I was recently reading David Mintz's excellent SESUG 2018 conference paper on Five Crazy Good Visualizations and How to Plot Them, and saw a map that caught my eye. David showed how to create a similar map, but with completely different data - I decided to try creating a map
Eliud Kipchoge recently ran a marathon in under 2 hours. It was a special marathon where they had set up the best possible conditions to help him achieve this goal (such as swapping in pace-setting runners to block the wind for him), so it won't count as the world record
You've probably heard of the stupid 'challenges' where people usually end up hurting themselves (cinnamon challenge, Carolina reaper pepper challenge, etc). I thought it might be more helpful to society to have a challenge that could actually help people, rather than hurting them! Therefore I came up with the Halloween
The SAS Championship golf tournament is happening this week, here in Cary, North Carolina! If you're following along and watching the scores, you might wonder how they're doing compared to past years, and what kind of scores it generally takes to win. Follow along as I plot the data from
We've had record high 90+ degree temperatures here in the southeast US this past week (September / October), and it has made me appreciate having an air conditioner. Indeed, air conditioners were pretty much invented here in North Carolina (see Eric Cramer). They are used in pretty much every building
Lately we've been hearing a lot about "record low unemployment" in the news. Being a data guy, I wanted to see it for myself. Follow along as I create some custom unemployment graphs from the official data for California and New York (two of our most populous states). Or, if
North Carolina is one of those key "swing states" that might possibly decide a national presidential election. And with such an election coming up next year (2020), I thought I would have a look at the voter registration data to see how it has changed since the previous presidential election
Yesterday we had a 'special election' here in NC, to elect new members to the House of Representatives for Congressional Districts 3 and 9. The election got a lot of national news coverage, therefore I thought people might like seeing the results plotted on a map. Before I decided to
As we're in the thick of hurricane season, I'm sure some of my fellow map-makers are wanting to create their own custom hurricane maps. In this blog post, I step you through the process, so you'll know where to find all the pieces, and how to put them together. I
Summer is winding down, and cooler fall weather is just around the corner. You might soon be able to take a pleasant drive with the windows down, while enjoying the scenery. But where should you go? What are the most scenic roads for that drive? Read along to see a
