Weekly Web Harvest for 2017-12-10

  • Chuck Grassley blasts Sheldon Whitehouse in Trump-Russia probe tweet – Business Insider

    I would hope you would tweet a correction so that your followers also know it is false.

  • fogleman/primitive: Reproducing images with geometric primitives.

    Reproducing images with geometric primitives.

  • Alaska is warming so fast, quality-control algorithms are kicking the data – The Washington Post

    The temperature in Barrow had been warming so fast this year, the data was automatically flagged as unreal and removed from the climate database. It was done by algorithms that were put in place to ensure that only the best data gets included in NOAA’s reports. They’re handy to keep the data sets clean, but this kind of quality-control algorithm is good only in “average” situations, with no outliers. The situation in Barrow, however, is anything but average.

    h/t jammurdo in Digital Humanities slack group

  • Trump’s Lies vs. Obama’s – The New York Times

    We have used the word “lies” again here, as we did in our original piece. If anything, though, the word is unfair to Obama and Bush. When they became aware that they had been saying something untrue, they stopped doing it. Obama didn’t continue to claim that all Americans would be able to keep their existing health insurance under Obamacare, for example, and Bush changed the way he spoke about Iraq’s weapons capability.

    Trump is different. When he is caught lying, he will often try to discredit people telling the truth, be they judges, scientists, F.B.I. or C.I.A. officials, journalists or members of Congress. Trump is trying to make truth irrelevant. It is extremely damaging to democracy, and it’s not an accident. It’s core to his political strategy.

  • Multivariate Map Collection – Jim Vallandingham

    But what if you have multiple variables that you would like to present on a map at the same time?

    Here is my attempt to collect examples of multivariate maps I’ve found and organize them into a loose categorization. Follow along, or dive into the references, to spur on your own investigations and inspirations!

  • Kleptocrat

    Kleptocrat is a unique game of strategy and tactics, based on real-life patterns of money laundering and offshore structuring that have been used by actual corrupt public officials… that is, until they got caught.

    This game, created by The Mintz Group, a global investigative firm that specializes in tracing assets, offers you insight into the strategies of the corrupt, as well as those who are trying to bring them to justice.

  • Millions Are Hounded for Debt They Don’t Owe. One Victim Fought Back, With a Vengeance – Bloomberg

    He started a spreadsheet, Scums.xlsx, to keep track.

  • xkcd: Bad Code

    “it just looks bad because it’s a spreadsheet formula”