Wednesday night I had the dubious honour of playing the weekly pub trivia solo. Accordingly my team name was Hats Solo. (After I opted not to wear my fedora one night, another regular team called itself Where’s Your Hat?) I started strong, had a second wind, but still faded to a seventh place (of nine) finish. As I finished my G&T, I decided I would visualise the results. Here, two days later, are my results.
Credit for the highlights, mine. The lowlights, someone else.
I still remember where I was on 23 June 2016 as the Brexit referendum results were coming in—drunk at a karaoke bar (for celebrating the end of a softball season) talking with a guy from Manchester about how the hell Britain could be voting to leave the European Union.
Fast forward a year (and a week) and where is the United Kingdom today? Well, still in the European Union. Though Article 50, the formal mechanism by which a country leaves the EU, was invoked in March, the UK remains part of the EU for at least two more years. But the vote has had some effects.
The Economist put together a nice piece explaining these effects by pairing chart and explanatory text.
I really like the concept and the layout. However, the charts themselves probably could use some additional vertical space—difficult to tell for certain—to allow the smaller variations to show. But that would almost certainly mean changing the layout to accommodate for greater white space around the text boxes. Tricky, but I think it would be an improvement.
Credit for the piece goes to the Economist graphics department.
I was reading my print edition of the Economist last night and found this graphic—screenshot from the online version—about the rising importance of skyscrapers in the urban landscape.
The article was written after the Grenfell Tower inferno and looks at things that could be done to improve safety in high-rises.
Naturally, I was reading this on my 11th story balcony in the high-rise tower block in which I live.
Credit for the piece goes to the Economist graphics department.
This weekend, the New York Times published an online piece explaining the spread of the Grenfell Tower fire in London. The story uses small animated graphics and videos to show the origin and progression of the fire from an exploding refrigerator on the fourth floor to its trapping of residents on the 23rd and final floor.
Credit for the piece goes to Troy Griggs, Mika Gröndahl, Josh Keller, Jamine C. Lee, Anjali Singhvi, Megan Specia, Derek Watkins, and Jeremy White.
My apologies for the radio silence, everybody. The day job has been super busy the last several weeks. I am hoping to return to the regular schedule next week. In the meantime, enjoy this from xkcd.
Credit for the piece goes to Randall Munroe.
There is a lot to unpack about last Thursday and Sunday. But before we dive into that, a little story from the New York Times that caught my eye from Friday.
The map shows the counties in the United States where there is one health insurer and no health insurer. Further on in the piece a small multiple gallery shows that progression from 2014 and highlights how the drastic changes are seen only in 2017 and 2018.
The problem is often not that people cannot buy insurance if no insurers are in the marketplace. The marketplace is for federally-subsidised coverage and insureres appear to be moving to offering policies outside the marketplace for non-subsidised customers.
The White House claims Obamacare is in a death spiral. It is not. But after seven years it could use a little maintenance.
Credit for the piece goes to Haeyoun Park and Audrey Carlsen.
I was up late watching the British general election. So forgive me for phoning this one in. But we have a great piece from xkcd that looks at those choropleth US state maps.
Credit for the piece goes to Randall Munroe.
Tomorrow is the big day: the general election in the United Kingdom. If, like me, you have been following the news over the last several weeks, you know it has been punctuated by…gaffes. And what was initially considered a certainty for Prime Minister Theresa May is, well, not so much.
This graph of polling data compiled by the BBC instead shows how the Conservatives have fallen to the gains of Labour. And what was once a certainty could now be a nail-biter.
By the time I start writing tomorrow, the vote will be under way although the results will not start coming in until tomorrow evening. One has to wonder if that upward Labour trend will continue. Or even just amount to anything.
Credit for the piece goes to the BBC graphics department.
While today’s post is not an uplifting story, I did find it remarkable in its presentation. Nothing too fancy or revolutionary to be certain, but remarkable nonetheless. What was it? This morning when I picked up the Times there was a chart in black and red, above the fold, below the cover photo.
The story is about the rising number of deaths in the United States attributed to drugs. And, no, the line chart is not groundbreaking—though I do love the way the designers cut into the space to efficiently set copy and annotations. But as an above-the-fold graphic this morning, it did the trick.
Credit for the piece goes to Josh Katz.
Okay, not entirely. But Bloomberg put together a solid series of graphics tracking not the travels of Donald Trump, but his private aircraft. But that information can serve as a rough proxy for Trump’s travels. But the data is not complete—Russia is missing from the map though he has visited the country for business.
Credit for the piece goes to Vernon Silver, Michael Keller, and Dave Merrill.
