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!…