Examining How We Measure Our Lives
Commentary, critiques, and observations on information design and data visualisation
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Read on…: Thanksgiving Side Dishes
American Thanksgiving meals often feature elaborate spreads of side dishes. And everyone has a favourite. A common theme around the holiday is for media outlets to conduct surveys to see which ones are most popular where. In today’s piece we have one such survey from pollster YouGov. In particular, I wanted to focus on a series of small multiples maps…
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More Pub Trivia Scores
Read on…: More Pub Trivia ScoresNext week is Thanksgiving and for me that means no pub trivia next week. So ahead of a two-week gap, here are our latest (and greatest?) in trivia scores. We won some, we lost some. And we definitely blew some. The key, as always, remains score points before music. Because we do not know music. Credit for this piece goes…
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Erasing Culture One Tomb at a Time
Read on…: Erasing Culture One Tomb at a TimeAs many of my readers know, I have a keen interest in genealogy. And for me that has often met spending hours—far too many hours—wandering around cemeteries attempting to find memorials to ancestors, links to my history, a context to that soil from a different time. But if you live in Xinjiang or more broadly western China, and you’re not…
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Revenge of the Flyover States
Read on…: Revenge of the Flyover StatesJust before Halloween, NBC News published an article by political analyst David Wasserman that examined what airports could portend about the 2020 American presidential election. For those interested in politics and the forthcoming election, the article is well worth the read. The tldr; Democrats have been great at winning over cosmopolitan types in global metropolitan areas in the big blue states,…
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Armistice Day
Read on…: Armistice DayYesterday was Armistice Day, a bank holiday hence the lack of posting. So I spent a few hours yesterday looking at my ancestors to see who participated in World War I. It turned out that on my paternal side, my one great-grandfather was too old and the other was both the right age and signed up for the draft, but…
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Hoyle’s House
Read on…: Hoyle’s HouseJohn Bercow is no longer the British Speaker of the House. He left office Thursday. Fun fact: it is illegal for an MP to resign. Instead they are appointed to a royal office, in Bercow’s case the Royal Steward of the Manor of Northstead, that precludes them from being an elected MP. Consequently the House of Commons then had to…