania counties in light purple.
I initially made this datagraphic over the weekend, after watching the last few weeks of Boston Red Sox baseball wherein they continued to win a game, lose a game, resulting in an even .500 record.
When I started, the graphic I sketched looked very different as I had included timelines and highlighted key moments where key players went down for the year or the year-to-date. But after I added some context of the sport’s leading clubs’ games above or below .500, I realised most of those clubs were all those that my good friends and family followed.
Consequently I ditched my initial concept and opted to instead show how middling my Red Sox have been to the rest of them. And whilst this graphic may have a few more spaghetti lines than I’d typically prefer, it does show that squiggle of consistency in the middle that is the Red Sox 2024 season to date.
Of course, when I posted it, the Red Sox had just lost to the Yankees and I said I expected them to win one and lose one the rest of the weekend to stay at .500. So what happened? The Red Sox won both and are now two games over .500.
Baseball superstition thus requires I post more graphics about the .500 Red Sox to get them more games over .500.
It’s been a little while since my last post, and more on that will follow at a later date, but this weekend I glanced through the Pennsylvania Liquor Control Board’s annual report. For those unfamiliar with the Commonwealth’s…peculiar…alcohol laws, residents must purchase (with some exceptions) their wine and spirits at government-owned and -operated shops.
It’s as awful as it sounds. Compare that to my eight years in Chicago, where I could pick up a bottle of wine at a cheese shop at the end of the block for a quiet night in or a bottle of fine Scotch a few blocks from the office on Whisky Friday for that evening’s festivities. Here all your wine and spirits come from the state store.
And whilst it’s awful from a consumer/consumption standpoint, it makes for some interesting data, because we can largely use that one source to get a sense of the market for wine and spirits in the Commonwealth. That is to say, you don’t need to (really) worry about collecting data from hundreds of other large vendors. Consequently, at the end of the fiscal year you can get a glimpse into the wine and spirit landscape in Pennsylvania.
So what do we see this year?
To start I chose to revisit a choropleth map I made in 2020, just before the pandemic kicked off in the United States. Broadly speaking, not much has changed. You can find the highest per 21+ year old capita value sales—henceforth I’ll simply refer to this as per capita—outside Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, and up in the northeast corner of the Commonwealth.
The great thing about per capita sales are that, by definition, it accounts for population. So this isn’t just that because Philadelphia and Pittsburgh are the largest two metropolitan areas they have the largest value sales—though they do in the aggregate as well. In fact, if we look at the northeast of the Commonwealth in places like Wayne County we see the second highest per capita sales, just under the top-ranked in Montgomery County.
Wayne County’s population, at least of the legal drinking age, is flat comparing 2018 to 2022: 0.0% or just six people. However, sales over that same period are up 20.2% per person. That’s the 15th greatest increase out of 67 counties. What happened?
A little thing called Covid-19. During the pandemic, significant numbers of higher-income people from New York and Philadelphia bought second properties in Wayne County and, surely, they brought some of that income and are now spending it on wine and high-priced spirits.
Wayne County stands out starkly on the map, but it does not look like a total outlier. Indeed, if you look at the highest growth rates for per capita sales from 2018 to 2022, you will find them all in the more rural parts of the Commonwealth. Furthermore, almost every county that has seen greater than 15% growth is in a county whose drinking-age population has shrunk in the last five years.
Overall, however, the map looks broadly similar to how it did at the beginning of 2020. The top and centre of the Commonwealth have relatively low per capita sales, and this is Appalachia or Pennsyltucky as some call it. Broadly speaking, these are more rural counties and counties of lower income.
I spend a little bit of time out in Appalachia each year and have family roots out in the mountains. And my experience casts one shadow on the data. Personally, I prefer my cocktails, whiskies, and gins. But when I go out for a drink or two out west, I often settle for a pint or two. That part of the Commonwealth strikes me as more fond of beer than wine or spirits. And this dataset does not include beer. I have to wonder how the data would look if we included beer sales—though lower price-point session beers would still probably keep the per capita value sales on the lower end given the broad demographics of the region.
Finally, one last note on that second call out, Potter County having the lowest per capita sales at just under $42 per person. The number struck me as odd. The next lowest county, Fulton, sits nearly $30 more per person. Did I copy and paste the data incorrectly? Was there a glitch in the machine? Is the underlying data incorrect? I can’t say for certain about the third possibility, but I did some digging to try and hit the bottom of this curiosity.
First, you need to understand that Potter County is, by population, the 5th smallest with just over 16,000 total people living there. And as far as I can tell, it had just three stores at the beginning of 2022. But then, before the beginning of the new fiscal year, one of the three stores closed when an adjoining building collapsed. It was never rebuilt. And so perhaps 1/3 of the local population was forced to head out-of-county for wine and spirits. Compared to 2018, per capita sales in Potter County declined by 62%, and most of that is within the last year as the annual report lists the year-on-year decline as just under 54%.
In coming days and weeks I’ll be looking at the data a bit more to see what else it tells us. Stay tuned.
