Happy Friday, all.
This past Sunday Series Seven of Game of Thrones began. And, no spoilers here, but it basically served as an episode to set the table for this series and its plot lines. But this piece from the Washington Post does a good job of summarising the deaths in the show over the previous six series. That does have some spoilers, but I chose my screenshot from minor characters in Series One. So I should not be ruining it for too many people.
Credit for the piece goes to Shelly Tan.
You all know that I love small multiples. And we have been seeing them more often as representations of the United States. But today we look at a small multiple map of London. The piece comes from the Economist and looks at the declining numbers of pubs in London. With the exception of the borough of Hackney, boroughs all across London are seeing declines, though the outer boroughs have seen the largest declines.
The only thing that does not work for me is the bubble in each tile that represents the number of pubs. That gets lost easily among the blue backgrounds. Additionally, the number itself might suffice.
Credit for the piece goes to the Economist graphics department.
This past Wednesday I once again ended up playing trivia at the pub solo. Once again, I decided over the final pint that I would attempt to visualise my performance.
One thing to keep in mind is that on Wednesday there were fewer teams competing—five instead of nine. And while I never placed higher than tied for third, this week’s bar charts show how I was incredibly competitive until the final music round.
Despite an abysmal performance at naming celebrities as they were as children, my near-perfect second round kept me only five points behind first place. And a perfect fourth round meant heading into that final round I climbed back to being only three points back. Thankfully I knew more of the songs this past week. And enough to not finish last. But, I was close enough that a perfect round would have been enough to still place first.
Super helpful that Lord of the Rings questions appeared a few times.
Some of the aforementioned work that has been keeping me busy is the design of a new part of a website. And one of the most common things I hear when I ask why something is not displaying as I intended is “Have you cleared the cache?”. And that is why this Friday’s piece from xkcd is super relevant to me.
Credit for the piece goes to Randall Munroe.
I don’t use Reddit. But things begin to made sense for me in this article from the Economist as it explained the origins behind Trump’s weird tweet of himself beating up a CNN-headed wrestler.
I think the thing perhaps lacking from the graphic is a line that tracks Trump’s approval or popularity. The article mentions that explicitly and it would be interesting to see that track over time. Although I certainly understand how stacking so many line charts above each other could become difficult to compare.
And my final critique are the Election Day outliers. They are above the y-axis maximum. But I wonder if there couldn’t have been a way of handling the outlier-ness of the datapoints while remaining true to the chart scales.
Credit for the piece goes to the Economist graphics department.
From those surveyed around the world.
The Pew Research Centre surveyed international respondents about their confidence in Donald Trump vs. Barack Obama. The Economist took those results and visualised them. And the results, well they kind of speak for themselves. But make sure to click through the link for the rest of the graphic.
Credit for the piece goes to the Economist graphics department.
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 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.
