Datagami was founded in the Pacific Northwest, where salmon is kind of a big deal. We had a friend visiting from New York a few weeks ago so we took them to the Ballard Locks to watch the boats come through the locks and to look through the fish windows that are provided for viewers... Continue Reading →
Life by the Numbers
After coffee, I take on the morning’s math problem: figuring out the insulin needed for my kid's breakfast. So much for total carbs, minus amount spilled and not eaten, plus replacement carbs eaten, minus some for gym class in the morning... Life is all about numbers when you’re living with Type 1 diabetes (T1D). Type... Continue Reading →
Summer = Sunscreen
Last weekend, my family went camping. It was our first exposure this year to our medium yellow star and as always, we forgot about “carefully” applying sunscreen on our virgin skin. By the end of the day, my daughter’s fair skin looked like preschoolers finger painted sunscreen. She sported some lovely patterns of white and... Continue Reading →
Hilarious Real Life Graphs
If you haven't run across Matt Shirley yet, stop and take a look! His daily, hand-drawn graphs are brilliantly simple. They distill emotionally ambiguous situations like the Sunday blues into minimal charts that everyone instantly "gets." Sibling relationships become a Ven diagram, and the life cycle of socks a scatter plot...of sorts! ... Continue Reading →
Fighting Racism with Visualization
How do you confront something pervasive yet ignored or invisible till experienced? W.E.B. Du Bois is best known for his civil rights work and scholarship, but his pioneering data visualizations around race inequity are drawing more attention as visualization becomes a profession. His visualizations for the 1900 Exposition in Paris are stunningly artistic, minimalist, and... Continue Reading →
Lady with the Lamp
Lately, I’ve been fascinated to learn about women data pioneers. Florence Nightingale was a nurse. But did you know she was also a statistician? In fact, she was the first female to be elected into the Royal Statistical Society. That’s really cool! Flo (as I call her for short) created a way to graphically represent... Continue Reading →
Avoiding the Wrath of Pele
Aerial pictures of the city of Seattle have changed a lot over the last 10 years – with Amazon moving in and the ongoing building booms the skyline is constantly evolving. But a consistent image in the backdrop to this skyline is Mount Rainier, looming large in the pictures despite being about 60 miles away... Continue Reading →