Fair Warning - Keep hanging on, kid
Hi. On Friday - Good Friday, of all days - I found out that my friend, brilliant journalist Lyra McKee, had been shot dead by dissident republicans in Derry. Shock turned to tears, turned to grasping at memories of the time we spent together and the messages that formed our friendship. I had hoped in the days between, to find more things to laugh about. Grief does strange things to people.
Lyra wrote this moving, inspiring letter to her 14-year-old self. "Keep hanging on, kid. It’s worth it. I love you."
She also wrote about the suicides of the so-called ceasefire babies in Northern Ireland: "We were the Good Friday Agreement generation, destined to never witness the horrors of war but to reap the spoils of peace. The spoils just never seemed to reach us."
Over the pond
How to make music out of the Mueller report redactions — www.pri.org
Obviously the Mueller report is a big deal this week. Lots of coverage. PRI calculated the percentage of each page of the report that was redacted, and turned that into music. Yes, really. The actual song is further down the page, probably best to look at the video so you can see the corresponding pages.
See Which Witnesses the Mueller Report Relied on Most
Don McGahn, Michael Cohen, and Michael Flynn were cited the most in the Special Counsel's long-awaited report into Russian interference in the 2016 election (and related issues, like obstruction of justice, etc).
This map shows the areas in the US where there are more cows than people, or more people than cows. Jury's still out on how to refer to this particular section. The sirloin strip?
Elsewhere
Why Notre-Dame Was a Tinderbox — www.nytimes.com
"The cathedral was all but assured to go up in flames." I really like this 3D model of the Notre Dame which explains a bit about the construction of the cathedral.
Why Budapest, Warsaw, and Lithuania split themselves in two
This is a great explainer on The Pudding about how the EU funnels money into less developed regions in the EU, and how some countries have engaged in a little... "Statistical gerrymandering".
Africa is the youngest continent
Actual Bill Gates posted this sunburst to Reddit, showing the median age of the population across countries and continents. I love a good sunburst viz, because they are visually impressive (but I recognise they are pretty limited format for communicating data).
Odds and ends
Spell-O-L: Hilarious Misspellings in Reddit Comments — public.tableau.com
A few weeks ago I linked to The Pudding's version of this, about people misspelling celebrities names. Well, this is a slightly different take on the same dataset (all things Redditors have written and then written "(sp?)" after - which means that they aren't sure of the spelling).
A Post–World War I “Hunger Map of Europe”
I feel like "unclassified" over Germany here pretty much means "we don't care about the people here; they caused the war in the first place" no?
Actual Bill Gates also posted this map to Reddit, showing the difference between maps showing the predicted incidence rate of malaria in Haiti, when you look at 5x5 km squares vs 1x1 km squares. Can't believe Bill Gates is such a map nerd.
I know this edition is uncharacteristically short and not particularly great. I wanted to make sure that I keep writing it though. Maybe you should not forward this edition to people who have never seen Fair Warning before. Send them a link your favourite one instead! Usual links: Buy me a coffee. Patreon. Twitter.
There is a fundraiser in Lyra's memory - the money will go towards funeral costs and to create something to represent her legacy, if you feel like you want to do something.