Infographic – Page 84 – Coffee Spoons

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.

The Grenfell Fire

This weekend, the New York Times published an online piece explaining the spread of the Grenfell Tower fire in London. The story uses small animated graphics and videos to show the origin and progression of the fire from an exploding refrigerator on the fourth floor to its trapping of residents on the 23rd and final floor.

Credit for the piece goes to Troy Griggs, Mika Gröndahl, Josh Keller, Jamine C. Lee, Anjali Singhvi, Megan Specia, Derek Watkins, and Jeremy White.

Election Night Maps

My apologies for the radio silence, everybody. The day job has been super busy the last several weeks. I am hoping to return to the regular schedule next week. In the meantime, enjoy this from xkcd.

It looks like Texas, but when Houston falls into the sea

Credit for the piece goes to Randall Munroe.

The Insurance Exchanges

There is a lot to unpack about last Thursday and Sunday. But before we dive into that, a little story from the New York Times that caught my eye from Friday.

The map shows the counties in the United States where there is one health insurer and no health insurer. Further on in the piece a small multiple gallery shows that progression from 2014 and highlights how the drastic changes are seen only in 2017 and 2018.

The problem is often not that people cannot buy insurance if no insurers are in the marketplace. The marketplace is for federally-subsidised coverage and insureres appear to be moving to offering policies outside the marketplace for non-subsidised customers.

The White House claims Obamacare is in a death spiral. It is not. But after seven years it could use a little maintenance.

Credit for the piece goes to Haeyoun Park and Audrey Carlsen.