The pandemic provoked a lot of experimentation in Philippine urban transport policy. Some were sensible, like rationalizing bus stops along EDSA. Some were, uh, destined to be hallmarks of the time. One of the more forward-thinking was the elevation of bicycles as a bona fide mode of transport. What’s ...

Do you want to excel at telling the future? Nostradamus shows us one way: make your predictions as vague and ambiguous as possible and you will always be “right”. Try attaching a 40% probability to all your calls: if you’re wrong, hey, you never said it was a sure thing. ...

In a previous post, we talked about the Oscars and whether prestige awards still matter. Let’s turn now to what is perhaps the mother of all prestige awards — the Nobel Prize. The legacy of Swedish industrialist Alfred Nobel, it honors outstanding achievement in the fields of chemistry, literature, medicine, ...

Putin’s war in Ukraine is now approaching its second year. In the face of Russia’s armies, Ukraine has confounded pessimists to contrive one unexpected success after another, from the repulsion of the initial invasion of Kiev to the retaking of te...

A super spy races to stop terrorists from bombing a national landmark. A dour careerist falls in love with a reckless bohemian. A genius overcomes a disability to make revolutionary discoveries. A dorky scientist gains superpowers after a lab acci...

Next month, Pope Francis will mark his 10th year in the papacy. Will he make it to his 15th year? His 20th? He is already 86: the last pope to reach this age was Leo XIII, who died in 1903 at the age of 93.1 In fact, by my count, only 15 of the 26...

With the release of this year’s Academy Award nominations, many have pointed out a surprising fact: several of the films gunning for Best Picture are actually hits! More than that, the highest-grossing movie of the year (which is, somehow, Avatar: The Way of Water) and the second-highest grossing (Top ...

In 2009, I watched James Cameron’s Avatar and thought, wait a minute, this is just Atlantis: The Lost Empire but with blue people. Then I didn’t think about Avatar again for the next 13 years. Last week, Avatar: The Way of Water was released, the ...

I have lately been experimenting with R’s map-making capabilities, and as a project I wanted to try visualizing the great mountain ranges of Luzon. The Philippines has some remarkable mountain ranges, and hiking through them is a unique sort of pl...

The pandemic (and turning 30) made me really start paying more attention to my health, and one of my resolutions was to go to the gym more consistently. It’s now been a little over a year. At the moment, my one-rep max for squats is about 1.5x my ...

People’s feelings about the Christmas season span a wide range, from very positive to very negative. As for where I fall, well: Code library(tidyverse) library(ggplot2) library(lubridate) df

In my last post I brought up the World Migration Matrix, an ambitious dataset constructed in 2009 by Louis Putterman and David N. Weil that attempts to trace the ancestral origins of the present-day populations of nearly every country on Earth. It’s a complete matrix, so that you can pick ...

One of the most interesting economics papers I’ve ever read is the 2013 survey by Enrico Spolaore and Romain Wacziarg (SW) titled “How Deep Are the Roots of Economic Development?” There has long been an active, highly contentious discussion over why some countries today are rich while others are poor. ...

Novels can take you for such a ride. Today I’m experimenting with sentiment analysis on some novels I’ve recently read. I’ll be using tidytext with data from gutenbergr (i.e. Project Gutenberg), which means I’m restricted to the classics. I r...

I was reading Matt Levine’s entertaining walkthrough of the FTX balance sheet and I thought it’d be fun to visualize this, um, unique financial document. FTX is a crypto exchange that collapsed spectacularly last week. There are already plans for ...

Elon Musk tweets a lot. Like, a lot. We can quantify it using this Kaggle dataset that contains all of Musk’s tweets between 27 January and 27 October 2022. library(tidyverse) library(lubridate) library(ggplot2) df

Consider this: all charts are essentially squiggles on a Cartesian plane. There’s a horizontal, or x, axis and there’s a vertical, or y, axis. This implies that the underlying datasets ever only need two columns, corresponding to the two axes. Man...

Today I’ll experiment with making maps via leaflet, which I’m using for the first time. I’m relying mainly on this tutorial. library(tidyverse) library(leaflet) Below is a map pointing out some of the planned stations of the future Metro Manila Subway, which will be built… sometime… ...

In the old days I used to download WDI datasets in Excel format and point-and-click my way to a neat little chart. Now I want to try using the WDI package and some ggplot wizardry. library(tidyverse) library(ggplot2) library(WDI) To start, let’s...