Examining How We Measure Our Lives
Commentary, critiques, and observations on information design and data visualisation
-
Read on…: What We Have Learned About Pluto
And of course a week with awesome science-y space news is not complete without a little bit of xkcd. Credit for the piece goes to Randall Munroe.
-
How We’re Talking to New Horizons
Read on…: How We’re Talking to New HorizonsSo New Horizons is long since gone from Pluto. But it will still take 16 months to send back all the photographs and science. Why so long? Because so far away. 3 billion miles away. Put another way, light from the sun takes eight minutes to reach Earth as it travels at, well, the speed of light. Radio signals that…
-
Your Guide to the Solar System
Read on…: Your Guide to the Solar SystemAs New Horizons will soon begin sending back photographs of Pluto, Charon, and the other moons, I figured it would be a good to share a Wall Street Journal piece that looks at the other photographed bodies of the system. Credit for the piece goes to Jon Keegan, Chris Canipe, and Alberto Cervantes.
-
New Horizon’s Flypast
Read on…: New Horizon’s FlypastA little after 07.30 EDT, New Horizons began its race past Pluto, what your author grew up learning as the ninth planet in the Solar System—the last planet to be explored. I recall thinking that when it launched back in 2006 I had no idea what I would be doing nine years later. Or at least I think I thought…
-
Putting Tatooine to Shame
Read on…: Putting Tatooine to ShameWhile the title sounds science-fiction-y, it is true. Star Wars has a famous scenece where a landscape is shown with a binary star system in the sky. But we now know of a quintuple-star system that has two separate sets of binary stars. This BBC article takes a look at how the system is structured. Credit for the piece goes…
-
Cruel and Unusual Punishment
Read on…: Cruel and Unusual PunishmentIt’s Friday, everybody, so let’s lighten the mood with cruel and unusual punishment. Don’t worry, it’s not as bad as it sounds. No, today we look at a simple two-axis plot or matrix used by Jon Stewart to classify means of death and whether or not they would unconstitutional based on the cruel and unusual clause. Credit for the piece…
-
High Strikeout Games
Read on…: High Strikeout GamesBaseball has changed in the last twenty years or so. (And I’m old enough to recognise it.) Gone are the days of the high strikeout/high pitch count starts from the likes of Roger Clemens, Pedro Martinez, Randy Johnson, and Kerry Wood. In are high strikeout/low pitch count games… What does that mean? You can read this article from FiveThirtyEight to…
-
Night Tube
Read on…: Night TubeTransport for London (TfL), the organisation that runs the London Underground or Tube, has announced a nighttime service called Night Tube. It is not for the entire system, but only a few specific lines. That means that TfL needed a new map. And that means that everyone will want to create their own version of the Night Tube map. So…
-
ISIS Throughout the World
Read on…: ISIS Throughout the WorldISIS is still a threat to the Middle East, evidenced by the US announcing yesterday that it is intensifying strikes against the quasi-state in both Syria and Iraq. But just where has ISIS spread? And are its attacks spreading? This New York Times piece looks at just those two questions. The first through an obvious map. What the map does…