Turns out I was not the only one to look at plotting the ratings of the final series of Game of Thrones. The Economist looked at IMDB ratings, but just prior to the finale on Sunday. They, however, took it a step further and compared Game of Thrones to the final series of other well regarded shows.
All good things…
From a design standpoint, I’m not a huge fan of breaking the y-axis at 6. While the data action is all happening at the high range of the scale, that is also the point. Each show is at the top of its class, which makes the precipitous falls of Game of Thrones, Dexter, and House of Cards all the more…wait for it…stark.
I do like the shading behind the line to indicate the final series. That certainly makes it easier to differentiate between the final episodes and those that came before.
But again, I’ll just say, I like how Game of Thrones ended.
Credit for the piece goes to the Economist graphics department.
Last week we looked at the data on Pennsylvania from the US Census Bureau and found the Commonwealth’s population is shifting from west of the Appalachians to the southeast of the state. That got me thinking about Illinois, one of three states to have experienced a decline in population. Is there a similar geographic pattern evident in that state’s data? (Plus, I lived there for eight years, so I am curious how the state evolved over a similar time frame.)
A lot more red in this map…
Well, it turns out the pattern is not so self-evident in Illinois as it is in Pennsylvania. Instead, we see small clusters of light blues across a sea of red. In other words, the population decline is widespread, though not necessarily extreme. However, it is notable that in the far south of the state, Alexander County, home to the city of Cairo, has seen the greatest decline in population since 2010, not just in Illinois, but in the entire United States (in percentage terms).
Unlike Pennsylvania, where the state’s primary city of Philadelphia is growing (albeit slowly), in Illinois the primary city of Chicago has seen its population shrink over the last several years. However, the counties south and west of Cook County have grown. Kendall County, where parts of Aurora and Joliet are located along with growing towns like Oswego and Plano, grew at over 11%.
The state’s other growing counties fall across the state from north to south, east to west. In the south the county containing the eastern suburbs of Carbondale has grown modestly. But for real percentage growth, one should look west towards Monroe County, a southern suburb of St. Louis, Missouri located just across the Mississippi River.
Then in the centre of the state we see growth in McLean and Champaign Counties. The former is home to Bloomington and Normal. While Champaign is home to the eponymous city as well as its neighbour, Urbana.
All in all, the pattern that emerges is that of urban/suburban vs. rural. With some notable exceptions, e.g. Cook County, the only growth in Illinois is in counties that have prominent cities or towns. Meanwhile, rural counties shrink—the aforementioned Alexander most notably.
But Game of Thrones ended last night. And I might be in the minority in that I like the overall ending and direction of the plot. But, I will agree that it would have been better…executed (just a Ned Stark reference) if at least the final two series were full, 10-episode series. As it is, we’re left to ourselves to connect the dots between previous character actions and their current actions. It makes sense, but you have to really think about it. It could have been done better over time. Alas, time was the one thing they did not have.
Anyway, a lot of people think the final series was terrible. And the ratings on IMDB say just that.
Ratings dropping faster than a dragon falling out of the sky…
We are in the midst of basketball playoffs right now. And one of the teams participating is the Golden State Warriors. They are pretty good at this whole basketball thing. One of the reasons is their star player Steph Curry. And it turns out that he is an enormous fan of popcorn. So much so that despite the widespread focus on power foods and healthy eating and wellness lifestyle, he devours the stuff before matches. So much so that NBA minders had to remove it from his hands during an all-star match last year.
He agreed to a request from the New York Times to rank each stadium, from 1 to 29, on the best popcorn. But he then went further and suggested that he rank the popcorn on a five-point scale on five different metrics: freshness, saltiness, crunchiness, butter and presentation. Naturally, the Times agreed. And he prepared a dataset that the Times turned into this heat map.
He’s so honest, his own stadium doesn’t rank in the top five.
The whole article is well worth a read for more insights into the player and his take on popcorn. I don’t know a thing about basketball, but if a player agrees to a request to rank stadiums based on their popcorn, but then goes further to create additional data that can be used to turn into a visualisation, he’s probably my favourite player. If only someone had asked this of Pedro, Nomar, or Big Papi back in the day. Here’s looking at you, Laser Show.
Happy Friday, everyone.
Credit for the piece goes to Steph Curry and Marc Stein.
In case you did not hear, earlier this week Alabama banned all abortions. And for once, we do not have to add the usual caveat of “except in cases of rape or incest”. In Alabama, even in cases of rape and incest, women will not have the option of having an abortion.
And in Georgia, legislators are debating a bill that will not only strictly limit women’s rights to have an abortion, but will leave them, among other things, liable for criminal charges for travelling out of state to have an abortion.
Consequently, the New York Times created a piece that explores the different abortion bans on a state-by-state basis. It includes several nice graphics including what we increasingly at work called a box map. The map sits above the article and introduces the subject direct from the header that seven states have introduced significant legislation this year. The map highlights those seven states.
We’ve been calling these box maps. It’s growing on me.
The gem, however, is a timeline of sorts that shows when states ban abortion based on how long since a woman’s last period.
There are some crazy shifts leftward in this graphic…
It does a nice job of segmenting the number of weeks into not trimesters and highlighting the first, which traditionally had been the lower limit for conservative states. It also uses a nice yellow overlay to indicate the traditional limits determined by the Roe v. Wade decision. I may have introduced a nice thin rule to even further segment the first trimester into the first six week period.
We also have a nice calendar-like small multiple series showing states that have introduced but not passed, passed but vetoed, passed, and pending legislation with the intention of completely banning abortion and also completely banning it after six weeks.
Far too many boxes on the right…
This does a nice job of using the coloured boxes to show the states have passed legislation. However, the grey coloured boxes seem a bit disingenuous in that they still represent a topically significant number: states that have introduced legislation. It almost seems as if the grey should be all 50 states, like in the box map, and that these states should be in some different colour. Because the eight or 15 in the 2019 column are a small percentage of all 50 states, but they could—and likely will—have an oversized impact on women’s rights in the year to come.
That said, it is a solid graphic overall. And taken together the piece overall does a nice job of showing just how restrictive these new pieces of legislation truly are. And how geographically limited in scope they are. Notably, some states people might not associate with seemingly draconian laws are found in surprising places: Pennsylvania, Illinois, Maryland, and New York. But that last point would be best illustrated by another box map.
Last month the US Census Bureau published their first batch of 2018 population estimates for states and counties. Pennsylvania is one of those states that is growing, but rather slowly. It will likely lose out to southern and western states in the 2020 census after which House seats will be reapportioned and electoral college votes subtracted.
From 2018 to 2010, the Commonwealth has grown 0.8%. Like I said, not a whole lot. But unlike some states (Illinois), it is at least growing. But Pennsylvania is a very diverse state. It has very rural agricultural communities and then also one of the densest and largest cities in the entire country with the whole lot in between . Where is the growth happening—or not—throughout the state? Fortunately we have county-level data to look at and here we go.
Some definite geographic patterns here…
The most immediate takeaway is that the bulk of the growth is clearly happening in the southeastern part of the state, that is, broadly along the Keystone Corridor, the Amtrak line linking Harrisburg and Philadelphia. It’s also happening up north of Philadelphia into the exurbs and satellite cities.
We see two growth outliers. The one in the centre of the state is Centre County, home to the main campus of Pennsylvania State University. And then we have Butler County in the west, just north of Pittsburgh.
The lightest of reds are the lowest declines, in percentage terms. And those seem to be clustered around Scranton and Pittsburgh, along with the counties surrounding Centre County.
Everywhere else in the state is shrinking and by not insignificant amounts. Of course this data does not say where people are moving to from these counties. Nor does it say why. But come 2020, if the pattern holds, the state will need to take a look at its future planning. (Regional transit spending, I’m looking at you.)
Today’s piece is another piece set against a black background. Today we look at one on natural disasters, created by both weather and geography/geology alike.
The Washington Post mapped a number of different disaster types: flooding, temperature, fire, lightning, earthquakes, &c. and plotted them geographically. Pretty clear patterns emerge pretty quickly. I was torn between which screenshots to share, but ultimately I decided on this one of temperature. (The earthquake and volcano graphic was a very near second.)
Pretty clear where I’d prefer to be…
It isn’t complicated. Colder temperatures are in a cool blue and warmer temperatures in a warm red. The brighter the respective colour, the more intense the extreme temperatures. As you all know, I am averse to warm weather and so I will naturally default to living somewhere in the upper Midwest or maybe Maine. It is pretty clear that I will not really countenance moving to the desert southwest or Texas. But places such as Philadelphia, New York, and Washington are squarely in the blacked out or at least very dark grey range of, not super bad.
In science news, we turn to graphics about planets and things. Specifically we are talking about exoplanets, i.e. planets that exist outside our solar system. Keep in mind that we have only been able to detect exoplanets since the 1990s. Prior to then, how rare was our system with all our planets? It could have been very rare. Now we know, probably not so much.
But, in all of that discovery, we are missing entire types of planets. This article published by Forbes does a nice job explaining why. But one of the key types of planets that we have been unable to discover heretofore have been: intermediately distant, giant planets. Think the Jupiters and Saturns of our system. Prior to now we could detect massive Jupiter-like planets orbiting super near to their distant stars. Or, we could detect super massive planets orbiting very far away. The in-betweeners? Not so much.
There’s still a pretty wide gap out there…
The above screenshot does a good job of showing where new detection methods have allowed scientists to begin to fill in the gaps. It shows how there is an enormous gap between what we have discovered and how they have been discovered. And the article does a nice job explaining how the science works in that only now with our longer periods of observation will help resolve certain issues.
From a design standpoint, this isn’t a super complicated graphic. It does rely upon a logarithmic scale, which isn’t common in non-scientific or academic papers. But this graphic comes from that environment, so it makes a lot of sense. The article is full of graphics from third-party sources, but I found this the most informative because of that very gap it highlights and how the new work (the stars) begin to fill it in.
Credit for the screenshotted piece goes to E. L. Rickman et al.
One of my current projects is consolidating and organising all my genealogy files spread across multiple devices and drives into one central location. So I’ve been spending quite a bit of time looking at file sizes and things. And that is why this piece from xkcd made me laugh.
Tuesday night/Wednesday morning, the New York Times broke the story that they had some of President Trump’s tax return information. For decades now, US presidents and candidates for that office have released their tax returns for the public to inspect. Trump has refused, often claiming that they are under audit from the IRS and then adding, and falsely claiming, they cannot be released whilst under audit. Consequently, when the Times publishes an article at the secret world of Trump’s finances, it’s a big news thing.
Unfortunately, the Times only had access to what are essentially summary transcripts of the returns. And only for a period in the mid-1980s through mid-1990s. So we cannot get the granular data and make deeper insights. But what we did get was turned into this bold graphic in the middle of the article.
That’s a whole lotta red. And not the good kind for a Republican.
Conceptually, there is not much to say. The bar charts are a solid choice to represent this kind of data. Red makes sense given the connotation of “being in the red”. And the annotations providing quotes from Trump about his finances for the years highlighted provide excellent context.
What the screenshot does not truly capture, however, is the massiveness of the chart in the context of the rest of the article. It’s big, bold, and red. That design choice instead of, say, making it a smaller sidebar-like graphic, goes a long way in hitting home the sheer magnitude of these business losses.
Sometimes it’s not always fancy and shiny charts that garner the most attention. Sometimes an old staple can do wonders.
Credit for the piece goes to Rich Harris and Andrew Rossback.
