It's stuff I made with data!
To be clear, by oldest name I mean a name belonging to old people, not a name that is itself very old. After I published my analysis of whether Garys are going extinct, I saw a lot of people commenting that the names closest to extinction were probably mostly held by very old people. That [ ]
More than ten (!!) years ago, the internet was briefly flooded with semi-ironic panic than the name Gary was going extinct. Indeed, if you look at the number of Garys born in the U.S., it looks pretty grim: This story would float to the surface of my brain every now and then. (Side note: what [ ]
Usually I d start a blog post with some blathering about what inspired me to do the project I m writing up. In this case, I have to admit I ve been sitting on this analysis for over half a year and have no memory of why I started it. Essentially, I wanted to see if certain names [ ]
I haven t been working on personal dataviz in a long time due to a few things, mostly a lack of time, lack of inspiration, and general burnout. To try to work through some of that burnout, I decided to try something new: revisiting old visuals I created in the stone ages (ie, pre-COVID). Back then [ ]
This is my first personal vis project in nearly six months, and I wish I were posting it under happier circumstances. Unfortunately, my employer, Axios, laid off half my team of extremely talented visual journalists. I wasn t laid off, thankfully, but I m heartbroken at losing these folks they re among the best in the business, and were [ ]
It s been nearly a year since I last posted, for several reasons All that aside, I ve still been faithfully tracking my reading, it just took me a long while to get the energy and inspiration to look at the data. Part of my block was that my reading has gone way done from last year not [ ]
I just hit my one-year anniversary as a viz journalist at Axios, and wow, what a ride. I guesstimate that I edit or create 10-12 pieces of viz a week. Heavy days can have 5-8 alone. That s a lot of visualizing! Disappointingly and unsurprisingly that means that I ve got correspondingly less energy to work on viz outside [ ]
Well, hi. I did that thing I do again. (This time with a jazzy new color scheme!) How much did I read? Quite a bit more than 2020 or 2021, as it turns out. I finished 21 more books (and abandoned about the same number) than 2021. I think there s a few explanations for my [ ]
Sometimes the universe delivers you something even better than what you thought you wanted. This doesn t happen often when what you want are clean, detailed, easily accessible spatial datasets. But it happened to me! Behold, basal areas of more than 300 tree species at a 250 meter resolution I stumbled upon this dataset while looking [ ]
Continuing my investigation of the USDA Quickstats site I first used here Notes on inspiration I was first inspired to do this piece when I saw these analogous maps for France: I figured that the USDA data I d already been digging into had to have the data for the USA, and in fact, it did! [ ]