Tag: maps

  • The Shrinking Colorado River

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    Brendan Barry
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    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…

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    Brendan Barry
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    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

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    Brendan Barry
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    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

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    Brendan Barry
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    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

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    Brendan Barry
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    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

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    Brendan Barry
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    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

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    Brendan Barry
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    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

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    Brendan Barry
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    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…

  • Russo-Ukrainian War Update: 29 March

    Russo-Ukrainian War Update: 29 March

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    Brendan Barry
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    I took a few days off from covering the war in Ukraine. Now it’s time to jump back in and catch up on things. Putin and his generals have declared the first phase of his “special military operation” over and that it was a success. They claimed that their goal was never the capture of…

  • Russo-Ukrainian War Refugees

    Russo-Ukrainian War Refugees

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    Brendan Barry
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    This data took far longer to clean up than it should have. And for that reason I’m going to have to keep the text here relatively short. We still see tens of thousands of refugees fleeing Putin’s war in Ukraine. Although, we are down from the peaks early on in this war. In total, nearly…