For those unfamiliar with the expression, what is a yardarm you ask? On traditional sailing vessels the tall thing holding the sail is the mast. Back in the day it was often crafted from a tall tree—see the critical timber industry of New England and the white pines provided to the Royal Navy. From the mast, horizontal (usually) beams of wood, called spars, anchored to the mast provide the connection points for the sails. These spars, especially for the big square-shaped sails on the famous fighting ships of yore, are called yards. The yardarm is the end of the yard after all the bits and bobs controlling the sails.
Back in the day, when the sun rose over the yardarm, sailors knew the time had arrived for their first ration of rum of the day. And as today is the Friday before—in the US—a three-day weekend, somewhere in the world the sun is over at the yardarm.
In other words, this Friday is a good Friday to highlight xkcd’s post about the common type of sailing rigs. The combinations of masts and sails can be grouped into a thing called a rigging and we classify riggings based upon shared traits.
Last week amongst all the things, the administration released new dietary guidelines, including a brand new food pyramid. The guidelines needed some tweaking as dietary and nutritional science evolves.
The administration made a big deal about replacing the old pyramid with the new pyramid, and you can see the comparison here.
I am not a scientist. I don’t even play one on television. So I will keep my thoughts to the design—although I will say that is a lot of steak and turkey…
My first thought about the design? Pyramids are an incredibly strong and stable shape. Just look over at Giza to see how stable a pyramid is compared to the tower that is the Lighthouse of Alexandria or the man-shaped Colossus of Rhodes.
But when you flip the script and turn the pyramid upside down…you place all the weight at the top and focus the pressure on the tip of the pyramid. That is an incredibly unstable design, and I have to wonder do we want that implicit communication in a message to people about how to be healthy?
The other point I would make is that the new pyramid does not just explicitly reference the older pyramid, but quietly and without mention replaces the MyPlate initiative of the Obama administration.
The plate design worked better from a personal planning standpoint because the circular plate is—usually—the device upon which we eat our meals. (The whole square meal thing, as I was taught, originated with the Royal Navy, which served three meals a day to sailors on wooden, square-shaped plates.) And who doesn’t like a small side dish of cheese with their meals?
I cannot say an inverted pyramid showing the aforementioned steak and turkey provides the same instructional use of what people should be placing on their plates.
Either the right-side-up pyramid of the healthy plate design works best from a design perspective. Though, to be clear, I have no real thoughts on what the division of the simplified three categories should be. But would I eat a wedge of cheese half the size of a turkey? Yes, yes I would.
Credit for the new pyramid goes to the National Design Studio.
Credit for the older works I cannot find, but if anyone does, please let me know.
The last several months I have had to use a number of websites where the user experience broke down and I was forced to switch to using a phone. Only to have the phone try and direct me back to the website. Nightmarish stuff, people.
On Friday I flagged this article from the New York Times for the first post in the new year here on Coffeespoons. The article discussed a Venezuelan oil tanker fleeing US Coast Guard and US Navy forces attempting to interdict the vessel as she steams into the North Atlantic. Whilst the article led with a photograph of the vessel in question, when you read the article you very quickly arrive at a map of the world.
I really enjoyed how the map blended together two different data sources. Ships are tracked by automated signals, similar to aircraft. But, like aircraft—remember Malaysia Airlines Flight 370?—those signals can be turned off and then you are left to search old-fashioned like with binoculars trained to the horizon. (Hyperbole, of course, as mariners now have things like radar and satellite imagery.)
Did anything else happen with Venezuela this past weekend?
Credit for the piece goes to Daniel Wood and Elena Shao.
Yesterday I read an article from the BBC about this weekend’s shooting at Brown University, one of the nation’s top universities. The graphic in question had nothing to do with killings or violence, but rather located Rhode Island for readers. And the graphic has been gnawing at me for the better part of a day.
First, its size. I typically read the news here on my laptop in the morning and evening and then around lunch I check the news on my mobile. (I find limiting my mobile screen use limits the propensity for doomscrolling.) This locator map occupied the entire screen in its column of text. I cannot say for certain this screenshot will be as large, but fingers crossed it is for point of emphasis.
Context for my international readers, Rhode Island is the smallest state in the union. I visited Providence a few years ago for a long weekend and walked about half an hour east of the city for some good Portuguese food and was about another 15 minutes’ walk away from the border with Massachusetts. I like to joke I walked halfway across the state in an hour. (A quick search on Google Maps says I could walk across the state in 9.5 hours, so it isn’t a stretch…) Why did the BBC need such a large map for such a small state?
Secondly, locator maps work really well when they contain other points of reference. If we assume most people do not know where Providence and Rhode Island are, we can agree to the need for a locator map. But what points of reference does this map include? None.
So here in a quick edit I reduce the size of the map and I add two points of reference and suddenly Providence’s place in the United States makes more sense.
No, I did not edit the shape of the square on the inset map.
My second quibble is the labelling for Rhode Island. The circle/dot points to a specific location. And that works well* for cities like Providence, Boston, and New York. But the dot for Rhode Island implies a specific location that is not true. Rhode Island is the entire shape of yellow. In circumstances like these I prefer an outline. Or even just an unlinked label works, because the graphic does not label other visible states: Massachusetts, Connecticut, New York, and New Jersey.
I like locator maps. I grew up a geography nerd—it was probably one of my favourite classes in school. Anything that happens in life happens in a time and a place and I am always curious to know where the place in a news story is. Granted, I know where Providence is, but if you mentioned a random town in upstate New York, I might instinctively open Google Maps and find where the town is located.
But I want locator maps to work well too. And I think this particular map from the BBC unfortunately fails to work. Especially because of how much space this graphic occupied in the article. In a smaller graphic, absolutely begin cutting labelling and context. But for a near-full screen image, these extra bits help readers tremendously.
Credit for the piece goes to the BBC graphics department.
* I am being overly simplistic here. Take a look at New York. The actual city of New York includes the grey island directly below the dot, Staten Island. The dot does not encapsulate all the area of the city. Even dots can be problematic at certain scales.
Back in September I wrote about the siege of el-Fasher in Sudan, wherein the town and its government defenders faced the paramilitary rebel forces, the Rapid Support Force (RSF). At the time the RSF besiegers were constructing a wall to encircle the town and cut residents and defending forces off from resupply and reinforcements.
At the end of October, RSF troops pushed into el-Fasher and captured the main government military base, effectively ending resistance in the town. Brutality followed suit.
In the following three weeks, social media footage has evidenced mass killings and summary executions. Satellites high above the conflict have captured images of mass graves dug and filled.
This graphic from a BBC article covering the horror includes a four-panel small multiple of satellite photos of a children’s hospital in the city. The first two images, screenshot here, capture the day before the city’s fall and then a few days later the appearance of likely bodies and the digging of a small mass grave.
The rest of the graphic in the article details the worsening of the situation.
In my September post I commented about how the RSF besiegers used one of mankind’s most ancient forms of warfare. Two months later they followed that up by another of mankind’s most ancient forms of warfare: slaughter the inhabitants of a captured town.
Suffice it to say the article’s content does not make for an easy read. The graphics buttress the article with a necessary, but cold clinical detachment as it is not as if the RSF will allow journalists or statisticians into el-Fasher to catalogue their crimes.
The graphics comprise a number of satellite photographs along with a few social media videos and images linking the RSF to the mass killings. The designers annotated the photographs clearly and they communicate just what we know about the crimes without any added hyperbole or hysteria. A well done piece.
Unfortunately, as for the subject matter, it does not look like things in Sudan will be getting any better anytime soon.
Credit for the piece goes to the BBC graphics team.
Last month the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) ordered Philadelphia’s public transit system, SEPTA, to inspect the backbone of its commuter rail service, Regional Rail: all 225 Silverliner IV railcars. The Silverliner IV fleet, aged over 50 years, suffered a series of fires this summer and the NTSB investigators wanted them inspected by the end of October.
We are now into the second week of November and the job is not yet finished. Luckily, the NTSB extended the deadline to the middle of November—this Friday—and the Philadelphia Inquirer has quietly tracked the progress of the inspections with a series of graphics, the screenshot below being today’s. (The data being as of Friday, 7 November.)
I specifically took a screenshot from the top of the webpage, because I think this datagraphic series works particularly well. Directly beneath the article’s sub-head the reader sees the graphic answering the title’s question. The legend sits atop the graphic and incorporates the actual data labels for the specific number of cars in each category. This is instant gratification without the need for a superfluous file photo of a burned out railcar or commuter rail station. I have long advocated that data visualisation pieces can be the hero or headline image for articles and written works.
Does the legend need to incorporate the actual, specific number of railcars in that status? No, that bit is superfluous because graphics are meant to show, not tell, a visual story or pattern. If the precise number is required, a table suffices. (Or, in this case, three factettes in lieu of the graphic could do the trick.)
Colour-wise the designers opted to eschew the traditional green–red status board and the potential deficiencies for the colour-blind that such a pattern entails. Instead they used a blue–red pattern that not only works in the context of statuses but also calls to the brand colours of the transit agency.
Functionally, the datagraphic is static. And that is perfectly fine—not every online graphic needs to be interactive. Instead of, say, having a dropdown menu to select the data from whatever date the user wants, the article contains a series of posts of the static datagraphic of the day.
Overall, I really like this piece. I just wish we could have seen the inspections completed by the original deadline.
Credit for the piece goes to Erica Palan and Thomas Fitzgerald.
Fun fact no. 1: the datagraphic shows a total of 223 railcars instead of the 225 in the fleet. The editors did a good job calling attention to this and pointing out Septa had previously retired two railcars for unrelated aging issues.
Fun fact no. 2: the Commonwealth’s budget impasse of earlier this year saw Harrisburg moved nearly $400 million from Septa’s capital improvements fund to cover day-to-day operating costs with the vague “promise” the fund will be backfilled at a later date. That $400 million capital improvement fund would have been responsible for things like, say, replacing the Silverliner IVs with new railcars. So for those so inclined, you can blame Harrisburg Republicans for delaying the Silverliner IV’s replacement.
(I do have to say, seeing that gives me flashbacks to the days of posting all my COVID-19 status updates. I had not realised it at the time, but nearly two years of daily posts of deaths burned me out on the regular daily updates here.)
Last weekend one of my good mates and I went out watch Game 7 of the World Series, wherein the Los Angeles Dodgers defeated the Toronto Blue Jays for Major League Baseball’s championship. Whilst we watched, I pointed out that the Jays’ pitcher at the moment hailed from a suburb of Philadelphia. He was well aware and informed that player was far from the only one and showed me a graphic of five Blue Jays from the Philadelphia region.
I asked him to send me the graphic, but unfortunately the graphic itself does not include any branding or creators’ marks so I cannot attribute its designer.
Also unfortunately, that night turned out—to nobody’s surprise—to be the final night of MLB games until Spring Training begins in February. (Though if you want, you can watch the Latin winter leagues to get your fix. I have been known to dabble.)
Credit for the piece goes to somebody out on the internet.
(Editor’s note, i.e. my post-publish edit: The subject matter, not the work.)
Last week the Philadelphia Inquirer published an article about the volume of sewage discharged into the region’s waterways over nearly a decade. It cited a report from Penn Environment, which claimed 12.7 billion tons of sewage enter the Delaware River’s watershed.
I clicked through to the report to see if it included any graphics. Mostly I saw tables and a few line charts. Nothing surprising. But the report led off with this interactive map as an overview of the various reporting locations, and I thought it worth a mention or two.
To start, a map works to show the various stations. That works great, because the actual names of the various stations are combinations of numbers and letters. I often hang out in Old City and the discharge at Front and Market is D53. Good luck trying to figure that out in a spreadsheet. Smartly, the designers added more user-friendly names to their overview and labelled D53 as “Market Street & Front Street”.
As for the design of the map, broadly it works for me, but I think it could use a little bit of refinement. To start, the legend provides dots of two colours: brown and blue. Brown, naturally represents combined sewer overflows (CSO). What is a CSO? Philadelphia, along with a number of cities, uses a single network of pipes to collect home and business sewage. When you flush it, there she goes. But these pipes often run under the streets where you will find grates to collect runoff from rain or thunderstorms. Those grates connect directly to the sewers below, because obviously street water is not exactly clean and so it all runs to your sewage treatment plant for, well, treatment, before the water returns to the rivers.
Except, when the thunderstorm is severe to the point of flooding. Sewers as old as Philadelphia were designed prior to the Industrial Revolution, read climate change, and their engineers drew the plans to handle a certain capacity. Even more modern sewers also have limits that fail to account for increased rainfall rates we increasingly witness due to climate change. In those cases where the stormwater runoff exceeds the sewer capacity, the overflow—that mixture of sewage and street water—is discharged directly into the nearest river or waterway. Hence the name, combined sewer overflows. In Philadelphia’s case the overflow discharges into the Delaware River and her tributaries. The problem for cities, especially older cities with infrastructure designed and built decades if not centuries ago, is renovating/upgrading/replacing things like sewers is expensive and costs money. And paying for those things requires taxes, which is not a thing people want to pay. And so we don’t and we delay the remedies and the problems worsen with time.
The Penn Environment report highlights the severity of the problem for the Philadelphia region and the map locates the various CSOs. Brown works. But then we get to “water recreation areas”, which receive a blue dot. Unfortunately the use of the dot confers a non-existent geographic precision. When people recreate in and around the waters, they often stray up- or downstream. I wonder if a different system could highlight portions of the rivers. Or perhaps the use of a symbol other than a dot could help disassociate the idea of a precise location for a recreational area.
As for the dots themselves, I would argue the strokes are a touch too heavy. The designers need the outlines, however, because the base map is beige, which is a tint of brown. And the legend notes how the size and the colour of the dots reflect the average annual frequency of overflows. Consequently a number of low overflow locations will have small, very light brown dots. So light brown they could be lost on the beige base map.
Instead, I would disentangle the two attributes from the one variable. I.e., allow the dot’s size, e.g., to reflect the frequency of overflows. Then the colour can remain constant and allow for a lighter stroke. However, the designes do have two attributes they could link to two different variables. I wonder if the size, linked to the frequency of the overflows, could encode one variable and the colour another, perhaps the volume of the overflows. A frequent but lightweight overflow could be a large, pale brown dot. A low frequency but high volume overflow could be a small, dark brown dot.
Regardless, using the two attributes for only variable is an inefficient choice.
Overall, this is a valuable piece of work because it highlights—or is it lowlights?—just how much work we need to do to update our urban (and suburban, you suburbanites have your own sewage systems) infrastructure for an era of warming climates and more extreme weather events.
After all, there was a reason so few people—mind you, not nobody—went into the water when Hurricane Ida turned the Vine Street Expressway into a crosstown canal.
Credit for the piece goes to the Penn Environment design team.
After a few weeks away for some much needed R&R, I returned to Philadelphia and began catching up on the news I missed over the last few weeks. (I generally try to make a point and stay away from news, social media, e-mail, &c.) One story I see still active is the US threatening Venezuela.
The BBC reported statements this past weekend from Venezuelan leader Nicolás Maduro, who claimed the US of “fabricating a new war”. This followed news the Pentagon ordered the aircraft carrier USS Gerald Ford to deploy to the Caribbean. The American carrier hosts 90 aircraft, including a number capable of striking ground targets within Venezuela if ordered.
In their article detailing Maduro’s comments the BBC included the following graphic detailing US Navy ship deployments to the Caribbean.
As far as graphics go, we are talking a simple locator map here. Just a little generic icon locating US warships. But I feel it misses some critical context. To start, the map highlights the country of Venezuela and Puerto Rico. Puerto Rico is, of course, part of the United States—despite what some who object to the announced Super Bowl Halftime Show performer think. But then why is Cuba highlighted? Do the US and Cuba not frequently find themselves on opposite sides of most issues?
Well, the map likely included Cuba to somehow acknowledge Guantanamo Bay. Since the turn of the 20th century the US has leased a naval base at the entrance to Guantanamo Bay from Cuba under a deal of indefinite length, which can only be ended by mutual agreement. Clearly post-revolution, Cuba has opposed the US agreement, but the US remains committed to the facility and so the base remains. Since the turn of the 21st century, however, the naval base earned notoriety and infamy for its hosting of the detention facility for high-value detainees in the US War on Terror. Although about a decade before that you may have heard of Guantanamo as the scene of a murder around which the plot of the film A Few Good Men revolved.
Regardless, the point is Guantanamo Bay houses US Navy facilities for the region, but I would have only covered the small area of the bay in Cuba and left the remainder grey. You will note that the designer did not even opt for a label for Guantanamo Bay. But to see two ships placed at a naval base is not at all surprising.
As for Puerto Rico, to my knowledge, the US Navy no longer maintains any active naval bases in Puerto Rico as Roosevelt Roads on the east coast was closed early in the 21st century. (Roosevelt Roads effectively guarded the Vieques Testing Range, which was the US Navy tested munitions, the protests of which were also big news at the turn of the 21st century.) (There have been rumours the administration is looking to reopen Roosevelt Roads.)
However, as the island is—strangely this feels as I cannot emphasise it sufficiently these days—an integral part of the United States, it is not surprising at all to see ships in and around the island just as you could see naval vessels up and down the east and west coasts of the continental United States. Arguably, warships are more valuable there than the mainland because trade with Puerto Rico is even more dependent on sea-based commerce.
An additional context missing from the graphic is just what each little ship icon means. We have reports of the deployment of the USS Newport News, which is a Los Angeles class attack submarine. Whilst nuclear-powered, it does not carry nuclear missiles and primarily attacks submarines and surface ships, though its Tomahawk cruise missiles can also strike land-based targets. But clearly not every icon represents an attack submarine. We also have reports of nearly half a dozen Arleigh Burke-class destroyers, powerful warships equipped with lots of missiles and helicopters, a Ticonderoga-class cruiser, with even more missiles but primarily tasked with air defence for a region, and the USS Iwo Jima, which is basically a light carrier and far smaller than the Gerald Ford and hosts helicopters and a few aircraft. The Iwo Jima is the focal point of amphibious group capable of inserting forces ashore. Definitely something the US would want nearby if the US intended to invade or utilise “land options” in Venezuela. As the centre of an amphibious group, a number of other naval vessels defend and support the Iwo Jima. (Similarly, when the Gerald Ford reaches the Caribbean, she will be defended by a number of ships and usually a submarine or two.)
Importantly, the news of US ships deployed to the Caribbean include logistical ships carrying cargo, fuel, munitions, &c. that are, by themselves not at all a threat to anyone.
Which icons represent which, if any of the aforementioned vessels?
Should this map alarm readers that the US has deployed warships to the Caribbean? I think on its own, no. The graphic does not really add much to the story here from my perspective. We have two (presumably) warships at a naval base and four more south of Puerto Rico, perhaps docking for shore leave—who knows?
Most threateningly for Venezuela, we have three icons near the coast, one more or less directly and two others east of Trinidad and Tobago. But is the icon the aircraft carrier with enough firepower to level a small city? Or is it the USS Minneapolis–St. Paul, a small patrol ship whose designers intended for it to interdict drug vessels and participate in littoral or coastal operations? An aircraft carrier is very different from a coastal patrol ship.
Perhaps if the designer added labels to identify each vessel or if different icons represented different types—not even specific classes—of ship the graphic could add some valuable context to US naval deployments in the Caribbean.
Usually I laud simple graphics for telling things clearly, simply, and plainly. But this graphic is a bit too oversimplified for my liking.
Credit for the piece goes to the BBC graphics department.
