maps – Page 30 – Coffee Spoons

How Trumpcare Differs from Obamacare

We are going to have a busy week this week. From the CBO release on Trumpcare costs and coverage to the elections in the Netherlands. Oh, and it might snow a wee bit here in Philadelphia and the East Coast. So let’s dive straight into today’s post, an article all the way from the West Coast and the LA Times.

It looks at a comparison between Trumpcare and Obamacare.

How the changes affect the young, middle-aged, and the elderly by income level

The clearest takeaway is that they are using some pretty good colours here. Because purple.

But in all seriousness, the takeaway from this graphic is that Trumpcare as proposed will cost more for the poor and the elderly. And it will cost especially more for those who live in rural and more isolated areas. And that basically comes down to the fact that Trumpcare will not factor in the local cost of insurance, which generally costs more in non-urban areas.

But for the fullest understanding of the differences, you should read the full piece as it offers a point-by-point comparison.

Credit for the piece goes to Noam N. Levey and Kyle Kim.

North Korea’s Missile Programme

So here’s how this week was supposed to go. I was going to write about the Northern Irish election Monday and then Tuesday was going to be a piece from the New York Times that looked at the public’s concerns facing an incoming president. This piece I was going to save for later. But then Sunday night North Korea tested several missiles and flew them into the Sea of Japan. Sort of felt appropriate to move this one up a couple of days.

As you know, I like infographics and diagrams about military things. And in an article about the US cyberwar against North Korea, the New York Times included these graphics to provide context about the scale and scope of the North Korean missile programme.

missileRange_900 — Where the missiles can reach, looking at you, West Coast

The size of the missiles and the number of tests

pageDesign_900 — The overall design of the page

I don’t have the URL for the page on-hand, but if you can find it. The article is well worth the read.

Credit for the piece goes to Troy Griggs.

Northern Ireland Assembly Election Results

Friday was election day across Northern Ireland as voters elected their representatives for the assembly at Stormont. The headline results: the Nationalists have gained significant ground on the Unionists. The Guardian captured the tallies in this results page.

Credit for the piece goes to the Guardian’s graphics department.

Get to Dam Work

Sorry, not sorry.

But also, sorry. This piece was supposed to go up Wednesday after President Trump’s speech where he announced he’d like to spend $1 trillion on infrastructure. But it didn’t post, so you will get two today.

This article from the New York Times dates from about a week or so ago at the height of the flooding out in California. During that deluge, the Oroville Dam emergency spillway partially failed. And a week prior to that, the Twentyone Mile Dam in Nevada burst.

Dams require investment and maintenance along with roads, railways, airports, and well practically all infrastructure. The article leads in with a map locating all those dam locations across the United States and colour codes them by age.

The article outlines the potential costs and risks associated with all this dam stuff and is worth a quick read. It also includes some nice secondary graphics about the dam hazard potential in Nevada.

Sorry, not sorry.

Credit for the piece goes to Troy Griggs, Gregor Aisch, and Sarah Almukhtar.

Marriage Rates

Well, so about that whole Michael Flynn furore thing I wrote about yesterday…. Time to add another name to the list of people to be appointed—as I said, that post isn’t confirmed, merely appointed.

But today is Valentine’s Day. So for all you lovebirds out there, here are some graphics showing how rate of marriages has declined in the United States.

It does a real nice job of presenting the overall national view, but then breaking that down into a state-by-state comparison over time, the small multiples shown below.

I can say that I was in DC for a friend's marriage during that spike — I can say that I was in DC for a friend’s marriage during that spike

My critique would be the labelling. Note how the state label appears above the chart, but how when stacked in a row, the label for the state below appears far closer to the chart above. The first few times I looked at this, I saw the label for the chart as being below. And I was therefore curious why Kansas was so different from the rest of the plains state. It just goes to show you how important spacing and layout can be on the page.

Credit for the piece goes to Matt Stiles.

Snowfall in Philadelphia

Today, 9 February, it finally snowed significantly here in Philadelphia. In Chicago it probably snowed shortly after I moved out in September. Today’s graphic is a forecast map from philly.com using National Weather Service (NWS) data.

I fail to understand the divergent palette—to be fair this is not the only instance of it throughout the meteorological world. There is a split at the six-inch mark—but why? If anything, my eye would think that the 4–6 range is the heaviest, not the yellow. Snowfall is usually more of a continuous range, and so both within the blues and yellows you get that through a softer edge as the colours become more intense. And then you hit the six-inch mark and a violent shift.

I am also curious as to why the choice to use a coloured map background. Especially if the colour, a lightish green-blue is so close to the lightish blue used by the map to forecast snowfall.

In short, I think this Philadelphia map could use some attention from some designers to make the message a bit clearer.

Credit for the piece goes to the philly.com graphics department.

To Visit or Not to Visit

Well we’re less than a full two weeks into the Trump administration and oh how he has upset people. So much so that after being offered a state visit to the United Kingdom, the people of the UK drafted and are signing a petition to attempt to prevent Trump from visiting the UK.

This map from the Guardian, screenshot below, looks at how the signatures are distributed across the UK.

Credit for the piece goes to the Guardian’s graphic department.

Old Las Vegas

During my time at the Mob Museum in Las Vegas, I came upon this illustrated map of 1930s Las Vegas and its environs. It shows the audience all of the various entertainments and attractions in the area, from the hubbub of Las Vegas to the natural scenery of the Grand Canyon. The gaming industry had yet to really take hold, as you can see from the lack of the Strip. It’s not a particularly data-heavy map, so it sort of fits for the Friday section of the blog.

Credit for the piece goes to an unknown artist—I cannot read the name in the map.

Philadelphia’s Growth Since the 1940s

I stumbled upon this article last night on philly.curbed.com that takes a look at the growth and slowdown in said growth in Philadelphia. For the purposes of this blog, that included an animated .gif that showed the expansion in the metro area since the 1940s.

At this point I was far from being born…let alone living in the city

My quibble with the piece is that the lighter blue loses out to the darker. And so one really sees the presence of the city at the expense of the growth. I wonder if reversing the two colours or in some other way de-emphasising the areas built up would allow the new growth areas to come to the forefront of the map.

Credit for the piece goes to BuildZoom.

The United States of Blank

Well, you made it to the Christmas holidays. First, some housekeeping, my posting next week might be a bit sporadic. Not that it hasn’t been sporadic the last few months.

Second, it’s a Friday, so let’s take a look at that federal republic of states we talked about yesterday. According to xkcd, of course.

Credit for the piece goes to Randall Munroe.