Examining How We Measure Our Lives
Commentary, critiques, and observations on information design and data visualisation
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Read on…: Fundraising for the Midterms
We are now less than 100 days away—95 to be exact—from the 2018 midterm elections here in the United States. As we get closer and closer we not only get more information from polls, but also campaign finance reports. Those can sometimes serve as a proxy for support as lots of grassroots support can dump lots of cash in a…
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Development Languages
Read on…: Development LanguagesLast week the Economist published an article sort of about my industry. Now I am a designer and more familiar with the front-end design and some HTML and CSS, but a lot of the things I have designed over the last few years have needed some serious developers with some serious skills. And those guys were the ones who would…
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Facebook’s Share Price Plunge
Read on…: Facebook’s Share Price PlungeLast Thursday, Facebook’s share price plunged on the news of some not so great numbers from the company on its quarterly earnings report. The data and number itself is not terribly surprising—it is a line chart. But what I loved is how the New York Times handled this on the front of the Business section on Friday morning. I found…
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Switching Sides
Read on…: Switching SidesFor those of you not baseball fans, Tuesday is Major League Baseball’s trading deadline. By that evening, trades of players between teams are sort of over for the year. (Yes, I understand this is the non-waiver deadline and the waiver deadline is at the end of August, but that is complicated to explain.) And so as the end of July approaches,…
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Longest Lunar Eclipse of the Year
Read on…: Longest Lunar Eclipse of the YearFor those of my readers in Europe, Africa, Asia, Australia, and South America, you are in for a treat tonight as you get to experience the longest lunar eclipse of the year. For those of us in North America, i.e. Canada, the United States, and Mexico, we get nothing. So for a reminder, we turn to this nice piece from Vox…
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Global Warming and Harder Living
Read on…: Global Warming and Harder LivingThe weather in Philly the past week has been just gross. It reminds of Florida in that it has been hot, steamy, storms and downpours pop up out of nowhere then disappear, and just, generally, gross. I do not understand how people live in Florida year round. Anyway, that got me thinking about this piece from a month ago in…
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The Decline of the Media
Read on…: The Decline of the MediaEverybody loves maps. Unfortunately this is not a map to love. The Economist looked at the global status of the free press and its decline around the world. The graphic is a neat little package of a map to anchor the narrative and a few callout countries with their general declines—or in Tunisia’s case the reversal thereof—highlighted. But I do…
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State Level Action on Gun Control
Read on…: State Level Action on Gun ControlA few months ago I covered an editorial piece from the New York Times that looked at all the action, by which I mean inaction, the federal government had taken on gun violence in the wake of some horrific shootings. Well on Saturday the Washington Post published an article looking at how there has been action on the state level.…
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The Rising Tide of Jihadist Violence in Africa
Read on…: The Rising Tide of Jihadist Violence in AfricaThe other day somebody mentioned to me that Africa is big, to which I agreed. It is big. It contains, depending upon how you count, about 55 countries and over one billion people. It stretches from Mediterranean climates and deserts in the north to rainforests around the equator and then back down through steppe climates to the southern coast of…
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Jupiter’s New Moons
Read on…: Jupiter’s New MoonsYesterday, space nerds were alerted to the news that 12 new moons have been discovered in orbit of Jupiter. These are much smaller than Jupiter’s moon Ganymede, which is the largest moon in the Solar System and is larger than even Mercury. The point is that there are almost certainly no Ganymede-esque moons orbiting Jupiter that remain undiscovered. But despite…