Fair Warning: Space oddities, Olympics, and swearing
Hello!
This week I went to Scotland and gave a talk about data visualisation and good practice, and I think it went well. Here is proof that it did indeed happen, and for bonus points, it was taken when I was talking about Charles Minard:
Regular readers will know that I normally split the newsletter into chunks (On the home front — UK stuff; Over the pond — US stuff; Elsewhere — anywhere else; and occasionally things like Odds and Ends) but this week’s content is very much allovertheplace, and so I’ve grouped them slightly differently.
Next week, normal service should resume if I can find enough to group under the normal headings. Let me know what you think of the change either way.
Politics
Democrats need to win 28 seats to control the Senate, Republicans only need 8. That’s what the NYT says anyway, and the thing that’s nice about this is it groups Senators by how moderate (or not) they are and talks through their chances of winning or losing their seat.
Apparently Labour are now four points behind the Tories in polling, and all I can think is that I can’t believe I used to hang on the edge of my seat about this stuff, because we are probably quite far away from an election and a lot can change in a very small time? I dunno. I guess what I am saying is: Chill out.
Ultra right-wing conservatives shared more false news stories on Facebook than any other political group, the FT writes. Another interesting tidbit from this: Trump supporters “are the least connected to other groups and shared links to 96 per cent of known ‘junk news’ sites”.
Geographical data
How far can you travel from the centre of your city in an hour? Someone looked at a bunch of European cities, and London comes out of this pretty badly.
According to Mike Bird, half the UK population lives inside this snake. No I have not fact checked this:
Pop goes the culture
Netflix growth is absolutely insane (source):
Pulp Fiction is the sweariest Quentin Tarantino movie, according to this Tableau project (play around with the buttons on the right to change words etc…)
What are the speediest Olympic sports? Just a few quick questions — I love that this is so informative.
Gender divisions
Danish gender pay gap research shows that having children dramatically affects women’s pay… And has absolutely no impact on men’s pay. Here’s the shocking chart in full:
The winter olympics started this week. The Guardian looked at how far have women come in terms of competing on an equal footing with men. Interesting that China had equality (or, actually, more women than men) in 1984 whereas the US and UK still haven’t got to the 50% threshold.
Space Oddities
If you ever wanted to know what the weather is like on Mars, then The Pudding have created a cute postcard from the Mars Rover, which talks about the weather data it has managed to observe and send back so far. Apparently this is updated regularly. Awesome!
Another note-worthy thing this week: SpaceX’s Falcon Heavy successfully launched in Florida. The Economist has pulled some nice data together on that — although it’s slightly out of date as the launch HAS now happened. Unfortunately, although only two of the boosters successfully landed (in unison, to be fair). And, it missed Mars which is quite funny, though the photo of the Tesla on top is basically Art. Here’s its orbit so far:
Social media listening platform Brandwatch did some analysis of the tweets that were sent during and after the launch event. Perhaps unsurprisingly, according to this analysis, just 25% of those talking about #FalconHeavy on Twitter were women.
This doesn’t fit anywhere else, but… I quite enjoyed reading this Medium post about hand-crafted data visualisations which included a lot of modern examples I’ve never come across, in fields I’m not familiar with. Interesting!
That’s all for this week, thanks for reading! If you like this newsletter, please forward it to people, encourage friends to subscribe to it, or buy me a coffee to show your appreciation. I’m on Twitter @SophieWarnes.
