Coffee Spoons – Page 58 – Examining How We Measure Our Lives

PECO Outages Five Years Ago

Christmas time is a time when people receive gifts. Well this year was no different and I received a few. One, however, was in a box stuffed with old newspaper pages. And it turns out one of said pages had a graphic on it. So let us spend today looking at this little blast from the past.

The piece looks at PECO outages, PECO being the Philadelphia region’s main electricity supplier. The article is full page and is both headed and footed with photography, the graphic in which we are interested sits centre stage in the middle of the page.

Overall the graphic is fairly compact and works well at showing the distribution of the outages, which the bar chart below the choropleth shows was historically significant. (Despite my years in Chicago, I was somehow in the area for all but the storm written about and can confirm that they were, in fact, disruptive.)

The choropleth works, but I question the colour scheme. The bins diverge at about 50%, which to my knowledge marks no special boundary other than “half”. If that yellow bin represented, say, the average number of outages per storm or the acceptable number of outages per storm, sure, I could buy it. Otherwise, this is really just degrees of severity along one particular axis. I would have either kept the bins all red or all blue and proceeded from a light of either to a dark of either.

I probably would have also dropped Philadelphia entirely from the map, but I can understand how it may be important to geographically anchor readers in the most populous county to orientate themselves to a story about suburbia.

Lastly, I have one data question. With power lines down during an ice storm, I would be curious to see less of the important roadways as the map depicts and other variables. What about things like average temperature during the storm? Was the more urban and built-up Delaware County less susceptible because of an urban heat bubble preventing water from freezing? Or what about trees? Does the impact in the more rural areas have anything to do with increasing numbers of trees as one heads away from the city?

Those last data questions were definitely out of scope for the graphic, but I nevertheless remain curious. But then again, this piece is almost five years old. Just a look at how some graphical forms remain in use because of their solid ability to communicate data. Long live the bar chart. Long live the choropleth.

Credit for the piece goes to the Philadelphia Inquirer graphics department.

Feathered Raptors

Well we made it to Friday. Admittedly, for many of us it was a short week. But we can end it all the same with this piece from xkcd. It asks the question, are feathered dinosaurs scary? Back when they made the first Jurassic Park, we didn’t know how prevalent feathers were and so the dinosaurs were scaly. Now the Jurassic World films keep the dinosaurs scaly because, well, anti-science?

Credit for the piece goes to Randall Munroe.

Anak Krakatau

During my winter holiday to London the volcano Anak Krakatau erupted, sending enormous amounts of material sliding into the ocean. The displaced water had to go somewhere and travelled as a tsunami that devastated the Indonesian coastline.

Of course Anak Krakatau is one of several remnants of the much larger volcano of Krakatoa that erupted several times, perhaps most famously in 1883. Anak Krakatau specifically emerged in the late 1920s and has been building ever since until it collapsed almost two weeks ago. But by how much did it collapse?

Until just a few days ago, the skies above the volcano have not permitted detailed photography. But within the last day or so we have started to get images and the BBC put together this piece that looks at Anak Krakatau before and after.

It is a fairly common convention these days, the slider overtop the two images. But conceptually it shows clearly how the shape of the island has changed, in particular the new bay that has emerged. The other remarkable feature is the extension of land to the presumably east (right) of the image.

Credit for the piece goes to the BBC graphics department.

Treasury of Atreus

Oh, hello. Apologies for the break from posting, however, after the Thanksgiving holidays I fell ill. Consequently I spent the entirety of December either sick or on holiday. Neither of which is conducive to posting. But I have largely recovered and so we begin a new year with a new post.

This piece comes from my visit to the fantastic British Museum. It describes the Treasury of Atreus. It was neither a treasury nor of Atreus. Instead it served as a tomb for an unknown man, but someone of great importance. The signage displays the structure of the tholos, or tomb, and how it was oriented.

The sign explaining the Treasury and the fragments to the right along with the massive columns .

Signs like these make exhibits far more insightful, for me at least. The design of the tholos could be explained solely through words, however a graphical representation does wonders for me and, likely, others who learn better visually.

This sign could be like any sign, however, until I read the small sentence explaining the doorway to the right of the sign represents the facade of the Treasury with the two columns part original and part reconstruction. When you realise that and then see it, the true scale of the Treasury becomes known.

The actual columns, or parts thereof, of the Treasury of Atreus

Credit for the piece goes to the British Museum’s design staff.

Ratings the Foods

For my American audience, Happy Thanksgiving. Coffeespoons will be on holiday for the remainder of the week. But don’t worry, we’ll be back. For my non-American audience, we basically celebrate a tale of the Pilgrims feasting with Native Americans after a successful harvest.

Today’s graphic is really just a series of tables. I think I missed this back in 2016 because, surprise, I had just moved to Philadelphia and was still settling into things—including running Coffeespoons. Anyway, FiveThirtyEight published an article trying to discover the most popular dishes. This is just a sampling , a screenshot of the meats. But you should go check it out to see if your favourite dishes made the cut.

Mine did not. I am not a big fan of turkey and am doing a pork roast tomorrow . I guess I could go with the ham in a pinch though.

Credit for the piece goes to Walt Hickey.

More on California’s Dry Heat

Yesterday we looked at the wildfire conditions in California. Today, we look at the Economist’s take, which brings an additional focus on the devastation of the fires themselves. However, it adds a more global perspective and looks at the worldwide decline in forest fires and both where and why that is the case.

California isn't looking too…hot. Too soon? — California isn’t looking too…hot. Too soon?

The screenshot here focuses on California and combines the heat and precipitation we looked at yesterday into a fuel-aridity index. That index’s actual meaning is simplified in the chart annotations that indicate “warmer and drier years” further along the x-axis. The y-index, by comparison, is a simpler plot of the acres burned in fires.

This piece examines more closely that link between fires and environmental conditions. But the result is the same, a warming and drying climate leaves California more vulnerable to wildfires. However, the focus of the piece, as I noted above, is actually on the global decline of wildfires.

Only 2% of wildfires are actually in North America, the bulk occur in Africa. And the piece uses a nice map to show just where those fires occur. In parallel the text explains how changing economic conditions in those areas are lessening the risk of wildfire and so we are seeing a global decline—even with climate change.

Taken with yesterday’s piece with its hyper-California focus, this provides a more global context of the problem of wildfires. It’s a good one-two read.

Credit for the piece goes to the Economist Data Team.

Dry Heat Is Only Part of California’s Problem

Wildfires continue to burn across in California. One, the Camp Fire in northern California near Chico, has already claimed 77 lives. But why has this fire been so deadly?

FiveThirtyEight explained some of the causes in an article that features a number of charts and graphics. The screenshot below features a scatter plot looking at the temperature and precipitation recorded from winter through autumn every year since 1895.

The designers did a good job of highlighting the most recent data, separating out 2000 through 2017 with the 2018 data highlighted in a third separate colour. But the really nice part of the chart is the benchmarking done to call out the historic average. Those dotted lines show how over the last nearly two decades, California’s climate has warmed. However, precipitation amounts vary. (Although they have more often tended to be below the long-term average.)

I may have included some annotation in the four quadrants to indicate things like “hotter and drier” or “cooler and wetter”, but I am not convinced they are necessary here. With more esoteric variables on the x- and y-axis they would more likely be helpful than not.

The rest of the piece makes use of a standard fare line chart and then a few maps. Overall, a solid piece to start the week.

Credit for the piece goes to Christie Aschwanden, Anna Maria Barry-Jester, Maggie Koerth-Baker and Ella Koeze.

Amazon’s Selection for HQ2

Well this week Amazon finally chose not just one city for its HQ2, but two—New York and Washington. Of course Philadelphia had been angling for the site. Alas, it was not to be. So let’s work with that for this Friday post.

Credit for this one is mine.

Pulling Gene-ies Out of Bottles

I don’t always get to share more illustrative diagrams that explain things, but that’s what we have today from the Economist. It illustrated the concept of a gene drive by which a gene modified in one chromosome then modifies the remaining chromosome to insert itself there. Consequently it stands an almost 100% chance of being passed onto the subsequent generation.

Naturally this means great things for removing, say, mosquito-born diseases from populations as the gene drives can be used to ultimately eliminate the population. But of course, should we be doing this? Regardless, we have a graphic from the Economist.

It makes nice use of a small mosquito icon to show how engineered mosquitos can take over the population from wild-type. The graphic does a nice job showing the generational effect with the light blue wild-type disappearing. But I wonder if more could not be said about the actual gene drive itself. Of course, it could be that they simplified the process substantially to make it accessible to the audience.

Credit for the piece goes the Economist graphics department.

The Midterms Are Not Over

Your author is back after a few days out sick and then the Armistice Day holiday. But guess what? The elections are not yet all over. Instead, there are a handful of races to call. Below is a screenshot from a FiveThirtyEight article tracking those races still too close to call.

The Republican gain might not be as big as they had hoped

Why are there races? Because often time mail-in ballots need only be postmarked by Election Day. Therefore they can still be arriving in the days after the election and their total must be added to the race. (Plus uncounted/missed ballots et cetera.) For example, the late count and mail-in ballots are what tipped the Arizona senate seat. When we went to bed on Tuesday night—for me Wednesday morning—Arizona was a Republican hold, albeit narrowly. Now that the late count ballots have been counted, it’s a Democratic pickup.

The graphic above does a nice job showing how these races and their late calls are impacting seat changes. Their version for the House is not as interesting because the y-axis scale is so much greater, but here, the user can see a significant shift. The odds were always good that the Republicans would pick up seats—the question was how many. And with Arizona flipping, that leaves two seats on the table. Mississippi’s special election will almost certainly be a Republican hold. The question is what about Florida? The last I saw the race is separated by 0.15% of the vote. That’s pretty tiny.

Credit for the piece goes to the FiveThirtyEight graphics department.