How Louis C.K. Could Help Improve Street Sign Design
The opening of last week’s season premiere of Louie offered up a hilarious scene of Louie and a fellow New Yorker trying to decipher an odd assortment of street signs to see if it was safe to park their cars. This must be a fairly common problem in bigger cities …
The Days Keep Getting Longer … Literally
Keeping track of time is never easy without an accurate clock and so people have come up with a number of different folk methods to keep themselves on pace. One of the most common techniques is to introduce a multi-syllable word as you count seconds so that you don’t count too fast. The …
Family Pool Trends
With the start of a rather warm, dry summer here in Wisconsin, we’ve decided to take the plunge (literally) and purchase a new above ground pool. We seem to outgrow these things every few years and I’ve become intrigued with the idea that we just keep buying larger and large …
You Are What You Watch
Experian-Simmons released some survey data in December that looked at the relative popularity of major television shows for three different political groups: liberal Democrats; conservative Republicans; and middle-of-the-road voters. Each show was given an index based on the concentration of specific voters and this information was used to create lists of …
Much Ado About Coughin’
Whether you know it as whooping cough or the 100 days’ cough, pertussis — a bacterial infection that causes severe coughing fits — is no fun. According to Wikipedia, it affects nearly 50 million people annually and causes almost 300,000 deaths worldwide. Although most of these deaths occur in developing nations, …
Visualizing English Word Origins
I have been reading a book on the development of the English language recently and I’ve become fascinated with the idea of word etymology — the study of words and their origins. It’s no secret that English is a great borrower of foreign words but I’m not enough of an …
Geographic References in Local Business Names
This little exercise came about after I read an article on the old Northwest Territory in the U.S., which basically consisted of all the land west of Pennsylvania, northwest of the Ohio River, and east of the Mississippi River. As the country expanded westward, this geographic area gradually became known as the “Midwest” (or the East …
CNN published the mugshots of all of the biker gang members who were arrested after the recent shootout in a Waco, TX restaurant. There were a total of 171 pictures, all in the same standard pose and most in the same standard orange jumpsuit: Seeing all of these pictures got …
There’s nothing too complicated about this post. I’ve been interested in creating an illustration of the U.S. Interstate system for awhile but my initial concept of a “subway-style” diagram of the network had already been done. After some recent experimentation with the D3 Javascript library, I decided that it might …
My family visited Washington D.C. last year for Spring Break and, during our 12-hour drive, I remember noticing a subtle change in the names of the cities and towns we were passing through. In the beginning, the place names had a familiar mid-western flavor; one that mixed Native American origins …
I have been reading a book on the development of the English language recently and I’ve become fascinated with the idea of word etymology — the study of words and their origins. It’s no secret that English is a great borrower of foreign words but I’m not enough of an …