Category: Illustration
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Vexing Vexillology
Happy Friday, all. As a young child, I always loved flags. I collected international ones from random places in the US. I no longer collect them, but I still love their design and was fortunate to live in a city that has a good one: Chicago. (Philadelphia and Pennsylvania, sadly, do not have good flags.)…
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Board of Modern Religious Architecture
Yesterday evening I received an e-mail about some of my work over on my Ganister website, where I try to capture, record, and preserve the history of the small quarry town in western Pennsylvania whence my grandfather came. The e-mail’s contents led me back to some old photographs I took from my trip to the…
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The Long, Winding Road
At the beginning of the week I wrote about a table as a chart, for which I designed a light-duty interactive bar chart. Tables can be great, when used well, but they are not ideal for showing trends in data—hence the term data visualisation. But today is now Friday and we made it to the…
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Back to Boston’s Beginning
And I don’t mean the city’s. No, 125 years ago today, the Boston Americans, later to be renamed the Boston Red Sox, played their first home game. Not at Fenway Park, mind you, but their original home—the Huntington Avenue Grounds. I decided to make a graphic comparing Huntington Avenue to Fenway, but could not find…
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Just a Little Annoying
To be clear, this is a comment on a hero graphic—not an actual graphic representing data. Nevertheless, it does represent the borders of states within the United States. Most obviously, because there is not a giant state called Mosquita occupying the centre of the United States. (Fun fact: there is a Mosquito Coast located in…
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The Broad Street Run
This past weekend, Philadelphia hosted the Broad Street Run, a 10-mile run from the “top” of the city’s Broad Street in the north to the end at the bottom in the Navy Yard, a length of—you guessed it—10 miles. And congratulations to my sister for not just running it for the first time, but completing…
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Damon the Bad
I guess we’re going to stick with the baseball this week. I forgot this year is the 20th anniversary of the Doug Mirabelli game. For those unfamiliar with the story, the Red Sox long employed knuckleballer Tim Wakefield, one of my all-time favourite pitchers. The knuckleball, however, is very difficult to catch because its lack…
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Words. Words. Words.
This year—and last—I have been making a more concerted effort to read more and use social media less. I just finished reading an Isaac Asimov novella, Lucky Starr the Moons of Jupiter, but that interrupted my reading of The Carpathians, a non-fiction book about the history of the northern slopes of the Carpathian Mountains—the Polish…
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An Arch to Nowhere?
Last week the New York Times published an article comparing the proposed triumphal arch by President Trump to other triumphal arches both in the United States and abroad. Firstly, it ought to be pointed out, as my title alludes, significant questions remain about the legality of the proposed arch. Personally, I’m still waiting for Infrastructure…
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Here Came the Sun
Sorry, George, had to change the verb tense. As I alluded to on Friday, today we are looking at some space weather news. This past weekend, the Sun put on a light show over Canada and northern US states with the aurora borealis. Of course the grandeur and spectacle is not a thing that comes…