Tag: data visualisation

  • The US Flies Alone

    On Sunday, a Boeing 737 Max 8 aircraft crashed shortly after taking off from the airport in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. This was the second crash in less than a year, since the another 737 Max 8 crashed into the sea shortly after taking off from Jakarta, Indonesia. And in the intervening months, there have been…

  • Basic Statistics

    Happy Friday, everybody. We made it to the end of the week. And so now we have xkcd going all back to school and teaching us all simple statistics. For those unfamiliar with statistics, that’s not at all how it works. Credit for the piece goes to Randall Munroe.

  • The Long and Winding Road

    This Washington Post piece caught my eye earlier this week. It takes a look back at all the departures from the Trump administration, which has been beset by one of the highest turnover rates of all time. What I like about the piece is how it classifies personnel by whether or not they require Senate…

  • The Uneven Rebound of Manufacturing

    Admittedly, I only read today’s piece because of the photograph on the Washington Post’s homepage. It featured a giant banner saying Lordstown (Ohio) was the home of the (Chevy) Cruze. Every single time I drove between Philadelphia and Chicago I would see that sign. It was also near the halfway point, so whichever way I…

  • Is Bryce Harper Another Ryan Howard?

    No. Definitely not. But, the position of this article by FiveThirtyEight is that the Phillies, the Philadelphia baseball team that just made the largest guaranteed contract in North American sports, may have purchased the rights to somebody who is a few years past his prime. The author tracked the performance of similar baseball players over…

  • The Stunted Growth of North Korea

    This piece from the BBC is a few years old, but it provides some interesting nuggets about North Korea. Unsurprisingly it appeared on my radar because of the coverage of the Trump–Kim summit in Vietnam. The article says it is nine charts that tell you all you need to know about North Korea. Now, I…

  • Where’s All the Oil Going?

    Hint: not China. Today’s piece is a nice little graphic from the Economist about the oil and natural gas industry in the United States. We have a bar chart that does a great job showing just how precipitous the decline in Chinese purchases of oil and liquid natural gas has been. Why the drop off?…

  • The Bill Barr Bifurcation

    So today’s piece is not a revolutionary piece of information design, but it is fascinating. For two or so years now, we have all heard about the Robert Mueller investigation into potential contacts between the Trump campaign, early administration, and the administration of Russian president Vladimir Putin. To be clear, thus far, this has been…

  • Individualistic Immigrants

    As many of you know, genealogy and family history is a topic that interests me greatly. This past weekend I spent quite a bit of time trying to sort through a puzzle—though I am not yet finished. It centred on identifying the correct lineages of a family living in a remote part of western Pennsylvania.…

  • Are Baseball’s Big Contracts Worth It?

    On Tuesday the San Diego Padres signed Manny Machado to a guaranteed contract worth $300 million over the next ten years—though he can opt out after five years. Machado was one of two big free agents on the market, the other being Bryce Harper. One question out there is whether or not these big contracts…