Examining How We Measure Our Lives
Commentary, critiques, and observations on information design and data visualisation
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Read on…: 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…
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Amazon’s Selection for HQ2
Read on…: Amazon’s Selection for HQ2Well 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.
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Pulling Gene-ies Out of Bottles
Read on…: Pulling Gene-ies Out of BottlesI 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.…
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The Midterms Are Not Over
Read on…: The Midterms Are Not OverYour 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. Why are there races? Because often time mail-in ballots…
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Midterm Challengers
Read on…: Midterm ChallengersMy 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.