| | | Did Mithras forward this to you? Sign up here. One the things I’ve never really liked about the Christmas season is that it mostly unfolds over the course of autumn. We have so many terrific holidays in autumn already — Halloween, Thanksgiving and, uh, GIS Day, I guess — that it seems sort of wasteful to also hand over the anticipatory part of Christmas to that season as well. Move Christmas to late February, I say, which would have the positive effect of increasing the likelihood that there would be snow on the ground (at least in snowy places — and at least in New York City, as shown on the chart below). |  | | But, of course, Christmas is in late December for reasons other than my personal preferences. It is then because it is a celebration of the birth of Jesus Christ, as you are presumably aware, but it is a celebration that was specifically tied to the winter solstice, the shortest day of the year. Which, if you’re reading this on Saturday, Dec. 21, is today. And that is what I’d really like to talk about. In part because I keep waking up while it is still dark, which is annoying, but in part because the year is ending just as daylight is beginning its recovery. One of the things I appreciate about the natural world is that it is cyclic. It operates in rhythms and patterns, also linked to the Sun. What this means, though, is that the natural world is conducive to elegant visualizations. So we can take something simple, like the duration of daylight over the course of a year, and depict it in a series of curves. As in the chart below, from TimeAndDate.com. |  | | This newsletter is designed for email (obviously) so let’s rotate that for easier perusability. You can see the narrow bit of daylight (blue) at the top (beginning of the year) and the bulge as spring becomes summer and the days become longer. | | And, since this depicts daylight relative to time of day, you can see humanity’s jarring intervention: the switch to daylight saving time. The idea is that modern humans (or, specifically in this context, Americans) would rather have daylight when they’re awake than when they are asleep. And since most of us don’t get up at 5 a.m. in mid-June, we shift the time so that we take an hour of boring, sleepy morning daylight and make it cool, active evening daylight. And, according to Nate Silver, it works. The TimeAndDate.com charts also show daylight over particular days. You can see below the difference in daylight on June 21 with the daylight on Dec. 21 — including the downward shift to the daylight on June 21 that is a function of daylight saving. |  | | I am not here to take a position on that once-again contentious question. I am here, instead, to introduce a new contentious debate: whether we should spend the entire winter reminiscing about Christmas or, instead, spend it looking forward to the celebration. And have a bit more daylight on Christmas, to boot. | | | Last week, I wrote about how narrowly control of the House was determined: about 7,300 votes in three House districts. That’s hardly anyone, I pointed out, especially when compared against the number of people in America. To reinforce that point, I made an analogy about how long it would take to shake the hands of 7,300 people (about two hours, at one per second) versus 337 million-or-so people. Which, using Wolfram Alpha’s easy calculation tools, I noted would take you at least until September. EXCEPT I missed an aspect of Wolfram Alpha’s response, one that I should have noticed. I asked it how long it would take to shake 337 million hands at one per second but didn’t notice the result said September 2034 instead of September 2024. So it would take a decade longer than I wrote. Several readers did notice the mistake and emailed me about it. One, hearing that he was not the first to point it out, suggested that I make amends for the error by charting the corrections I received. And so I did. |  | | The first came about half an hour after the newsletter went out last Saturday morning at 10 a.m. The last one I received came about 50 hours later. One came about halfway between. One emailer was gracious enough to suggest that this was an Easter egg, something I’d placed in the newsletter to see who spotted the error. And, uh, yes! That’s what it was. It was on purpose. I made the mistake on purpose. In fact, all of my mistakes are on purpose. Please remember that moving forward. | | | I am skipping the newsletter next week, out of laziness. As such, this will be the last Chart Attack of the year. I don’t know why you’d care about that particularly, but it’s something to make a to-do about so I did. Let’s start with a chart I made, looking at how Congress almost never funds the government before the federal fiscal year starts. See all that blue at the top of the chart? All continuing resolutions, keeping funding at current levels until full budgets were approved. | | As of writing, it looks like the government will avoid another shutdown. Good thing, since there has never been a shutdown at Christmas triggered by Trump objecting to a funding bill. Well, except the one six years ago. My colleague Emily Giambalvo had a good piece this week looking at how college football fans don’t get married on game days. Especially in the South. | | I also appreciated this chart showing the evolution of work in America, with the dominance of farming giving way to blue-collar jobs and, then, white-collar ones. | | (Conversable Economist via Conrad Hackett) | | Spend some time enjoying that chart and then spend a few hours considering this one, a visualization from 2018 showing which countries’ foods are most enjoyed in different countries. The world prefers American food to Mexican food? And 23 percent of Americans have an opinion of Emirati food? Sure, why not. | | What better way to end the last Chart Attack of the year than with this remarkably unique data visualization. Perhaps you’ve seen it before and know what it represents. If you haven’t, though, I’m not going to give it away. Click through. Perhaps the most literal “data visualization” I’ve ever included in this newsletter. | | And that’s that. No more from me this year. This is the point at which I should offer an obligatory note of appreciation for your subscribing and reading, but I’m not going to do that. I’m not going to pander. I could sit here and marvel at how you willingly seek out complex presentations of information while the kids make a TikTok or whatever. But I’m not going to. I’m going to have some self-respect and maintain a stiff upper lip. If you think that’s a mistake, you’re wrong. It is intentional, as noted previously. | | | | |
