Examining How We Measure Our Lives
Commentary, critiques, and observations on information design and data visualisation
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Read on…: Obama and His Irishness
Ireland, the ancestral land of many Americans, can also be claimed by President Obama. His maternal great-great-great-grandfather was a shoemaker. The BBC created this graphic to complement their news article. And I must admit to being quietly amused at the % ‘Irishness’; Approximate label.
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(Insert 1/1000 Airplane Jokes Here)
Read on…: (Insert 1/1000 Airplane Jokes Here)Airlines merge. (As do many other companies, but those companies are not the focus of this post.) And often the mergers are complex. Lamentably, one cannot simply merge logos and be done. Here is looking at you, UAL Corporation (United Air Lines) + Continental Airlines Inc.= United Continental Holdings Co.—not that I particularly care for […]
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Updating Minard
Read on…: Updating MinardYesterday, Chartporn posted a link to an OkCupid post about sex, specifically charts of sex. And yes, they are quite interesting and worth checking out. But, I enjoyed the humour at the outset, where they noted the brilliance of the pie chart as a modern chart form that can replace the classic Minard chart about […]
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The End of the World As We Know It (And How It Goes Round and Round and Round)
Read on…: The End of the World As We Know It (And How It Goes Round and Round and Round)The future of the world according to Google. As prophesied by xkcd.
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Royal Wedding Genealogy
Read on…: Royal Wedding GenealogyIf you have not heard, somebody in Britain is getting married…and of course that means explorations of royal blood lines and, well, non-royal bloodlines. So the BBC put together a small piece on Kate Middleton’s ancestry. So for those of you with any interest in charting family lines, here you go. The piece has some […]
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RMS Titanic, 99 Years Ago
Read on…: RMS Titanic, 99 Years Ago99 years ago today, the RMS Titanic sank in the North Atlantic with more than 2/3 of the over 2200 passengers losing their lives. The ship was rather state-of-the-art and was considered remarkably safe with more lifeboats than was legally required for the passengers and crew. She also had a number of watertight bulkheads that […]
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Perhaps Paperwork, Not Plumbing, Is The Pinnacle of Modern Society
Read on…: Perhaps Paperwork, Not Plumbing, Is The Pinnacle of Modern SocietyFrom Indexed. What more must one say other than that 1) this is generally true and 2) paperwork can be substituted for bureaucratic work in general.
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The Country’s Most Violent States
Read on…: The Country’s Most Violent StatesDo you live in a horribly violent and crime-afflicted state? Do you want to know? Well there’s a map for that. From the Guardian, here we have a familiar choropleth that colours each state based on where it falls into the range from most peaceful, Maine and Vermont, to the the most violent, Louisiana and Tennessee. […]
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Shutting Down Nuclear Reactors
Read on…: Shutting Down Nuclear ReactorsJapan has updated the the threat level from the Fukushima Plant from five to seven. And while everyone ought to put Fukushima into context, chiefly by looking at the damage facing the rest of the country, we can also see that, broadly, things worked as expected at the power plant. They just did not build […]