Category: My Work

  • Covid Update: 6 July

    In trying to limit my Covid-19 updates to Monday, bank holidays definitely affect the schedule. For my international audience, that meant Monday was a day of no posting. It also meant that some states—Illinois—were not reporting data. Add to that Illinois had already stopped reporting data on Saturday and Sunday, I wanted to wait until…

  • Yep, Still Hotter

    Like I said yesterday, I wanted to compare cities, surprise, Philadelphia vs. Chicago. And so with some extra time I was able to finish this graphic that took the data from Climate Central to compare the two cities. What you can see below is that Philadelphia has seen more significant temperature growth in both summer…

  • Covid Update: 28 June

    Technical difficulties prevented me from posting yesterday morning. But we’re back today and even though it’s a Tuesday, I wanted to begin the week with a post about the current status of Covid-19 in Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Delaware, Virginia, and Illinois. Broadly speaking, things continue to improve. I don’t have all the vaccination data plugged…

  • Biden’s English Ancestry Revisited

    Last week I posted about an article in the BBC on the English ancestry of American president Joe Biden. And these types of article are a bit pro forma, famous person has an article about their personal ancestry with a family tree attached. Interestingly, this article did not, just the timeline I mentioned and a…

  • Covid Update: 20 June

    So today’s post will be a little bit shorter than usual. The big reason is probably good, but also worth addressing. States are increasingly less reliable about their data. For several weeks I have mentioned that Philadelphia had not been updating their vaccination data. Last week or two weeks ago I noticed a small line…

  • Biden’s English Ancestry

    We all know Joe Biden as the Irish American president. And that’s no malarkey. But, go back far enough in your family tree and you may find some interesting ancestry and ethnic origins and that’s no different with Joe Biden. Keep in mind that our number of ancestors doubles every generation. You have four grandparents,…

  • Inflating Areas

    One trend people have begun to follow lately is that of rising prices for consumer goods. If you have shopped recently for things, you may have noticed that you have been paying more than you were just a few weeks ago. We call this inflation. The Bureau of Labour Statistics (BLS) tracks this for a…

  • Covid Update: 7 Jun

    Technical difficulties yesterday. But I wanted to run the latest Covid numbers to start this week of posting, so we’re just going to use the Monday data, which is the lowest of the week since it captures the data reported by authorities on Sunday. That said, where are we? Last week we began to see…

  • Covid Update: 31 May

    Last week I wrote about how new cases had maybe flattened a wee bit in their rapid drop from peaks earlier this year. But the good news is that even in where new cases declines may have slowed down, they continue to decline. We can see the tails at the right ends are all back…

  • Covid Update: 23 May

    Last week I wrote about how we were seeing new cases continuing to rapidly decline. This week we can say cases are still declining, but perhaps a bit less rapidly than earlier. The charts above show that slowdown in the tail at the right of the chart. First some points to note, Delaware reported that…