Well we made it to Friday. Admittedly, for many of us it was a short week. But we can end it all the same with this piece from xkcd. It asks the question, are feathered dinosaurs scary? Back when they made the first Jurassic Park, we didn’t know how prevalent feathers were and so the dinosaurs were scaly. Now the Jurassic World films keep the dinosaurs scaly because, well, anti-science?
Credit for the piece goes to Randall Munroe.
My initial plan for today was that I was not going to run anything light-hearted and focus instead on next week’s elections. But I still love xkcd so I checked that out and…well, here we go.
At the broadest view, much is unintelligible on the map. But, you can see a lot of blue, or in other words, there are a lot of Democratic challengers to a Republican House, Senate, and state governments. That’s right, it’s also covering state races, e.g. gubernatorial races. But at this level, the difficulty is in seeing any of the details.
The one problem I had with the map was the zoom. On a computer you can double-click or mouse scroll for the zoom, but I was looking for little buttons. Admittedly it took me a few moments to figure it out until I moused over the map to get the tooltip, which of course provided the instructions.
Once you zoom in, however, you can see the details of the map. This here is focused on southeastern Pennsylvania.
The key to the map is an interesting mix of values as the typographic size of the candidate is related to both their odds of success as well as the importance of their office. So in this view we can see an interesting juxtaposition. Chrissy Houlahan and Mary Gay Scanlon, for example, are running for suburban Philadelphia congressional districts. However, Scott Wagner is running for the arguably higher office of Pennsylvania governor. But his name is fairly small compared to the two women. And just above Scott? Lou Barletta. He is running for one of Pennsylvania’s two senate seats, challenging incumbent Bob Casey Jr. Clearly neither is forecasted to have great success whereas Houlahan and Scanlon are.
Of course the map lacks a scale to say what represents breakeven odds. It is also difficult to isolate the degree to which a level of office influences the size of a challenger’s name. That makes the map less useful as a tool for looking at potential outcomes for Tuesday.
The tooltip that revealed the instructions, however, also had one more big tip. If you found the map needed an update, the instructions were to submit your ballot on 6 November.
Anyway, this is just a reminder to find your polling place over the weekend and get prepared to vote on Tuesday. In the meantime, have a good weekend.
Credit for the piece goes to Randall Munroe, Kelsey Harris, and Max Goodman.
It’s Friday, everybody, and that means we all made it to the end of the week.
As a millennial, I was surprised to learn that my mobile can actually be used to make telephonic calls. Phone calls, as they are often known, are like direct messages or text messages, but made without cat gifs or memes. And your voice cannot be filtered. It seems a #primitive way of communicating.
But thanks to xkcd, we can see how, using one person as a sample, the types of these phone calls have varied over the years.
Credit for the piece goes to Randall Munroe.
I was initially going to ignore this one graphic, but the absolute craziness of this past week’s Bret Kavanaugh nomination hearings/process made this feel at least somewhat relevant. But hey, at least it’s Friday?
Credit for the piece goes to Randall Munroe.
Today is my Friday, everyone, as I am going away on holiday for a little bit. (You can expect me back mid-next week.) So, enjoy this design tip from xkcd on my favourite form of data visualisation: the pie chart.
Credit for the piece goes to Randall Munroe.
Happy Friday, all. I’ve been busy preparing for a trip to Boston next week where I’ll continue to research my family’s history. But family trees and generational relationships between cousins can be confusing. Over at xkcd, however, it turns out the in-law relationships are more confusing.
I don’t think I blame him.
Credit for the piece goes to Randall Munroe.
Huzzah. It’s another Friday and we made it. So today, courtesy of xkcd, we can look at some insider tricks for charting best practices.
Credit for the piece goes to Randall Munroe.
A few weeks ago it was announced that NASA’s James Webb space telescope would see its launch delayed again. The successor to the Hubble telescope was originally supposed to launch several years ago, but now it won’t fly until at least 2021. Thankfully xkcd covered this slipping launch date.
Credit for the piece goes to Randall Munroe.
Today is Friday. We all made it through yet another week. So let us look up into the evening sky tonight and see the Hertzsprung–Russel diagram in action. Or, we can take xkcd’s expanded version and just enjoy ourselves.
Credit for the piece goes to Randall Munroe.
Here in Philadelphia, the weekend is forecast to be not rainy, which is a departure from the last several weeks. So this piece from xkcd’s Randall Munroe seemed appropriate.
Credit for the piece goes to Randall Munroe.
