New phone who dis

As someone who can't drive for medical reasons its maddening how ubiquitous the assumption is in Australia that we all have a license. A lot of automated verification systems, for instance, don't work with state-issued ID cards

"In a world in which I can’t get anyone to communicate with me – my bank, my broadband provider, my doctor, my daughters – I can’t get an oven I don’t even like to give me a minute’s peace." www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...

Part of the problem here is a long-standing issue of mine: The public gets a huge benefit from beat journalism—but the journalism industry does not, by and large, recognize beat journalism for its value or when it comes to awards and prizes. Those go to investigations and "one big thing" features.

this this this this this

To cap off this thread, I've written a new blog post calling on the federal government to raise its ambition and add four new senators per state, not just two. tallyroom.com.au/64397

🚀 Don’t miss leading geospatial expert & YouTuber Matt Forrest bringing the Modern Geo-Stack to the Data Visualization Society Geospatial Interest Group! 🗓 March 5, 12 PM ET 🌍 Free virtual event — sign up: www.eventbrite.com/e/modern-geo... 🔗 Follow Matt: forrest.nyc, youtube.com/@MattForrest

okay, this is funny, though

ICYMI, @australia.theguardian.com is officially the No4 news website in Australia for the second month in a row

Someone needs to do a chart showing the ratio of Australian media coverage about Aus/British dual citizens, to the coverage of Australian residents who have to jump through innumerable hoops to travel anywhere because of passport discrimination

1/8 So you're excited to go to the @ire.org 2026 NICAR data journalism conference! And you want to follow all the speakers online. This tutorial will show you how do this quickly with #Rstats and @bsky.app. schedules.ire.org/nicar-2026/#/

We visualize the Olympic medal count as Norwegian-style scarf. :) 📊 Check out how Germany looks like and generate your own scarf – including download of the knitting pattern.

The greatest trick the devil ever pulled was convincing people local newspaper reporters are rarified elites instead of ink-stained wretches driving their Honda Civic to a crime scene so you know don’t have to rely on Nextdoor and the police press release.

How much time and skill this took. Great to see this kind of care in visual journalism www.nytimes.com/2026/02/20/i...

Relooted: the South African video game where players take back artefacts from western museums www.theguardian.com/games/2026/f...

The idea that coding agents prove "learn to code was a mistake" is kind of analogous to thinking the printing press meant "psych! y'all wasted a lot of time learning how to write." Computational thinking is getting easier to pick up, and also providing more leverage than before.

Increasingly the stories sound like the stories about tourists picked up in Iran or Russia, for trivial or inexplicable reasons. How long before we start to read them and say, like Russia and Iran, "well, they really should have understood the risks of visiting the United States."

For renters, what really matters is housing supply and demand. Low vacancies and long lines for rentals means landlords have more power, resulting in higher rents (and often a poorer rental experience). Whereas high vacancies means lower rents.

Hey, whether you work in tech or not, if you use Python, please do take a couple minutes to fill out the 2026 Python Developers Survey: surveys.jetbrains.com/s3/python-de...

Nice day for a #scribble

Good example of what the diffusion of commercial satellite imagery and other open source intelligence tools means for our understanding of the world. Clear documentation of a de facto US blockade of Cuba that appears to be working. www.nytimes.com/2026/02/20/w...

Drawing for Alysa Liu，daughter of 1989 Tiananmen protester. Champion for Olympic & Champion for liberty！ 刘美贤折桂奥利匹克自由滑！由衷为她高兴！

My “Figma for Data Visualization” course is now available online for free at @albertocairo.com's Open Visualization Academy! openvisualizationacademy.org/courses/figm... It’s an introduction to Figma in the context of data narratives on the web, with no prior knowledge required.

“I think the wider cultural shock is [Melbourne] is going to go from the cultural capital to the least funded city in Australia.” www.theguardian.com/australia-ne...

part of why this is bugging me so much is that it seems many people are discovering the value of open source software, but crediting it to tools that are trained on it these tools can do many amazing things, but I promise you that "barebones monday.com board that runs locally" was already possible

"In their analysis of 2023 annual reports, the National Tertiary Education Union calculated that universities spent a total of over $733 million on consultants." 🤯

This is a good essay, but sometimes as a thought experiment I think about how we defended the ubiquity of cars 100+ years ago. Sure, we can't really walk places anymore and they kill tens of thousands a year and gasoline makes the air toxic, but getting places fast in a personal bubble is cool!

unfortunately evergreen

The dream is over for Chicago. Bulls can still finish 81-1, but season feels hollow now.

I wrote a thing about drawing and Melbourne www.theguardian.com/australia-ne...