An Ephemeral Update to daylight()

This occurrence of the bi-annual corruption of the space-time continuum (i.e. changing to/from standard/daylight time) in the U.S. caused me to make a slight change to the code [from an older post](https://rud.is/b/2014/09/23/seeing-the-daylight-with-r/). The `daylight()` function now auto-discovers the date and location information (via [telize](http://www.telize.com/)) from the caller, which means all you have to do to… Continue reading

Less Drama, More Encoding

Junk Charts [adeptly noted and fixed](http://junkcharts.typepad.com/junk_charts/2015/10/is-it-worth-the-drama.html) this excessively stylized chart from the WSJ this week: Their take on it does reduce the ZOMGOSH WE ARE DOOMED! look and feel of the WSJ chart: But, we can further reduce the drama by using a more neutral color encoding _and_ encode both the # of outbreaks and… Continue reading

Achieve Charting Zen With TauCharts

There was some chatter on the twitters this week about a relatively new D3-based charting library called [TauCharts](http://taucharts.com/) (also @taucharts). The API looked pretty clean and robust, so I started working on an htmlwidget for it and was quickly joined by the Widget Master himself, @timelyportfolio. TauCharts definitely has a “grammar of graphics” feel about… Continue reading

Using the new ‘viridis’ colormap in R (thanks to Simon Garnier)

Nathaniel Smith and Stéfan van der Walt presented a new colormap (for Python) at SciPy 2015 called viridis. From the authors: The default colourmap in Matplotlib is the colourful rainbow-map called Jet, which is deficient in many ways: small changes in the data sometimes produce large perceptual differences and vice-versa; its lightness gradient is non-monotonic;… Continue reading

Faceted “World Population by Income” Choropleths in ggplot

Poynter did a nice interactive piece on world population by income (i.e. “How Many Live on How Much, and Where”). I’m always on the lookout for optimized shapefiles and clean data (I’m teaching a data science certificate program starting this Fall) and the speed of the site load and the easy availability of the data… Continue reading

Two pending features to metricsgraphics

I’ve been slowly prodding the [metricsgraphics package](https://github.com/hrbrmstr/metricsgraphics/) towards a 1.0.0 release, but there are some rough edges that still need sorting out. One of them is the ability to handle passing in variables for the `x` & `y` accessor values (you _can_ pass in bare and quoted strings). This can now be achieved (in the… Continue reading

Animated US Hexbin Map of the Avian Flu Outbreak

The recent announcement of the [start of egg rationing in the U.S.](http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2015/06/05/the-largest-grocer-in-the-texas-is-now-rationing-eggs/) made me curious enough about the avian flu outbreak to try to dig into the numbers a bit. I finally stumbled upon a [USDA site](http://www.aphis.usda.gov/wps/portal/aphis/ourfocus/animalhealth/sa_animal_disease_information/sa_avian_health/sa_detections_by_states/ct_ai_pacific_flyway/!ut/p/a1/lVPBkqIwEP2WOexpCxMBAY-oo6Kybo01q3JJNSGB1GCgSNTi7zcwe3CnZnQ3h1Sl-3X369cdlKADSiRcRA5aVBLK7p14ZLVd2sMJtqPFbvyMox-_5nGw8Z3t0jWAowHgL06I_47friOvi3_Bk-VsiHcO2qMEJVTqWhfoCHUhFKGV1ExqUoq0gab9hhWQ6twQXtGz6l8gxQlKUjAodXFryYRioBgRklfNqW_i3X0RIG_xGdOMdm5F0pYoDZqZ1FQTEKQGKrighJftFdqOX01Fho7c9iiAzS3HG6WWm2HbSnmAzYXxyA3AG1L-R487Df-TntNFuHT9jVHQDWwczUywP44xjrxH8b2eDzL0gHsj-1Bk8TwxReabn_56ZeP1CB0NSf9LFmMX7f5TtdXDtmYoib9z5YadQnYTT-PcVABdWN2s0eHuDry7b3agN3y2A-jw6Q4YfnlZpeZD7Ke3REKZOoEh0jDOGtYMikppdLher4OzymCQVxdUn15PgdMK6-0lwM7obR9ayTx_evoNPxBrVg!!/?1dmy&urile=wcm:path:/APHIS_Content_Library/SA_Our_Focus/SA_Animal_Health/SA_Animal_Disease_Information/SA_Avian_Health/SA_Detections_by_States/) that had an embedded HTML table of flock outbreak statistics by state, county and date (also flock type… Continue reading

A quick, incomplete comparison of ggplot2 & rbokeh plotting idioms

I set aside a small bit of time to give [rbokeh](https://github.com/bokeh/rbokeh) a try and figured I’d share a small bit of code that shows how to make the “same” chart in both ggplot2 and rbokeh. #### What is Bokeh/rbokeh? rbokeh is an [htmlwidget](http://htmlwidgets.org) wrapper for the [Bokeh](http://bokeh.pydata.org/en/latest/) visualization library that has become quite popular in… Continue reading