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 …
What ‘The Office’ Gets Wrong About the Office
I start a new job next week and so I’ve been working on documenting all of my old tasks and projects in preparation for the transition. As I was going through old e-mails, I came across the introductory note my manager sent out to the department on my first day back in June …
Thick as a [LEGO] Brick
A few weeks ago, Samuel Arbesman wrote an article in Wired touching on the mathematical properties inherent in LEGO structures. In it, he discussed the results of a 10-year old study of natural and human-made networks that described how the number of distinct components in a network increased with the overall size of …
Wisconsin Voters Banished to NULL Island
The top headline in my local paper this morning was “Glitch puts some Wisconsin voters in Africa” … an interesting thing to ponder over a bowl of Quaker Oatmeal Squares. I suppose this problem merits at least some attention given the heated political climate surrounding the state’s voter redistricting process. But headline …
Canine Cop in Constitutional Crisis
[There have been some interesting topics flitting about the blogosphere in the past weeks but I’ve been too busy with other stuff to comment. To eliminate some of the backlog, I’ve decided to try and do a few quick takes. First up: Franky the chocolate lab.] There is a Florida legal …
Favre-a-Palooza
Now that we can safely say that Brett Favre has retired (notwithstanding rumors to the contrary), I thought it was time to pull out some data on the indecisive quarterback’s career touchdown passes. Stats on passes say a lot about the relationship between a quarterback and his receivers so I wanted …
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 …