Introducing… What Size Am I

Posted by on Jan 19, 2012 in fashion, visualisation | No Comments

For many women, there are few things more frustrating than trying on clothes. To put it in terms that my (mostly male) coder friends will understand: debugging CSS doesn’t come close to the blood-boiling irritation of trying to work out whether you are a size 8, a size 10, or both. Because, yes, you can ...

Forget 5.9% – some train fares rise today by four times inflation

Posted by on Jan 2, 2012 in transport | No Comments

Today, rail fares go up by an inflation-busting average of 5.9%, to howls of outrage from commuters and groups like Passenger Focus. But what many people don’t realise is that 5.9% is just an average. And while Passenger Focus came across individual fare increases of up to 11%, I have scraped data from National Rail ...

Train times v. house prices: the commuter belt, on a graph

Posted by on Oct 13, 2011 in life-hacking, transport, visualisation | 10 Comments

We’re house-hunting. And for me, like most coders, house-hunting involves lots and lots and lots of screen-scraping. As well as crawling Rightmove listings, I’ve been looking at transport and house-price data. Specifically, I’ve scraped travel times to London by train versus house prices, to examine the theory that houses get much cheaper once you escape ...