Fair Warning - Public transport, breweries, and Titanic visualisations
Hello! I now have a shiny new logo for Fair Warning!
There is a fantastic story doing the rounds this week: the parents of a disabled boy, Mats, thought that he had died isolated and lonely, but actually he had a thriving social life on World of Warcraft where he was known as Ibelin, a nobleman-turned-detective and philanderer.
It's simultaneously heartbreaking and a wonderful tribute to the good that the internet can do, and I highly recommend setting time aside to read it.
Or, for something completely different... I am interested in what artworks people have on their walls (because I wanted inspiration for my flat, and I'm very nosey) so I tweeted asking to see, and it's just a nice thread of people sharing artists and artwork that's meaningful to them. Feel free to join in. :)
On the home front
Where to live if you're young: Local areas ranked for under-26s — www.bbc.co.uk
I don't count as young anymore so this isn't much use for me but I like the way that they've created indexes of different things so you can more easily compare across local authorities. Cardiff is much better for young people than where I actually grew up (a dull outer-London suburb), so that's interesting.
Where Europe Would Be Hurt Most by a No-Deal Brexit
"Households and businesses in Malta rely on British-based banks for almost 40% of foreign lending" is perhaps the most surprising tidbit in here.
I thought this was a genuinely insightful take. If we want to make cities work better for people, we need to think about when and how we get them from A to B. Properly good read, especially if you're a transport nerd.
According to ORB, 80% of adults in the UK disapprove of the way the Brexit negotiation is being handled.
Over the pond
Optimized Brewery Road Trip, With Genetic Algorithm — flowingdata.com
Just in case you ever wondered how you could hit the top breweries in the US as decided by RateBeer. It would take you nearly 200 hours to drive, but that's... doable... right??
This is a great playable map of mortality rates for leading causes of death for every single county in the US going back to 1980. It's massively impressive technically, and you can drill down into different diseases etc but I can't help but feel like having a map of the entire country misses the element that most people will be looking for which is: what's it like in MY county and how has THAT changed. I feel like there's a more interesting angle in here that hasn't been explored.
#MakeoverMonday - How White and Male is the Republican Party?
It's more of a rhetorical question really, because you already know the answer and I already know the answer.
And now for something completely different
Just a massive armadillo on a map of the US that makes little sense. I don't even remember who I found it from but it stood out, and it's been sat there in my tabs for days.
Maps, maps, maps
Mapping and Visualization — Scott Reinhard — scottreinhard.com
I can't link directly to the ones that I think are the most striking and incredible images in this collection, but CTRL-F to find "3D elevation" and you'll see a few 3D elevation maps superimposed on top of old maps.
So. Beautiful.
Wetter-Vergleich: Ist dieser Winter eigentlich normal?
WAZ asks: Is the winter we're experiencing normal? Some lovely maps of Germany here, showing the snow and temperature over the last decade.
A map of how Romans saw the world
I saw this via someone on Twitter and I thought it was quite cool. The map is round, and also obviously the centre of the known world is Italy, (with Britain in the bottom left corner). It's interesting how our experiences and perspective can change the way we objectively present things.
Odds and ends...
Letting neural networks be weird: GANCats — aiweirdness.com
This entire Tumblr site is quite funny but I saw this post on "GANCats" and it really tickled me so I had to include it. I don't want to ridicule myself by inaccurately explaining the ins and meowts (!) of it but it looks amazing. The code is on GitHub. Go forth and play!
Visualising the Titanic disaster
This is from the RSS magazine Significance, I don't think much of the stuff is put online and certainly not free to view so I was surprised to see this. It's a discussion of the visualisations that were created to help explain the numbers involved in the disaster. And it looks at newer visualisations too.
The artwork around this is lovely and the data is interesting. I had no idea cigarette butts were the biggest problem, but I suppose that makes sense. You just never really hear about it, I guess.
"Turns out people really like Game of Thrones"
Someone on Reddit did this scatterplot of all ratings on IMDB and it's actually quite interesting in that GoT is consistently popular and highly rated, but also the number of ratings...
Wind and Words: an interactive Game of Thrones data visualization
This one deserves a bit of time set aside to really fully appreciate - it's essentially analysis of the dialogue used in Game of Thrones, cut by character, season, episode, analysed by sentiment, etc. It's laid out in a sort of grid, so you can go down through different levels to explore different things, all while listening to thematic music and sounds...
That's it for this week! If you are enjoying reading Fair Warning, please forward it to people who would also like it, encourage friends to subscribe to it, buy me a coffee to say thanks, or support Fair Warning on Patreon if you’re so inclined. I’m on Twitter @SophieWarnes.