Ventfort Hall

On the last day of my trip I took some time to visit two Gilded Age mansions, called “cottages”, though they are anything but the image the word cottage conjures in my mind. Ventfort Hall, the subject of today’s post, was the cottage of Sarah Morgan, sister of J.P. Morgan. Yeah, that J.P. Morgan. So already “not a stereotypical cottage” should be flashing in your mind.

From an information design standpoint, one of the really neat things was seeing the floor plans and grounds of the home, which had significantly deteriorated since it 19th century construction and necessitated significant restorative work.

First we have a map of the grounds, originally over 26 acres, since reduced to just under 12.

Lots of running around room there…

These kind of maps help you appreciate just how much has been lost in the century-plus since its construction. In particular greenhouses and other mansions’ farms made the estates partially self-sustaining. The butlers weren’t doing Whole Foods runs, except they did have to go to town to get the specialties and the meats.

In addition to the landscape architecture we also have the floor plans for two of the four floors of the mansion. This is the ground floor, or first floor. Most of this is open to the public as part of the restored summer home, though some parts are closed for staff and volunteers. Some parts remain original, though significant damage has meant that other parts are wholly new, but to the best reconstruction of what was.

But where’s the mancave?

The first floor, or the second floor in American parlance, held most of the bedrooms, including the two masters, his and hers.

I want the big room.

This floor has two rooms, Caroline’s Suite and the Honeysuckle Room, that are presently off limits to visitors. But you can peer in through the open doorway to see what the original conditions were like before the restoration, spoiler, not good.

Also not accessible to visitors are the floor above, which contained mostly servants quarters and a few additional guest bedrooms, in particular two directly over the master bedrooms.

Finally the basement is also not accessible, but is where the kitchen, boilers, &c. were all housed. You can peak in through the outside windows and catch a glimpse of the kitchen. But hopefully it’s restored and opened someday, because apparently beneath the veranda was an entire bowling alley. Because don’t all great homes have bowling alleys?

It’s funny because I’ve always enjoyed architecture, so much so that I thought I wanted to be an architect growing up. Then I realised I’d have to do maths and I said nah. Now I work with data. Go figure. Also, whenever I’ve looked at apartments or places to live, whilst photos are super helpful, I’ve always valued floor plans more. They help me appreciate the true dimensions and thus visualise myself and my stuff in the spaces. And that’s why these sort of displays are super neat when visiting famous homes.

It’s also funny because my present one-bedroom flat could almost fit entirely within the billiards room. Oh, the Gilded Age.

Credit for the piece, as in the design, goes to Arthur Rotch.

Mt Greylock Covered in Ice

Yesterday I referenced a photo of a sign along the drive to the summit of Massachusetts’ Mt Greylock. When I finally arrived at the summit, well, there were quite a few people as the day was very pleasant. But walking about the summit I also found a few more signs. One that impressed me was the following.

Yesterday I had mentioned how glaciers carved the geography we see today. But just how big were these glaciers? Massive. This graphic shows how high the glaciers would have been over the summit, already nearly 4,000 feet above sea level.

That’s a lot of ice.

Naturally the silhouettes of both the Memorial Tower and Empire State Building help given additional context of just how large these glaciers were. This sign isn’t far from the tower, which just reinforces the mental image the sign creates.

But the glaciers retreated thousands of years ago, and since then nature has reclaimed the summit. One of the things that impressed upon me was how the whole summit smelled. I grew up in a house where we frequently burned balsam fir incense and candles scented the same. Opening the car door I immediately was hit by that very same smell.

It turns out that the elevation is sufficiently high that the summit of Mt Greylock supports a sub-alpine environment, including a boreal forest, which you’d typically find near the Arctic Circle. And those kinds of forest are full of those kinds of evergreens and balsam firs. This sign detailed just that.

Need smell-o-vision for this…

Credit for the piece goes to the Massachusetts Department of Conservation and Recreation (DCR) designers.

An Animated Approach to Understanding Vaccines…

…courtesy of Family Guy.

In the last 18 months of looking at the data behind Covid-19 and the vaccines, I’ve had a lot of conversations with people, maybe even some of you, about the pandemic and the vaccines we’re using to combat it. Unfortunately, I’m just one person. Seth MacFarlane, however, has himself and the crew behind Family Guy to produce an advert for the Ad Council. The advert explains how vaccines work, why you should get them, and does so with some really nice animation. Animation that tops any illustrations I could do.

So enjoy their animated short.

It’s like Schoolhouse Rock…without the rock.

Credit for the piece goes to Seth MacFarlane and the crew behind Family Guy.

Update on Tiffany

Last month on another Friday I shared some graphics from a video by CCP Grey that looked at the origin and history of the name Tiffany. It’s a great video and I highly recommend it. But last week he published…an addendum I guess you could call it.

The piece takes a look at a research path he took for the video. It happened to involve some history and genealogy, two things I personally enjoy, and found it to be a fascinating insight into his research process.

All the paths don’t lead to Rome

The screenshot above hints at the idea that sometimes work is not linear and, especially when I’m doing genealogy work, there are often tangents and dead ends. In other words, to an extent, I can relate.

Happy Friday, all.

Credit for the piece goes to CCP Grey.

The Hexagons of Saturn

Well, it’s the end of another week. I’ll save the bigger posts I have planned for next week and instead end with this little astronomy/geometry gem from xkcd. It takes a look at Saturn’s polar storm that takes the shape of a hexagon, not a circle or anything else.

Gooaaaallllllll

Credit for the piece goes to Randall Munroe.

Protecting New Jersey’s Back Bay Communities

We’re back and there’s a lot to touch on this week. But first, as a prelude to some of the Hurricane Ida coverage, I wanted to briefly point our attention to an article in the Philadelphia Inquirer from about two or three weeks before Ida struck.

The article focused on the US Army Corps of Engineers proposal to protect the back bay areas of the South Jersey shore, i.e. the areas between the outer barrier islands and the mainland. The article chose a few graphics from the report to draw attention to some of the proposed solutions, e.g. massive gates, new levee systems, and wetland restoration.

I wanted to focus on a different graphic in the report. This functioned more as an illustrated guide to the whole suite of solutions available to mitigating flood and storm surge disasters. Because, in the future, rising sea levels will threaten coastal communities. And as we saw just last week here in the Northeast, warmer seas plus warmer skies increase the potential for storms with crippling deluges.

Image links to the report, not the article

The graphic shows how we can try to deal with surge waters from out beyond the barrier islands through to the back bay to communities inland both by protecting, adapting, and in some cases relocating.

All need to be on the table, because if last week showed us anything—not that many hadn’t been saying this for decades—it’s not just the bayous of New Orleans and Florida’s beaches that are at risk from environments and weather patterns altered by a changing climate, but even those areas more local (to the Northeast).

Credit for the piece goes to the US Army Corps of Engineers.

Tiffany

Happy Friday, all. We made it through another week of Covid, vaccinations, asteroids, and all that pleasant stuff. So let’s end with an upbeat note.

Over on YouTube there’s a channel I have long enjoyed, CCP Grey, who creates videos about, well lots of things, but sometimes really interesting historical, geographical, and political topics.

This week he released a video about Tiffany. As in the name Tiffany.

In addition to some great 80s aesthetics, the video touches on a couple of things that particularly interest me.

You see names are an important part of genealogical research. After all, almost all of us have names. (Some infants died without names.) Now in my family, on both my mother’s and father’s side I have a lot of Johns. In fact, I broke a line of five consecutive John Barrys. But occasionally a family will have a rarer or more uncommon name that allows you to trace that individual and therefore his or her family through time and space/place.

Grey tracks the history of the name Tiffany from its possible origin to some reasons for its popularity in the 1980s. And that includes some great graphics like this chart tracking the number of children with the name.

Thinking I need breakfast…

In the screenshot above you can see one thought he has on why the name took off in the latter half of the 20th century after languishing for centuries.

But he also examined the family history of one Tiffany and how that became important in the cultural zeitgeist. And to do so he used a family tree.

Family trees, with so many deaths in infancy

It’s a nine-minute long video and well worth your time.

I think what’s interesting to consider, however, is how this story could be told for many if not most names. There’s a reason they exist and how, by pure happenstance, they survive and get passed down family lines.

Though I have to say I did a quick search in my family tree and I have not a single Tiffany.

Credit for the piece goes to CCP Grey.

Threats from Little Bodies Inside and Outside

Of course the inside threat are those little bodies of coronavirus causing Covid-19. We cover them a lot here. But there are also threats from little bodies outside, way outside. Like asteroids impacting us. And that was the news yesterday when NASA announced improved data from a mission to the asteroid Bennu allowed it to refine its orbital model.

And we have reason to ever just so very slightly worry. Because there is a very slight chance that Bennu will impact Earth. In 2182. The New York Times article where I read the news included a motion graphic produced by NASA to explain that the determining factor will be a near pass in 2135.

Too many keys

Essentially, the exact course Bennu takes as it passes Earth in 2135 will determine its path in 2182. But just a few slight variations could send it colliding into Earth. Though, to be clear, it’s only a 1-in-1750 chance.

NASA used the metaphor of keyholes to explain the concept. The potential orbits in 2135 function as keyholes and should Bennu pass into the right keyhole, it will setup a collision with Earth in 2182. Hence the use of little keyholes in the motion graphic that accompanied the article.

But who knows, if we’re lucky the United Federation of Planets will still be formed in 2161 and the starship Enterprise will gently nudge Bennu back into a non-threatening orbit.

Credit for the piece goes to NASA.

Get Your Shots

I’ve heard a lot about vaccine hesitancy and resistance lately and I mentioned this on Monday. Subsequently, I thought I would try to make a graphic to try and help people understand where some of these excuses fit on the spectrum of rational to irrational—with claims of people being magnetised off the chart in the land of kooky.

But I also realised there’s a second spectrum, albeit far more limited in range, of selfishness vs altruism. And there is an interesting shift in how those who waited for the most vulnerable to receive their shots first were, initially, altruistic and rational. But now that those populations have received their vaccines, it’s shifted into an irrational selfish behaviour.

Anyway, I made a few sketches and as I was working on it, there was something in the aesthetic quality of the sketches that I couldn’t quite replicate digitally. And so I present the unpolished rough cut of my graphic.

Just get your shots, people.

For the fuller explanations, I refer you to my aforementioned post earlier this week. This was just an attempt to visualise the two spectrums.

Credit for the piece is mine.

Come At Me, Bro

I did not create this, but rather I saw it on a friend’s social media feed. But I didn’t take a screenshot instead I sketched it my sketchbook. So if anybody knows who actually created this I’d like to get the credit correctly attributed.

Anyway, it was just a Venn diagram that made me laugh. And after yesterday’s Covid data update, I feel like we need to at least try to end the week on a laugh.

The recreation is mine. The content is not.