Sienna, Rihanna, Cameron and Usama: Baby names in England and Wales

Posted by on Apr 25, 2012 in life-hacking, visualisation | 17 Comments

If you are a parent, or soon to be a parent, you may already have discovered the US’s Baby Name Voyager. It’s a data-visualization classic, a wonderful way to bring 100 years of American baby names to life. And like (I think) the very best visualizations, it is useful as well as interesting: not only ...

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

Posted by on Oct 13, 2011 in life-hacking, transport, visualisation | 11 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 ...