Martin Monkman 🇨🇦

Main Street
Alex Colville
1979

Who wants a very detailed poll-by-poll map of the last election you can go scour?

Kyle Hutton put in the leg work and you can check it here! -> app.atlas.co/shared/uhOeG...

Is baseball still America’s game? The Blue Jays are changing the idea of who baseball is for | CBC Arts Jays fan Sadaf Ahsan and sports journalist Shireen Ahmed examine the cultural changes at play.

Everywhere I go, people are wearing Jays gear. People I know who have never watched baseball (me included) are staying up past midnight to for an 18th inning. The coffee shop has baseball donuts.

And, I cannot emphasize this enough, I am in a city *3000 km from Toronto*

Canada is behind this team

Image of text from website linked in post

It's time!

COVID and Flu vaccines are available.

Check the website to see if you are eligible to book an appointment.

www2.gov.bc.ca/gov/content/health/managing-your-health/immunizations/covid-19-immunization
#yyj

A group of bronze statues depicting five people in a park setting, with some standing and others seated around a table, set against a snowy background with bare trees and a clear blue sky.

Today is Persons Day.
This day honours The Persons Case, which ended in a victory for The Famous Five on Oct. 18, 1929. The ruling declared women to be persons under the law and qualified to sit in the Senate.
This is the story of that case.

🧵 1/12

YouTube video by APTN News Cree artist’s exhibition brings together 40 paintings challenging colonial perspectives | APTN News

The Montreal Museum of Fine Arts is hosting the largest solo exhibition to date by Cree artist Kent Monkman.

It brings together more than 40 paintings that challenge colonial perspectives.

Hills in Autumn
A.J. Casson
1980

Red (not so) Delicious apple no longer the most popular | CBC Radio After more than five decades as the nation's best-selling apple, the Red Delicious has been dethroned by the Gala variety.

Correct. Here's a transcript of an As It Happens interview from 2018. www.cbc.ca/radio/asitha...

In this episode of "The Professor Is In," economist Justin Wolfers tackles the battle over the jobs numbers—and why trustworthy economic data matters for everyone. 📊 Why do we need… Economic data. Where does it come from, what do we do with it, and why must politics stay out of it?

This week on #TheProfessorIsIn, we dig into official economic statistics. What are they? Why does the government provide them? Why there's a trade-off between accuracy, timeliness, and cost. And why it's so important that these numbers be produced free of political interference. youtu.be/oSbnv2drRkA

screaming

Building Skyscrapers, described by Cass Gilbert, Architect

Accidentally stumbled upon the origins of one of my favorite quotes about architecture:

"The building is merely the machine that makes the land pay." rerecord.library.columbia.edu/pdf_files/ld... 🗃️

There Were Still Old People When Life Expectancy Was 35. A demography myth that won't die

“Historically, no one lived past age 35”

"I’ve heard *so* many versions of this claim, including recently from a menopause doctor (implying menopause is not “natural” because noone lived long enough to go through it). Every time someone states this “fact,” a demographer loses a piece of their soul"

Google and Meta search both report that Cape Breton Island has its own time zone 12 minutes ahead of mainland Nova Scotia time because they are both drawing that information from a Beaverton article I wrote in 2024

Post to the subreddit r/AskHistorians: What was navigation like for vehicle drivers in the United States before the internet and GPS? Before GPS devices and smartphones/cellular internet networks were a thing (Garmin company was founded 1989), millions of Americans were already getting around driving without the use of those inventions. How did they navigate? Did everyone need stacks of maps? Were drivers frequently lost? Did everyone have to understand the interstate system and use intuition to guide them? How burdensome was driving before GPS? Did drivers pay people to calculate an optimal route for them?

I am officially one of The Ancients, Keeper of Knowledge of the Before Time

"Requiring that we be invited into someone's home before we can enter is kneecapping the vampire industry."

Graphic showing how vehicle front design affects pedestrian deaths.

“Vehicles with higher, more vertical front ends pose greater risk to pedestrians. Vehicles with especially tall front ends are most dangerous to pedestrians, but a blunt profile makes medium-height vehicles deadly too.”

Deadly by design. And they know it.

www.iihs.org/news/detail/...

Sound on!

Forget America. Build an East-West Power Grid. - Macleans.ca For decades, we've prioritized electrical trade with the United States. It's time to reduce our dependence on them.

It's always been part of the national vision.
The barriers are still there, waiting to be overcome.
But the benefits---and urgency---have grown.

Forget America; it's time to build the east-west power grid.

By me, in Macleans today:
macleans.ca/economy/forg...

With CBC now having called all ridings it's time for the land-vs-people-vote animation.

Valuable thread.
These are all true facts, with perhaps a modicum of editoral hyperbole (e.g. the degree to which Canadians were excited about the new wifi router, which was in fact moderately, not very, exciting).

From Star Trek: The Next Generation (Season 2, Episode "The Child"), Commander Data explains to Dr. Pulaski that "One is my name. The other is not." after she pronounces his name "dah-tah" instead of "day-ta".

This has been living in my brain rent-free since 1988.

(Video for full context: www.youtube.com/watch?v=WssB...)

I would suggest that the gridlines are superflous--the width of the empty columns and rows is implicit in the size of the squares themselves.

Minimalism and the absurdity of the data-to-ink-ratio How much minimalism is too much minimalism? I explore this question and propose the most minimalist, highest scoring data-to-ink ratio on a visualization ever made as a thought piece. Why? Well novice...

I wrote about the data-to-ink ratio and a new game I've invented called "ink golf" for data visualization.

I hope you enjoy:
www.frank.computer/blog/2025/04...

Time changed for French-language debate due to Montreal Canadiens game | CBC News The New Democratic Party is requesting that Wednesday evening's French-language debate be postponed rather than held on the same night the Habs are making what could be their last chance to clinch a p...

Canada: Where we reschedule our politics around a late-season hockey game with major playoff implications.

What's new in R 4.5.0? Here we summarise some of the more interesting changes that have been introduced in R 4.5.0.

New version of R is out!

Our Data Scientist, Russ Hyde, has put together a quick review of the key features and changes in R 4.5 — from new language features to graphics updates and more.

📝 Read the full blog post here: www.jumpingrivers.com/blog/whats-n...

#rstats #Rprogramming #opensource

The data referenced is from Statistics Canada:
www150.statcan.gc.ca/n1/daily-quo...

A scatter plot showing the peak blossom date of cherry blossom in Kyoto, Japan from 812 to 2025. The trend oscillates around mid-April until the mid 19th century where it moves consistently earlier in the year, in 2025 it happened on 4th April.

In 2025, the peak cherry blossom of happened on April 4th.

This long-run data is a proxy for how the climate has changed.

Since the early 20th century, the combined effects of urbanization and higher temperatures due to climate change have gradually moved the peak blossom earlier in the year.

Which in turn was based on a 1956 short story by a famous sci-fi writer who wrote all sorts of prescient warnings

Graph of the Dow Jones Industrial Average from January 1929 to December 1932, showing the slow, bumpy decline that presaged the Great Depression. It didn't happen overnight!

If you're like me, you think of a stock market crash as sudden. But after Black Monday, 28 October 1929, it took two and a half years for the stock market to hit bottom.

fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=1HWnn