Tag: information design

  • Diagramming the Phases of Water

    Even when things are funny, I do not always laugh aloud. This xkcd post, however, made me do just that. And for that, it’s going up on the blog as today’s graphic of choice. Credit for the piece goes to Randall Munroe.

  • The Atomic Bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki

    On 6 August 1945, the United States dropped one of the only two nuclear weapons used in combat on the city of Hiroshima, Japan. 70 years later, the city has been rebuilt and the war is long since done and over—the atomic bombings playing no small part in changing the Japanese calculus of surrender. But,…

  • New Population Estimates

    The UN released some new population estimates. And no surprise here, the world is still getting larger and a lot of that growth will be in Africa. But the Economist put together a graphic looking at some of the forecasts, including the ever popular bragging rights of “Who is the Largest Country?” Credit for the…

  • Journalists and Deaths

    Journalism is not always a safe profession. Indeed, many journalists risk their lives to bring us news from conflict zones or otherwise dangerous places. This piece from the Washington Post supplements an article about a particular Pakistani journalist, but looks at a broader set of journalist deaths over the last 20+ years. That said, unless…

  • Kepler 452b

    So this is sort of a recycled post, in the sense that I talked about it back in April of 2013. But it’s worth revisiting in light of last month’s announcement of Kepler 452b. For those unaware, the planet is a little bit larger than Earth, but is believed to be a potentially rocky planet…

  • Your Average Daily Sunshine

    (Hint, it’s not me.) I was talking with someone the other day about how I dislike warm weather. Give me nice, cool, crisp weather any day of the week. And also how I am okay without sunshine—a cool, misty, grey day is lovely. Much of weather, of course, is determined by sunlight, energy, hitting the…

  • The Funding Sources for the 2016 Candidates

    We are past the halfway point for summer in 2015 and that means the autumn 2016 presidential election is off and running. But running an election campaign, if even just for the primary phase, costs money. So where does each candidate receive its money? Well, FiveThirtyEight looked at the early reporting and identified four types.…

  • Explaining the Greek Crisis

    In today’s post we look at a graphic made by the South China Morning Post to explain the Greek Crisis. The graphic does a nice job anchoring the story in a combined chart and timeline. The reader then continues down the piece learning about additional points from demographics to text-based explanations. Credit for the piece…

  • Pedro Martinez Was Amazing

    So the Red Sox in 2015 are godawful, terrible, bloody bad baseball. But, go back 11 years and they were amazing, fantastic, great and awesome baseball. 2004 was, of course, the year the curse was broken and that was in no small part due to the pitching efforts of Pedro Martinez, who would head down…

  • Water Level on Lake Michigan

    Today’s a little piece for those of you who follow me from the Chicago area. It turns out that in the last 30 months, the water level of Lake Michigan has risen three feet. Despite what some people think, Lake Michigan is not an ocean—I have overheard conversations in my neighbourhood about people who went…