Tag: maps

  • Hidden Cities in the Amazon

    Who did not like Indiana Jones growing up as a kid? Or better yet, stories of explorers like Heinrich Schliemann, who discovered the lost city of Troy? The ancient world boasted a number of civilisations that no longer exist. But not all lost civilisations date back thousands of years. A recent article in Nature details…

  • Kids Do the Darnedest Things: But Really They Do

    Remember how just last week I posted a graphic about the number of under-18 year olds killed by under-18 year olds? Well now we have an 18-year-old shooting up an elementary school killing 19 students and two teachers. Legally the alleged shooter, Salvador Ramos, is an adult given his age. But he was also a…

  • The Shrinking Colorado River

    Last week the Washington Post published a nice long-form article about the troubles facing the Colorado River in the American and Mexican west. The Colorado is the river dammed by the Hoover and Glen Canyon Dams. It’s what flows through the Grand Canyon and provides water to the thirsty residents of the desert southwest. But…

  • Whilst We Wait for Roe…

    to be overturned by the Supreme Court, as seems likely, states have been busy passing laws to both restrict and expand abortion access. This article from FiveThirtyEight describes the statutory activity with the use of a small multiple graphic I’ve screenshot below. Each little map represents an action that states could have taken recently, for…

  • Kids Do the Darnedest Things: Shoot Other Kids

    Kids Do the Darnedest Things: Shoot Other Kids

    Last month, a 2-year old shot and killed his 4-year old sister whilst they sat in a car at a petrol station in Chester, Pennsylvania, a city just south of Philadelphia. Not surprisingly some people began to look at the data around kid-involved shootings. One such person was Christopher Ingraham who explored the data and…

  • One Million Covid-19 Deaths

    This past weekend the United States surpassed one million deaths due to Covid-19. To put that in other terms, imagine the entire city of San Jose, California simply dead. Or just a little bit more than the entire city of Austin, Texas. Estimates place the number of those infected at about 80 million. Back of…

  • Madagascar

    Well we made it through the week. Yesterday we looked at plate tectonics and the future shape of the world. So today it’s time to look at a map recently made by xkcd. Specifically it looks at the world through the lens of Madagascar. Greenland isn’t as big as it looks on Google Maps. So…

  • The Continents Will Fall Off the Flat Earth

    To be clear, we know the Earth is round. At least most people know that. Some people delude themselves. We also know that sitting atop the mantle we have plates of rock that move around. Sometimes they slip underneath others. Other times they collide and crumple. Plate tectonics explain why there are so many similarities…

  • The Potential Impacts of Throwing Out Roe v Wade

    Spoiler: they are significant. Last night we had breaking news on two very big fronts. The first is that somebody inside the Supreme Court leaked an entire draft of the majority opinion, written by Justice Alito, to Politico. Leaks from inside the Supreme Court, whilst they do happen, are extremely rare. This alone is big…

  • Russo-Ukrainian War Update: 6 April

    Russo-Ukrainian War Update: 6 April

    It’s been a week since my last update and that’s in part because a lot has changed. When we last spoke, the Russians had announced they had successfully completed the first phase of the “special military operation”. They didn’t. Instead, Russian forces have completed a full-on retreat from northern Ukraine, sending troops and equipment back…