Examining How We Measure Our Lives
Commentary, critiques, and observations on information design and data visualisation
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Read on…: Midterm Challengers
My initial plan for today was that I was not going to run anything light-hearted and focus instead on next week’s elections. But I still love xkcd so I checked that out and…well, here we go. At the broadest view, much is unintelligible on the map. But, you can see a lot of blue, or in other words, there are…
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Where People Vote
Read on…: Where People VoteVoting is not compulsory in the United States. Consequently a big part of the strategy for winning is increasing your voters’ turnout and decreasing that of your opponent. In other words, demotivate your opponent’s supporters whilst simultaneously motivating your own base. But what does that baseline turnout map look like? Well, thankfully the Washington Post created a nice article that explores…
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Pages of Polls and Forecasts
Read on…: Pages of Polls and ForecastsWe are now one week away from the midterm elections here in the United States. Surprisingly, we are going to be looking at election-y things over the course of the next week or so. But before we delve into that, I wanted to focus on the homepage for FiveThirtyEight, the below screenshot is from my laptop. The reason I wanted…
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119 Wins
Read on…: 119 WinsThe only number you need today, the only factette you need to see today, is this. Well done, Boston. Well done.
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Government Officials Using Private Devices
Read on…: Government Officials Using Private DevicesEarlier this week the news broke that President Trump refuses to use his government-issued iPhone for all his communications and prefers his private, unsecured device. This of course means, and reports indicate is happening, that Chinese and Russian intelligence agencies can listen in on his calls. So how about those private e-mail servers? Happy Friday, all.
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#MeToo After One Year
Read on…: #MeToo After One YearOne year on and the #meToo movement continues to upend the political, economic, and cultural landscape of the United States. And a few days ago the New York Times published a piece on all the stories they have collected. From a data visualisation standpoint, this is a fairly simple piece. It takes 201 men (and a few women) who allegedly…
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The Saudi Assassination Squad
Read on…: The Saudi Assassination SquadYesterday we looked at the importance of arms deals from the US and UK to Saudi Arabia in the wake of the brutal murder and assassination of Jamal Khashoggi, the Washington Post journalist who sometimes wrote critically of the Mohamed bin Salman (MBS) regime. But what about the actual murder itself? What do we know? Well at some point today,…
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Arms Sales for Saudi Arabia and Head Removals for Journalists
Read on…: Arms Sales for Saudi Arabia and Head Removals for JournalistsYeah, guess where I am going with that title… If you have been living under a rock, Saudi Arabia barbarically murdered/assassinated a Washington Post journalist in the Saudi consulate in Istanbul, Turkey about three weeks ago. The journalist, Jamal Khashoggi, was a Saudi citizen and US resident living around Washington from where he reported on the new Saudi government under…
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Phone Calls
Read on…: Phone CallsIt’s Friday, everybody, and that means we all made it to the end of the week. As a millennial, I was surprised to learn that my mobile can actually be used to make telephonic calls. Phone calls, as they are often known, are like direct messages or text messages, but made without cat gifs or memes. And your voice cannot be filtered.…
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The New Longest Flight
Read on…: The New Longest FlightYou might recall that back in March I wrote about the use of spherical maps to show great circles. This helps illustrate the actual routes that aircraft take in flight. (Yes, actual flight plans deviate based on routes, weather, traffic, &c.) At the time I wrote about how there was a soon-to-be Singapore–New York route. Ta da. Nothing fancy here…