Recent Writing

New York City's POC Population

16 May 2024 I was messing around with some Census data this morning. I had two main thoughts. One was to show the utility of old-fashioned grayscale when it comes to mapping data (or displaying it in general). The goal of most carefully thought-through dataviz color palettes is to make them legible to viewers, which mostly means making them as linear as possible in the luminance (or brightness) channel. Which is, at root, making them more like grayscale.   Continue reading…

Inspirational Quotes

8 May 2024

Six to Ten Hours of Poly-Processing

16 April 2024

gssr is now two packages: gssr and gssrdoc

15 April 2024 Summary My gssr package is now two packages: gssr and gssrdoc. They’re also available as binary packages via R-Universe which means they will install much faster. The GSS is a big survey with a big codebook. Distributing it as an R package poses a few challenges. It’s too big for CRAN, of course, but that’s fine because CRAN is not a repository for datasets in any case. For some time, my gssr package has bundled the main data file, the panel datasets, and functions for getting the file for a particular year directly from NORC.   Continue reading…

Daily Average Sea Surface Temperature Animation

12 April 2024 Yesterday evening I gave a talk about data visualization to Periodic Tables, a Science Cafe run by Misha Angrist. It was a lot of fun! Amongst other things, I made an animation of the NOAA Daily Sea Surface Temperature Graph from the other week. Here it is: Here’s the static graph. Global mean sea surface temperature 1981-2024 And because the hardy perennial of whether, for the sake of honesty and not Lying With Graphs, you should always have your y-axis go to zero also came up, I made a zero-baseline version of the average temperature graph.   Continue reading…