So last week I mentioned Pennsyltucky in my blog post about Pennsylvania’s forthcoming importance in the election. And then on Friday I shared a humourous illustrated map of Pennsylvania that led into an article on Pennsyltucky. But where exactly is it?
Luckily for you, I spent a good chunk of my weekend trying to find some data on Pennsylvania and taking a look at it. You can see and read the results over on a separate page of mine.
Today’s post is just a little scatter plot today of my own creation. I was interested to see which countries fall outside the mainstream when it comes to economic and political freedom, as measured by the Heritage Foundation and Freedom House, respectively.
Those are certainly not the only indices that I could have chosen, however, they were admittedly the easiest to find and use. Despite the fact the one dataset still contained data on such mythical places as Czechoslovakia, East Germany, and the Soviet Union.
That all said, my apologies for the graphics not quite being super clean. I am working on some new things and so this post is at best only a partially successful experiment.
Freedom and Liberty
Economic Freedom
100
Both Economically and Politically Free
Economically Free but Politically Not
Singapore
New Zealand
Switzerland
80
Australia
Bahrain
Qatar
Saudi Arabia
60
Micronesia
Ukraine
Kiribati
Argentina
40
Zimbabwe
Venezuela
Cuba
20
Neither Economically nor Politically Free
Politically Free but Not Economically
North Korea
0
0
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
Political Freedom
Sources
Heritage Foundation
Freedom House
Brendan Barry
brendanbarry.com
coffeespoons.me
brendan.barry@gmx.com
I spent the weekend in Ganister, Pennsylvania (shameless plug, you can learn more about the town on the website I built for it) where my immediate family gathers for Easter. The Orthodox version was obviously far later than the Catholic version this year. When here I try to do research on the town and the families who lived there. One of my long-standing projects includes researching the history of the church of my ancestors, St. Mary’s Holy Assumption Church. I wanted to understand who were the pastors over the almost 100 years the church was open. In a local library I found copies of a few anniversary service souvenirs and I used that to create this first draft of that timeline.
Alaska Airlines and Virgin America made some news the past few days when they announced Alaska would purchase Virgin America for $2.6 billion. I mapped out the flight routes of the two carriers to see where they overlapped. You can see the results in my piece for the blog today below.
Credit for the work is mine, except the underlying map, which I sourced from Brigham Young University Geography Department.
Another Tuesday, more primary and caucus victories for Donald Trump in his quest to become the Republican nominee. However one of the refrains you hear from the right is that he is not a true conservative. How true is that? Well the BBC put together an article comparing Trump to the other candidates and some previous Republican presidents on various issues like foreign policy.
Okay, so it sort of works with cutout photos of people pasted onto an American flag background. But I cannot quite take the piece seriously because of its amateurish design. Maybe the American flag makes sense as a background graphic? But the heads? Surely not.
So what happens if we take a more serious approach—though I admit originally the idea of a Trump candidacy seemed farcical—to this graphic? Well I took a quick stab this morning.
Credit for the original goes to the BBC graphics department.
As I mentioned earlier this week, I visited London for work for a week and then took some rollover holiday time to stay around London and then visit Dublin. But now I am back. And this week that has meant all the jet lag. And while everybody experiences jet lag and recovers from it differently, I wanted to take a look at my experience. The data and such is below. But the basic point, it is about four days before I return to normal.
What is missing, unfortunately, is the Chicago-to-London data. Because anecdotally, that was far, far worse than the return flight.
Credit is my own.
I know, I know. You probably expect some sort of climate post given the whole Paris thing. But instead, this morning I came across an article where the supporting chart failed to tell the story. So today we redesign it.
The BBC has an article about MPs backing a tax on sugary drinks. Within the text is a graphic showing the relative importance of sugary drinks in the sugar consumption of various demographics. Except the first thing I see is alcohol—not the focus of the article. Then I focus on a series of numbers spinning around donuts, which are obviously sugary and bad. Eventually I connect the bright yellow to soda. Alas, bright yellow is a very light colour and fails to hold its own on the page. It falls behind everything but milk products.
So here is 15 minutes spent on a new version. Gone are the donuts, replaced by a heat map. I kept the sort of the legend for my vertical because it placed soda at the top. I ran the demographic types horizontally. The big difference here is that I am immediately drawn to the top of the chart. So yeah, soda is a problem. But so are cakes and jams, you British senior citizens. Importantly, I am less drawn to alcohol, which in terms of sugars, is not a concern.
Credit for the original goes to the BBC graphics department. The other one is mine.
Turkey held its elections over the weekend. And so on the way to work this morning I decided to check the results on the BBC. And I saw this graphic—screenshot from my phone.
So I decided to scrap today’s blog post and instead spend all of five minutes tweaking this to make it a bit clearer. Or, a lot clearer. Simple little tweaks can make all the difference in data clarity. Now you can visually see the scale of difference in the votes. You also don’t need to refer to a legend off to the side with tints of the same colour.
Credit for the original piece goes to the BBC graphics department.
In January 2011, I made a map of counties I had visited in my life. I just rediscovered the file last weekend, and so today I decided to update the map. So below is 2011 and then after is 2015.
I have returned from my trip up north to Minnesota and Wisconsin. Unfortunately, from the research side it was not the most successful of trips. I did find some records, but none that answered any of the big questions I had. If anything, I now have far more questions. Most of the information I learned deals with the homesteaded land that John Spellecy received in 1888, at the young age of 70. It turns out by the time he was given the land by the US government, he had already made one contract to sell a portion of it. And so to make some semblance of it, I made this animation to show how the land grant disappeared over only a 12 year period.
For the curious, the background image is a digitisation of the US government’s original land survey. The A.160 denotes 160 acres, the maximum allowed by a homestead claim.
