Tag: xkcd

  • Studying Will Be the Death of Me

    At least in certain fields. Happy Thursday all. For me, however, it’s more of a Friday. I am on holiday the next several days, so until I resume posting mid-next week, I will leave you with an xkcd graphic that looks at how what you study can kill you. I think all my economist colleagues…

  • It’s like M*A*S*H That Way

    Happy Friday, all. Welcome to the end of the week. Today is just a little post from xkcd looking at the time span of the Wild West compared to the genre of the Wild West. The genre has lasted longer than the historical era. Kind of like how the television show M*A*S*H lasted far longer…

  • Disc Space

    One of my current projects is consolidating and organising all my genealogy files spread across multiple devices and drives into one central location. So I’ve been spending quite a bit of time looking at file sizes and things. And that is why this piece from xkcd made me laugh. Happy Friday, all. Credit for the…

  • I Have to Explain This a Lot…

    …so we’ll just put it here. Thanks to xkcd. But in all seriousness I had to describe this just the other day. Credit for the piece goes to Randall Munroe.

  • The M87 Black Hole in Context

    Last week we looked at the amazing news that astronomers had finally photographed a black hole. Or, technically, the shadow of a black hole since the black hole itself cannot be seen. I want to return to that news, because it’s awesome. And because xkcd published a piece that annotated the image to show the…

  • Per Sense

    For some levity given today is Friday, let us get to the really contentious matters of late. Is the percentage sign acceptable in text? According to the AP, it now is. Thankfully, xkcd was on it and took a look at the acceptability of various forms of expressing a percentage. Credit for the piece goes…

  • Infinite Errors

    Information design has largely settled on a few key forms to communicate data. One is the error bar. But xkcd explores what can happen when we take error bars…to infinity. Credit for the piece goes to Randall Munroe.

  • Video Orientation Guide

    We made it to Friday, everybody. Although for me it, was a short week. I spent the last week on holiday in Ireland to celebrate St. Patrick’s Day. And that meant I took a lot of photos. And I mean a lot. But the question when taking a photo is, in which orientation should I…

  • Basic Statistics

    Happy Friday, everybody. We made it to the end of the week. And so now we have xkcd going all back to school and teaching us all simple statistics. For those unfamiliar with statistics, that’s not at all how it works. Credit for the piece goes to Randall Munroe.

  • What About the Magic JPEG

    We made it to the end of the week, everybody. And that’s saying something. Part of my jobs over the last several years has been to work with context experts and help them tell their stories. Sometimes I have to do it through charts and graphics. When that happens,  I often need data files to…