Blog
Things that have come rushing from my pen as if it were a firehose, and as if the words were water
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How Leicester City failed to reach 100 points
Visualisations
Leicester City experienced a bumpy season after their relegation from the Premier League. Despite a new manager, successful squad changes, and early dominance in the Championship, they ultimately failed to reach triple figures. Why?
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Election fever in Iceland: a presidential race too close to call
Visualisations
As Icelanders head to the polls, four leading candidates compete in an unpredictable election
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When was Red Dwarf at its best?
Visualisations
The long-running and much-loved TV series has seen its highs and lows, but are its best days behind it? You know what we do here: explore the data to find out
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A map of Lake Victoria, in a traditional atlas style
Maps
My own attempt at making an atlas-style map showing the political boundaries and elevation of Kenya, Tanzania, and Uganda
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Are Leicester City in a relegation battle?
Visualisations
Will City end the 2022/23 season in the bottom three of the Premier League? Let’s see how City’s points so far this season compare to previous seasons’ relegated teams
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Making a high-resolution 3D map of the Geldingadalsgos volcanic eruption
Maps
Open data and open-source tools combine to make a detailed model of Iceland’s newest land
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How do Covid cases in Iceland compare to Britain?
Data
Looking at the seven-day rolling rate of new cases per 100,000 population in Iceland and the United Kingdom
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Já’s new map: switching from raster to vector
Maps
In a talk I gave to LÍSA, the Icelandic association for geographic information, I argue that we need to think about maps as software now
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Comparing the cover art of Immortals Fenyx Rising and The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild
Videogames
How Ubisoft’s new game can’t possibly live up to the Nintendo classic it tries to emulate
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‘It astounds me to be able to look at a map and know to the square metre where my buttocks are deployed’
Blog
How do traditional paper maps compare to today’s digital maps?
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Brexit
Blog
Britain is finally free to guarantee its own international nuclear-safety standards, unencumbered by those meddling Europeans.
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Price of .org domains has risen by 3% annually, far below 10% price cap
Blog
The wholesale price of a .org domain could have risen 10% a year since 2003, increasing from $6 then to over $27 now. But in reality the price has risen by an average of only 3% annually. Now price caps have been lifted, what will happen next?
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What if it were our city?
Maps
What impact would the Fat Man atomic bomb, dropped on Nagasaki in 1945, have on modern-day Reykjavík?
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Which planet is closest to Earth?
Visualisations
The BBC’s Sky at Night programme said our nearest neighbour is Mars but one viewer disagreed. Was he right? Let’s find the answer using Python and R
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The rise and fall in support for British political parties
Visualisations
How the distribution of the popular vote has been shared between Britain’s main political parties since the 1950s
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2017 in review
Annual reviews
A look back at last year’s books, podcasts, video games, and more
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Can you ever own too many bikes?
Blog
When you have one bike you need two; when you have two, you need three. What happens then?
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Access denied: using the Glasgow Subway by wheelchair
Maps
The subway can be the quickest way to get around a city. Unless you’re in a wheelchair
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What of Trump’s ‘world’s greatest person’ claim?
Blog
The 45th president of the United States has a fraught relationship with the English language
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Data for the 2016 Olympic Games in Rio de Janeiro
Blog
Making stats on the athletes and events available in a structured format
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A 3D terrain map of Iceland using Three.js and GDAL
Maps
Playing with open data and open-source libraries to make a three-dimensional terrain map of Iceland
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Shaded relief map of Iceland
Maps
What would Iceland look like if we could only see the shadows of its mountains?
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From village to city: the evolution of Reykjavík
Maps
Using open data to track 140 years of growth in Iceland’s capital city
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The Counted in southern California
Maps
People killed by police and other law enforcement agencies in and around Los Angeles
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How Antonin Scalia compared with other Supreme Court justices
Visualisations
Charting the swing vote in the US Supreme Court, and finding a flaw in the New York Times while we’re at it
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Analysis of health and economic consequences of storm events in the United States
Blog
A report produced as an assignment for the Reproducible Research course run by Johns Hopkins University on Coursera
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The story of 2015’s Kexreið
Visualisations
Sixty riders jostle for position in a 30km criterium around Reykjavík’s city centre
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Who came second in the British general election?
Maps
Britain’s voters are more diverse than the election results suggest
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Glasgow’s upcoming bike-sharing scheme
Blog
A bike-sharing scheme similar to that found in London, Paris, and other European cities is coming to Scotland’s largest city, Glasgow
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‘Pandas 2, Tories 1’
DataMarket
Do pandas really outnumber Conservative party MPs in Scotland?
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London: violent crime in 2012
Maps
Violent crime recorded in Britain’s capital city throughout the year
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How I made the map of the buildings of Reykjavík
Maps
Every dataset is messy, and each is messy in its own way
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The Age of Greater Reykjavík
Maps
The age of buildings in Iceland’s capital city, dating back to the 18th century
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The influence of the United States on Latin American political systems
Blog
How the American Revolution, the Monroe Doctrine, and the Roosevelt Corollary shaped democracy in Latin America
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What is famine?
Maps
How food shortages have come to be seen as a tragedy of the individual
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How did MPs vote on the gay marriage bill?
Maps
In February 2013, the House of Commons voted on same-sex marriage. Did the vote follow party lines?
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Map of child poverty in England, Scotland, and Wales
Maps
District-level data from the Campaign to End Child Poverty
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Three things to watch for in the men’s Olympic road race
Blog
Will Bradley Wiggins and Mark Cavendish win Olympic gold for Britain?
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A new obsession with cycling and the Giro d’Italia
Blog
Deep in the centre of Italy, one of cycling’s great races is in full swing
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In praise of CSV
DataMarket
A paean for the undemanding and widely-supported data format
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The story of Ripped Records
Blog
Scraping unstructured music gig data, combining it with several free APIs, and making something beautiful
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Edinburgh’s most photogenic locations
Maps
Where in Scotland’s capital are you most likely to take a photograph?
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Wind farms across Scotland
Maps
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Is this what passes for an argument in technology punditry?
Blog
Tech journalism is a bland, vacuous echo chamber populated by lightweights intent on celebrating one another
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The human race
Blog
The happiness of the long-distance runner
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This week in clubs
Blog
This week’s news of note
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Jón Gnarr to the fashion world: we are all prisoners
Blog
Mayor of Reykjavík Jón Gnarr speaks about the profound effects of fashion
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How many pineapples will I find in Costa Rica?
DataMarket
DataMarket International launches with 100 timeseries and 600 million facts
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Davíð Oddsson and the Constitutional Assembly candidates
Blog
The former prime minister’s influence on elections to Iceland’s Constitutional Assembly is unmistakable
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Blurring an image using the HTML 5 canvas
Blog
How to blur an image in the browser as fast as possible
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After a farcical display in parliament, what will the legacy of the digital economy bill be?
Digital Economy Act 2010
As the digital economy bill becomes the Digital Economy Act 2010, I think about the legacy of that political process
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Falling off the map
Blog
Alison and I are emigrating to Iceland’s capital, Reykjavík
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The future of control
Best of
A revolution in publishing means companies will have to learn to relinquish control
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There are some things the internet can’t do
Best of
A eulogy to the printed word
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Students
Blog
Oh the youth of today
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Nick Davies on Rupert Murdoch and the digital economy bill
Digital Economy Act 2010
A battle is emerging: the people of the planet against its media proprietors. Who’s going to win?
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House of Lords debates the digital economy bill
Digital Economy Act 2010
Britain’s upper chamber of parliament debates the controversial bill during its second reading
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Malcolm Tucker’s resignation
Blog
Have The Thick of It’s writers killed off the programme’s greatest character in his prime?
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Newspapers decide they’re not the news
Blog
An important national story about workplace bullying fails to make it into Britain’s newspapers
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Stop Peter Mandelson’s digital economy bill becoming law
Digital Economy Act 2010
Find time to write to your MP and protest the digital economy bill
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Leith Walk botanical cottage, demolished and risen again
Best of
The campaign to bring a small eighteenth-century building in Edinburgh back to its former glory
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The world’s top 100 universities, visualised
Maps
See how the world’s best institutions compare
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If we’re not careful we’ll lose the web
Best of
The ephemeral nature of the contempory Web means our time will be seen as a second dark age
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The unintended consequences of Isaac Newton’s pursuit of counterfeiters
Best of
How the Wikipedia article on an obscure architectural style came to be
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How much do we pay our MPs?
Blog
Britain’s MPs were first paid a salary in 1911. How has it changed since?
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The world in recession
Blog
Visualising which countries are in recession, and which aren’t
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Walking home
Blog
Common-or-garden photos from my short commute home
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Musings on Apple and the App Store
Blog
Developers are frustrated with the opaque rules surrounding Apple’s App Store. What should the technology giant do?
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Twitter and the text message
Blog
How to send and receive Twitter messages using only SMS
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Github participation sparklines for Django
Blog
Introducing a library that lets you display snazzy charts on your Django-based web site
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Version three
Blog
The world has another blog
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Barack Obama
Blog
Just in case anyone was waiting for me to throw my weight behind a presidential candidate
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Ernest Hemingway and an Icelandic short story
Blog
Famously, Ernest Hemingway wrote a complete story in six words. Here, I present that same story in just four. In Icelandic
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The film festival and me
Best of
The camera shutter snapped open. The flash fired. Darkness. And that was that: we had taken the photograph that would become the front cover of the programme for the Edinburgh International Film Festival
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Introductions
Blog
At a party, you can live or die on your introduction. It needs to be good — it needs to be great. Last Saturday I got the greatest introduction of my life. Almost
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Slog, drudge, and excitement
Blog
I’d been so concentrating on training for a marathon I nearly missed a week’s achievements. Once I realised, it felt fantastic
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Pheidippides and the marathon
Blog
A short story from Ancient Greece gives me the excuse to introduce my latest harebrained idea. I think I like to make life harder for myself
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And so the world has another blog
Blog
Another day, another blog. Can I persuade you this is one blog worth reading? And do I have a reason to write publicly?
