Of all my regular stops for data-vis design, Our World in Data is probably my favourite. Unlike (for example) FiveThirtyEight, which keeps complex graphics and news articles on different parts of the site, and unlike news sites which embed data graphics as iframes, OWID has a unique approach to mixing graphics and prose.

A very common topic of questions on data visualization forums concerns responsive charts. In this post I will use an example of responsive chart design to illustrate the key issues when confronting this problem, outline the framework of a general solution, and show a bit of general-purpose code. The principles should be applicable to any frontend framework (React, Vue, Svelte). I'll use d3 throughout, but no prior d3 expertise is necessary.

Overall inflation seems to be cooling, but the costs of food and housing continue to soar across Canada. In October 2023, food inflation was still nearly double the overall inflation rate, and the federal governement began steps to stabilize prices through regulation of the major grocery chains. Exactly what items are behind the increased price at the register depends on where you live.

In April, The Economist proposed a new metric for measuring the climate impact of food. The motivating factor was that while most plant-based foods are "better" for the environment that most meat-based ones, they also contain fewer calories and less protein, and therefore more of them are needed to make up a full meal or diet.

I gave a talk earlier this week about how much I liked working with Fresh, but I ran a bit short on time and didn't talk about what brought me to Fresh in the first place. This seems like a good place to go into it, because the motivation for trying out Fresh was building this website! This website is in part an attempt to explore technology solutions for data-rich blogging and journalism on the web.

One of the most predictable trends in the ecology of humans is that as countries become wealthier, fertility rates decline. This means that even as mortality rates plummet and most people can expect to live into old age, the population of a country stabilizes and may even begin to shrink. The population of the world has been increasing exponentially for centuries. This period is now at an end.

The wall came down, and about a month later the first episode (season 1, IMDB 8.2) of The Simpsons aired on the Fox network. For 34 years the show has been locked in a kind of strange timewarp, with characters who never age, while the world around them has changed to be almost unrecognizable.

Header image: John William Waterhouse, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons A lot of people smarter than me have been sounding the alarm about the potential threat that AI poses for some time, and I have chosen to ignore it. Until recently, I had never had a conversation with an AI that sounded even halfway plausible.

There's a strange moment that occurs during passionate arguments between close friends, romantic partners, or coworkers when two sides with deeply dug opposing trenches suddenly realize that they agree - almost - about everything at issue. When the key realization is that the two sides differ not so much about the facts, as the paradigm by which they approach those facts.

It’s almost forgotten now, but “Generation X” - a term now used to describe people born between 1965 and 1980 - was originally the title of a novel. Vancouver author Douglas Coupland wrote the novel and coined the phrase to describe what it felt like to be alive at a certain time in a certain point in your life.