Gnimmel's House of Maps

And other sundrie entertainments

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I finished some art that I left unfinished *mumble* years ago! Admittedly, time has moved on and now a) my scanner does not scan very well, and b) since I drew the left-side part one of the hand gestures got co-opted by the far right, but at least I finished a thing. It is intended to be vaguely illuminated manuscript knotwork-like but with hands. No particular text intended (the ‘A’ is because I had to put something there and it was first in the alphabet).

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A rare[1] foray into actual data today, in celebration of the Olympics. This arose from a conversation about what the best[2] Olympic event was, and turned into an exploration of medal distribution for different sports by rich and poor countries. There is a bigger version here, in case the graphic suffers from Tumblr auto-resizing. I can’t help noting that Team GB’s Gold Rush is primarily in the sports that are mainly only accessible to rich countries (see also the effect of income distribution within Britain).

I would have loved to look back further in time - the big issue is the Soviet Union, which was big into national prestige as measured by medals and for which there isn’t reliable GDP data.

Medal data from the awesome Guardian datablog, economic data from the Penn World tables, record data from the New York Times.

[1] Arguably the depths of London underground stations or all of Shakespeare’s plots count as data, but they’re not the sort of data that I use in my day job, so that feels like it doesn’t count.

[2] In the sense of ‘best represents the pinnacle of human achievement possible in that particular discipline’. The best in terms of awesomeness is clearly the Modern Pentathlon, which seeks to replicate the experience of a cavalry officer caught behind enemy lines.

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Reblogging this from the last Olympics, on the grounds of it being the Olympics again.

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Just to note: whilst more content for this tumblr is in the pipeline, the pipeline is rather clogged at the moment. However, I am doing a list-based writing project at the moment which is here.

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Not a new one - this was three pages from the middle of the late unlamented font boy that I thought might be worth posting on their own.

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Mainly because I once perkily responded 'not too bad!' when asked 'how are you?' at the beginning of a conversation about whether I could get funding from the other party to stave off impending job loss.

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Seven Kings for Seven Sisters, part 7 (and last): In which locks are picked, and the end result is an unexpected number of kings.

(Other parts: part 1, part 2, part 3, part 4, part 5, part 6)

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Seven Kings for Seven Sisters, part 6: in which ham is eaten, and a cat plays bridge.

(Other parts: part 1, part 2, part 3, part 4, part 5, part 7)

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Seven Kings for Seven Sisters, part 5: in which we travel to the land of the dead.

(Other parts: part 1, part 2, part 3, part 4, part 6, part 7)

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Seven Kings for Seven Sisters, Part 4: In which we meet a witch. This would probably be a good time to note that sometimes the story relies on the right pronunciation for the station names (e.g. Holborn) and sometimes on the wrong pronunciation (e.g. Greenwich). I'm not sorry.

(Other parts: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 5, Part 6, Part 7)

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Seven Kings for Seven Sisters, Part 3: In which the town of Junction is founded. (Part 1, Part 2, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6, Part 7)

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Seven Kings for Seven Sisters, Part 2. In which there is a lot of green.

(Other parts: Part 1, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6, Part 7)

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I have always been suspicious that there is a story hiding in the names of London stations. Or at least, when passing through Turnham Green or Hatton Cross I am very suspicious; at Heathrow Terminal 5 I am less so. At one point I got suspicious enough that I got the complete list of London stations off Wikipedia[1] and started playing around with them. Eventually,  the list combined with a regrettable fondness for doggerel to result in this: Seven Kings for Seven Sisters. This is part one of (surprise, surprise) seven. Part two is here, part three here, part four here, part five here, part six here and part seven here. [1] There are quite a lot of them. They are all included somewhere. Insert usual caveat about errors and omissions here.

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Rocks at Imachar Point, Arran.

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A super-creepy dream I had a while back.

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This is the more serious illustration for that Lord of the Rings readthrough that I mentioned.

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Last week was the run-up to the first-stage Horizon 2020 funding call deadline. I also had sole toddler care responsibility (Chris was in Canada). So this is semi-autobiographical. I can confirm I would score well at Question 5.

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An experiment in branching writing/typography (one of rather a lot of them, but this one was finishable today and I'm trying to clear out half-finished stuff)