Examining How We Measure Our Lives
Commentary, critiques, and observations on information design and data visualisation
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Read on…: The Great British Baking
Recently the United Kingdom baked in a significant heatwave. With climate change being a real thing, an extreme heat event in the summer is not terribly surprising. Also not surprisingly, the BBC posted an article about the impact of climate change. The article itself was not about the heatwave, but rather the increasing rate of […]
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A New Downtown Arena for Philadelphia?
Read on…: A New Downtown Arena for Philadelphia?I woke up this morning and the breaking news was that the local basketball team, the 76ers, proposed a new downtown arena just four blocks from my office. The article included a graphic showing the precise location of the site. For our purposes this is just a little locator map in a larger article. But […]
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Small Dog Days of Summer
Read on…: Small Dog Days of SummerFor my readers in the northern hemisphere, which is the vast majority of you, we are in the middle of meteorological summer, the dog days. And whilst my UK and Europe readers continue to bake under temperatures greater than 40ºC (104ºF), the northeast United States and Philadelphia in particular is looking at a heatwave starting […]
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Legendary Adjustments
Read on…: Legendary AdjustmentsThe other day I was reading an article about the coming property tax rises in Philadelphia. After three years—has anything happened in those three years?—the city has reassessed properties and rates are scheduled to go up. In some neighbourhoods by significant amounts. I went down the related story link rabbit hole and wound up on […]
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Warming Towards Women Leaders
Read on…: Warming Towards Women LeadersWe are going to start this week off with a nice small multiple graphic that explores the reducing resistance to women in positions of leadership in Arab countries. The graphic comes from a BBC article published last week. These kinds of graphics allow a reader to quickly compare the trajectory of a thing between a […]
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James Webb
Read on…: James WebbIt’s cool. In the darkness of space. We made it to the end of the week, a big week for space news. So with that, enjoy this illustration from xkcd about the James Webb Space Telescope. Credit for the piece goes to Randall Munroe.
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It’s a Little Steamy Out There
Read on…: It’s a Little Steamy Out ThereAnd by out there I mean 1150 light years away. One of the five amazing images out of the first day’s announcement by the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) team was not a sexy photo of a nebula or a look back 13.5 billion years in time. Instead it was a plot of the amount […]
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L2 Halo for JWST
Read on…: L2 Halo for JWSTYesterday I received a question about where the new James Webb Space Telescope is located. Is it in orbit of the Earth, like Hubble? Is it out in deep space? The answer is no, not really. Now I spent this morning trying to illustrate the answer to that question myself. However, it’s taking me too […]
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Those Quirky Quarks
Read on…: Those Quirky QuarksLast week scientists working at the Large Hadron Collider in Switzerland announced the discovery of new sub-atomic particles: a pentaquark and tetraquarks. This BBC article does a really good job of explaining the role of quarks in the composition of our universe, so I encourage you to read the article. But they also included a […]
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Choo Choo
Read on…: Choo ChooI took two weeks off as work was pretty crazy, but we’re back to covering data visualisation and design with a graphic about trains. And anybody who knows me knows how I love trains. One of the early acts of the Biden administration was funding a proper expansion of rail service in the United States. […]