Infographics & Data Visualization (Week 1)
Despite a crazy schedule, I’ve decided to sign up for a free online course offered by the Knight Center for Journalism called Introduction to Infographics and Data Visualization. It runs from October 28 – December 8 and will be taught by Alberto Cairo, the author of The Functional Art: an …
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 …
There’s a Person in There
My wife works as a speech and language pathologist for a local school district and her caseload is a mix of kids from ages 3 to 21. One of her most difficult cases involves a student with severe cerebral palsy who transferred into the district when he was 12-years-old. This …
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, …
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 …