Examining How We Measure Our Lives
Commentary, critiques, and observations on information design and data visualisation
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What’s in a Corporate Name?
Read on…: What’s in a Corporate Name?Last Thursday I wrote about the Wagner Group, an off-the-books semi-private army the Kremlin uses wage war where plausible deniability is desired. During that piece I mentioned Blackwater, one of the more infamous American private security contractor firms. The day before I had seen a tweet, this tweet, where Samantha Stokes created a matrix to […]
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If You Can’t Stand the Heat, Cut Your Carbon Emissions Pt. II
Read on…: If You Can’t Stand the Heat, Cut Your Carbon Emissions Pt. IIA few weeks ago I wrote about the United Nation’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) latest report on climate change, which synthesised the last several years’ data. If you didn’t see that post, suffice it to say things are bad and getting worse. At the time I said I wanted to return to talk […]
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Sankey Shows Starters Sticking with Sticky Stuff
Read on…: Sankey Shows Starters Sticking with Sticky StuffI spent way more time trying to craft that title than I’d like to admit. Headline writing is not easy. Quick little piece today about Sankey diagrams. I love them. You often see them described as flow diagrams—this piece is in the article we’ll get to shortly—but they are more of a subset within a […]
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The Years of the Asterisks
Read on…: The Years of the AsterisksHappy Friday, all. Another week and we made it. This Friday I want to highlight a graphic from xkcd that, strictly speaking, isn’t really data visualisation, but it does speak to that world because it’s about the underlying data. And as with the best humour, there’s an element of truth in it. Credit for the […]
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Little Green Men. Now with Tanks.
Read on…: Little Green Men. Now with Tanks.In 2014, what became known as little green men invaded Crimea, Ukraine. No, these were not aliens, but what we’ve later learned were unmarked Russian Army soldiers. They routed what little resistance Ukraine mustered in 2021 Crimea is de facto Russian, though de jure it remains Ukrainian. Following Crimea, insurrections erupted in the Donbas, part […]
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Out with the New, In with the Old
Read on…: Out with the New, In with the OldAfter twenty years out of power, the Taliban in Afghanistan are back in power as the Afghan government collapsed spectacularly this past weekend. In most provinces and districts, government forces surrendered without firing a shot. And if you’re going to beat an army in the field, you generally need to, you know, fight if you […]