So another Wednesday, another pub trivia night. But two weekends ago, I attended the wedding of a good mate of mine down in Austin, Texas. And at his rehearsal/welcome dinner, he and his now wife had a trivia game. How well did their guests know them?
Turns out my friends and I, not so much. And I can prove it, because I documented our score after every round in my sketchbook.
Credit for this one is mine.
Yesterday Canada went to the polls for the 43rd time. Their prime minister, Justin Trudeau, has had a bad run of it the last year or so. He’s had some frivolous scandals with wearing questionable fashion choices to some more serious scandals about how he chose to colour his face in his youth to arguably the most serious scandal where an investigation concluded improperly attempted to influence a criminal investigation for political gain. (Sound familiar, American readers?) Consequently, there was some chatter about whether he would lose to the Conservatives.
But nope, Trudeau held on.
So this morning I charted some of the results. It was a bad night for Trudeau, but not nearly as bad as it could have been. He remains in power, albeit head of a minority government.
Credit for the piece goes to me.
This afternoon I am off on a flight to Austin, Texas for a friend’s wedding in nearby Kyle, Texas. Two years in a row I’ve been to Texas in October. And so that felt like a good enough reason to update my counties visited map that, according to my files, I haven’t updated since 2015.
In those four years, before I moved from Chicago to Philadelphia, I explored Wisconsin for genealogy purposes. Then after said move, I have visited Las Vegas for bachelor party—now the furthest west in the United States I have ever visited. And work trips have sent me to St. Louis and Dallas, the former of which allowed me a nice train ride from St. Louis to Chicago across central Illinois. I have also done some genealogy research up in western New York bookending a bachelor party to the Finger Lakes.
At a state level that makes 23 states visited plus two through which I’ve travelled (Connecticut and Rhode Island). Plus I’ve visited DC. Almost halfway there to visiting half the United States.
With the wedding Saturday, I am on holiday Friday. Plus, Monday is a bank holiday and so I will be posting again from Tuesday.
Another week, another Wednesday, another night of pub trivia tonight. So after several weeks of disappointing scores and placement, the last few weeks has seen us triumphantly returning to second place. And so what better way to show that than showing our rank at the end of each night.
More encouragingly, as the line chart shows, we’ve been becoming more competitive. Our number of points behind the first place team has been dropping. Last week, for example, we were only one point off from first place.
Credit for this is mine.
And now with more deaths.
On Friday, Pennsylvania reported its first death from the vaping disease spreading across the country. So I decided I would take a moment to update the map I made a month ago charting the outbreak. Then, the CDC had tallied 450 cases. Now we are at 1080. And whereas last time New England, parts of the deep South, and the Southwest were untouched, now the disease is everywhere but New Hampshire and Alaska.
But we are starting to see a pattern in a clustering of high numbers of cases around Lake Michigan and the Upper Midwest. Though I should point out these bin breakdowns come from the CDC. They did not provide more granular data.
Credit for this piece goes to me.
The British Supreme Court ruled today that Boris Johnson unlawfully advised the Queen to prorogue Parliament. And because the advice was unlawful, the act was therefore unlawful. And because the act was unlawful, the effects of said act were unlawful. And because the effects were unlawful, said effects are null and void. So, you know, prorogation never happened.
So the Prime Minister has misled the Queen. He has failed to pass all but one bill in Parliament (it was a bill for the restoration of the Palace of Westminster totally unrelated to Brexit). He lost three seats, one via a by-election and two by defecting MPs. And then he purged 21 MPs from his party to completely obliterate his working majority. In any other year, this would be cause for the immediate resignation of the Prime Minister. Instead he is sticking around in New York to give a speech about, what else, Brexit, before flying back to London tonight (Eastern US time).
So what’s next? Who really knows. This has never before happened in the history of the United Kingdom. But one possible option is that the opposition parties may hold a no confidence vote. But there will be significant pressure against that, because, as my graphic shows, any election that would likely result, would mean Brexit happening with Parliament dissolved. And that would, ahem, defeat the entire purpose of preventing a No Deal Brexit. Consequently, a no confidence vote or general election is unlikely. (Unless, the opposition and Tory rebels can agree to a non-Jeremy Corbyn caretake prime minister, e.g. Ken Clarke or Margaret Beckett.)
Regardless, get ready for a crazy day of Parliamentary procedure tomorrow.
Last week we looked at the data on Pennsylvania from the US Census Bureau and found the Commonwealth’s population is shifting from west of the Appalachians to the southeast of the state. That got me thinking about Illinois, one of three states to have experienced a decline in population. Is there a similar geographic pattern evident in that state’s data? (Plus, I lived there for eight years, so I am curious how the state evolved over a similar time frame.)
Well, it turns out the pattern is not so self-evident in Illinois as it is in Pennsylvania. Instead, we see small clusters of light blues across a sea of red. In other words, the population decline is widespread, though not necessarily extreme. However, it is notable that in the far south of the state, Alexander County, home to the city of Cairo, has seen the greatest decline in population since 2010, not just in Illinois, but in the entire United States (in percentage terms).
Unlike Pennsylvania, where the state’s primary city of Philadelphia is growing (albeit slowly), in Illinois the primary city of Chicago has seen its population shrink over the last several years. However, the counties south and west of Cook County have grown. Kendall County, where parts of Aurora and Joliet are located along with growing towns like Oswego and Plano, grew at over 11%.
The state’s other growing counties fall across the state from north to south, east to west. In the south the county containing the eastern suburbs of Carbondale has grown modestly. But for real percentage growth, one should look west towards Monroe County, a southern suburb of St. Louis, Missouri located just across the Mississippi River.
Then in the centre of the state we see growth in McLean and Champaign Counties. The former is home to Bloomington and Normal. While Champaign is home to the eponymous city as well as its neighbour, Urbana.
All in all, the pattern that emerges is that of urban/suburban vs. rural. With some notable exceptions, e.g. Cook County, the only growth in Illinois is in counties that have prominent cities or towns. Meanwhile, rural counties shrink—the aforementioned Alexander most notably.
Credit for this piece is mine.
No spoilers here, so don’t worry.
But Game of Thrones ended last night. And I might be in the minority in that I like the overall ending and direction of the plot. But, I will agree that it would have been better…executed (just a Ned Stark reference) if at least the final two series were full, 10-episode series. As it is, we’re left to ourselves to connect the dots between previous character actions and their current actions. It makes sense, but you have to really think about it. It could have been done better over time. Alas, time was the one thing they did not have.
Anyway, a lot of people think the final series was terrible. And the ratings on IMDB say just that.
Credit for the piece is mine.
Last month the US Census Bureau published their first batch of 2018 population estimates for states and counties. Pennsylvania is one of those states that is growing, but rather slowly. It will likely lose out to southern and western states in the 2020 census after which House seats will be reapportioned and electoral college votes subtracted.
From 2018 to 2010, the Commonwealth has grown 0.8%. Like I said, not a whole lot. But unlike some states (Illinois), it is at least growing. But Pennsylvania is a very diverse state. It has very rural agricultural communities and then also one of the densest and largest cities in the entire country with the whole lot in between . Where is the growth happening—or not—throughout the state? Fortunately we have county-level data to look at and here we go.
The most immediate takeaway is that the bulk of the growth is clearly happening in the southeastern part of the state, that is, broadly along the Keystone Corridor, the Amtrak line linking Harrisburg and Philadelphia. It’s also happening up north of Philadelphia into the exurbs and satellite cities.
We see two growth outliers. The one in the centre of the state is Centre County, home to the main campus of Pennsylvania State University. And then we have Butler County in the west, just north of Pittsburgh.
The lightest of reds are the lowest declines, in percentage terms. And those seem to be clustered around Scranton and Pittsburgh, along with the counties surrounding Centre County.
Everywhere else in the state is shrinking and by not insignificant amounts. Of course this data does not say where people are moving to from these counties. Nor does it say why. But come 2020, if the pattern holds, the state will need to take a look at its future planning. (Regional transit spending, I’m looking at you.)
The key problem in the Brexit deal remains what to do with the Irish border. In essence, the UK faces the same trilemma it has since the beginning. It wants three things it cannot have at the same time: exiting the EU single market and customs union, so it can create a free and independent trade policy; no hard border between Ireland and Northern Ireland, per the Good Friday Agreement that ended the Troubles; and territorial integrity, i.e. no hard border between Northern Ireland and the rest of the UK in the Irish Sea.
Essentially, the UK can choose two of these three options. Below, I have attempted to show how they relate and what the result is once two of the options have been chosen.
Credit for the piece is mine.
