Examining How We Measure Our Lives
Commentary, critiques, and observations on information design and data visualisation
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Read on…: Income Peak Map
Today’s post looks at peak income for the middle class. The Washington Post looked at peak median household income for each county in the United States. And for 81% of counties, that peak was over 15 years ago. The really nice features of this piece are not actually the map, which is a standard choropleth map. Instead small multiples above…
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Periodic Table of Non-elements
Read on…: Periodic Table of Non-elementsScience is great. But science is also a process and scientific progress goes boink. Some of the mis-steps in chemistry have been erroneous elements. Thankfully the Boston Globe built a small periodic table of non-elements with short anecdotes about the selected few. Credit for the piece goes to Mary Virginia Orna and Marco Fontani.
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Temperatures in New York City in 2014
Read on…: Temperatures in New York City in 2014Today’s piece is an attempt by Alex Bresler to update a chart originally made by the New York Times over ten years ago. Credit for the piece goes to Alex Bresler.
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The Link Between Work and Transit
Read on…: The Link Between Work and TransitThe Wall Street Journal recently published an interesting article about the link between work and access to transit. They included a graphic that looked at the link between the two. Credit for the piece goes to the Wall Street Journal graphics department.
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Board Games
Read on…: Board GamesOn New Year’s Eve, well technically in the wee hours of New Year’s Day, the group with which I was spending the holiday broke out Settlers of Catan. We played that game—and drank a few bottles of champagne—until 04.00. My experience of playing the game—not necessarily the part about being inebriated on New Year’s Eve—bears out the increasing popularity of…
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How Different Temperature Profiles Make Different Precipitation Types
Read on…: How Different Temperature Profiles Make Different Precipitation TypesI apologise for the lack of posts over the last two weeks, but I was on holiday. Naturally, I have returned just in time for some snowstorms in the Midwest. But today’s piece comes from WGN and it explains how the type of winter precipitation that falls depends not solely on ground temperatures. Rather, temperature profiles in the upper atmosphere…
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Surviving Holiday Parties
Read on…: Surviving Holiday PartiesThe Christmas holidays are known for many things. One of them is the office holiday party. Today’s post looks at a flow chart put together by the company for which I work, Euromonitor International. As it was put together by the design team, you might very well think that I had something to do with it. But I couldn’t possibly…
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Chicago’s Minimum Wage
Read on…: Chicago’s Minimum WageToday’s piece is a photo I snapped of the cover of a relatively recent edition of the RedEye, a free, daily tabloid distributed in Chicago. The city of Chicago decided to raise the minimum wage in the city. And this photo of a stack of quarters depicts just how many quarters that increase will be over the next five years.…
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Website Popularity Over the Years
Read on…: Website Popularity Over the YearsI remember the internet from some of the earlier days. So when the Washington Post published this chart in a piece looking at the history of the popular sites on the Internet, well I felt old. Remember Geocities? Looking at this chart, how many of the old web companies can you recall? Does that make you feel old? Credit for…