Litte Pictures Competition

Earlier this fall, I stumbled across a fun data visualization competition called the “Little Picture” competition, advertised with this delightful call to action:

help us transform decades of satellite climate data to compelling, impactful “Little Pictures” that spark awareness and drive action

As you might guess, I couldn’t resist putting a submission! Now - I am not sure I am technically even eligible to submit an entry to the competition, as the eligibility guidelines seems to target citizens of European Union (EU) member states and European Space Agency (ESA) contributors. But… I did some work on the graphic while I was in London, so I’m just gonna send it in and see what happens??

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Earlier this week, I came across an analysis with some interesting data and takeaways, but one of the worst data visualizations I’ve seen in a long, long time.

After some very careful study, I was able to make out that openness to purchasing an electric vehicle (EV) or hybrid surged in 2021, but has stagnated in 2022 and 2023. However, the chart is so unintuitive that it’s hard to quickly come to that conclusion - I can’t actually believe a big company like S&P Global Mobility would publish something like this!

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Last summer, I finally caved and bought an air conditioning (AC) unit for my apartment living room. With my job fully remote and a very hot summer season in LA across 2022, it was money well spent - no longer did I sweat at my desk in the afternoons.

Unfortunately, no good deed goes unpunished - I quickly realized that the AC unit consumed significantly more energy than the rest of my apartment put together! In turn, my electricity bills jumped up from the $40ish/month range to the low hundreds - quite a bit of money.

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Pythagorean record is one of those useful rules-of-thumb that every veteran baseball fan knows to consult when there’s an anomaly in the standings.

“Well, you see, the Mariners and the Rangers both have 74 wins - but the Rangers have a +173 run differential, and Seattle’s only at +102… I’d expect Texas to pull ahead.”

Regression to the mean is an incredibly powerful factor in sports, and Pythagorean record helps capture it much better than pure Win/Loss record, which is subject to the many idiosyncrasies of the sport and tends to be less predictive of future outcomes.

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I’d like to share a sample of recent text messages from my mom:

“What is going on?!”

“Am I insane?”

“How can they be so bad at their jobs??”

The target of her ire? The MLB umpires calling balls and strikes during Washington Nationals games.

While I don’t see quite as many games as her, I still catch a bunch on MLB.TV, and completely share her sense that the rate of “bad calls” by umpires was up a ton in the first half of the 2023 season. To add insult to injury, it also has felt that these calls often came during pivotal moments of games, where it’s most critical for umpires to spot balls and strikes accurately.

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One of my most strongly held hypotheses about the world is that the US housing market is in the early stages of a slowdown that is going to last for quite a while.

This concept, of course, is not news - I don’t claim to have invented it! But I recently found some interesting data which helps support my thoughts, and as such I thought it might be interesting to walk through my thesis, talk through the drivers, and see what supporting data we can find to support the argument.

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Ugh, Juan Soto. It almost broke my heart when the Nationals traded him last fall. Looking back on the deal, I’m happy with the package of prospects we got back from the Padres, with CJ Abrams and MacKenzie Gore as immediate starters with All-Star upside, and James Wood and Robert Hassell hopefully both future every-day contributors. But still - it’s terribly bittersweet to see my favorite player hitting for a different club.

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About a month ago, I wrote a post highlighting the new MLB pitch clock. In it, we were able to see that the implementation of the timer seems to have driven a half-hour decrease in game runtimes - for most fans, a huge improvement.

Game runtimes weren’t the only perceived issue that the MLB tried to address in the offseason - they also sought to create more action on the basepaths. This was done through a few different mechanisms:

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If you tuned into Opening Day last season, you might have been curious where the baseball was! Between the endless batting glove adjustments by hitters and the incredibly slow working pace of many pitchers, games sometimes felt interminable - especially if Pedro Baez was on the mound:

Baseball’s 2023 Reforms

The pace-of-play problem had gotten so bad that the Major League Baseball, a legendarily change-resistant and slow-moving organization, implemented significant reforms for the 2023 season. While I might be forgetting a minor tweak or two, the key changes to the game are as follows:

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Growing up on the East Coast, I never thought much about water. And why would anyone? With abundant rivers, lakes, and reservoirs, water is cheap and easy to access.

Since moving out West, it’s been interesting to see a world in which the baseline is almost fully opposite: water is increasingly rare, expensive, and difficult to acquire.

While this winter’s parade of rain and snow storms should provide a brief respite from the drought conditions plaguing the region, I have no doubt that the overarching trend of aridification in the West will resume and potentially even intensify over the coming decades.

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