Interactive Archive:

A nice interactive map of daily sunlight.

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I love how people will spend hours reading yelp to find the best tacos in town, searching for the cheapest flights for their next vacation, looking for costume accessories on etsy, comparing reviews of their next phone upgrade or amazon purchase, yet base their vote for leader of the free world on facebook rants and memes. The reviews are in. The information is available. Go read it. I will try to post some well designed site and tools to help below.

Vote411
Find personalized info on your voting locations, view down-ticket matchups, and any referendum items.

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Ballotpedia

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FiveThirtyEight
Want to know how the latest polls look? 538 has the most reliable analysis

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Draw Your Own Electoral Map (CNN)
Try your own hand at allocating electoral votes.

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A beautiful interactive chart of causes of death according to age. (via Washingtonpost)

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Some beautiful visualizations of where each player shoots from, and is more successful (this is last year’s season, though)

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Pretty wonky, but it’s a nice breakdown of content analysis.

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An interested analysis, but not too surprising if you are already aware of DC income distributions. (via WashingtonPost blog article)

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So, how does America’s middle class compare to those around the world? Not as good as it used to.

It takes a second to absorb these charts, but they show how other countries’ middle class incomes have closed the gap on the USA from 1980 to 2010. Except for our top income brackets – they are still the richest of all.

The original article tries to explain parts of this trend.

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And annotated interactive narrative of about 20 charts on trends in death. This was done by Bloomberg, which has a number of these well done data mining narratives.

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Somewhat obvious, but fun to look at the details. The original NYT article points out some of the more contentious borders.

 

Josh Worth created a horizontal map of the solar system using a scale of 1 pixel = diameter of moon.  There’s a lot of nothing out there (but Josh does add some amusing commentary to help pass the time scrolling between planets).

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Map of all kinds of energy related things: coal fields, mines, oil/gas pipelines/storage, electrical transmission lines, wind turbine potential, offshore windspeeds, solar potential, etc. You get the idea.

It’s not the smoothest operating interactive map I’ve ever seen (lots of delays in loading, etc) – but it works if you’re patient.

Thanks to Mr. Brown for sending me the link.

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Plots outbreaks of measles, mumps, whooping cough, polio, rubella, and other diseases that are easily preventable by cheap and effective vaccines. (via)

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The Economist has updated their annual Big Mac Index.

…based on the theory of purchasing-power parity (PPP), the notion that in the long run exchange rates should move towards the rate that would equalise the prices of an identical basket of goods and services (in this case, a burger) in any two countries. For example, the average price of a Big Mac in America in January 2014 was $4.62; in China it was only $2.74 at market exchange rates. So the “raw” Big Mac index says that the yuan was undervalued by 41% at that time. Burgernomics was never intended as a precise gauge of currency misalignment, merely a tool to make exchange-rate theory more digestible.

Interesting footnotes: India’s Maharaja Mac is made out of chicken.

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According to this Harvard study, on average people today are just as likely to be better off than our parents than the generation 50 years ago was. I wonder if they adjusted incomes for debt? (I’m too lazy to check).

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I’m not sure why it took the Washington Post six months longer than the NYT to do an article and map about this. NYT’s interactive map/chart combo helps grasp what they’re measuring:

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Ok, I lied. It’s really only updated every three hours – but it’s still pretty awesome. You can zoom in and rotate the globe to see whichever hemisphere you’re interested in.

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You can even change the map projection used:

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