This chart showing renewables completely dominating new electricity generation - and others in the thread showing amongst other things solar overtaking coal in overall generation - must signify a major milestone.

Kind of amazing that this was 7.5 years ago I wrote this on censored data, glad if it is still a bit helpful.

Thucydides alert! "What made war inevitable, in other words, was not merely the presence of rival great powers, but the fact that one of those powers was abusing the rules of the system that had enabled its rise to greatness in the first place." Gift link www.nytimes.com/2026/04/19/o...

IPUMS DHS data extracts can now be created using a microdata API in R, through a package called ipumsr! See our introduction to the microdata API at https://tech.popdata.org/ipumsr/dev/articles/ipums-api.html

Box art for Nestle's "DOCTOR WHO MILK CHOCOLATE" (1971). #DoctorWho #DrWho #scifi #sciencefiction #scifiart #1970s

On The Climate Brink, I write about different ways of counting heat-related mortality. I think this is important info for everyone who wants to talk about climate impacts. open.substack.com/pub/theclima...

Its hard not to notice a pattern in e.g Australia, Canada, Hungary of the side of politics that associates itself publicly with Trump and Vance and gets their support being resoundingly thumped in the election. Is this true or am I selecting a sample based on the response?

spooky Eh open.spotify.com/track/0PIu0w...

Not sure this photo does it justice but I thoroughly agree, both seasons of Deadloch are brilliant, very funny, ultra-Australian thriller comedies. And beautifully Tasmanian and Northern Territorian. Caution, there *is* more swearing per minute than any other show I recall.

What's the most under-rated driver of gender equality? (In praise of job-creating economic growth) www.ggd.world/p/whats-the-...

Day 4 — Slope Illiteracy is declining across the world. Countries don’t start from the same place — far from it. But over time, the slopes of decline look strikingly similar. #DataViz #RStats #ggplot2#Education #OpenData #30DayChartChallenge.

This is the short list of public, frequently updated prices I'm monitoring for the economic impact of the war in Iran on Asia-Pacific. Are there any suggestions or corrections #econsky? Why is the Intra-Asia Container Index not showing price increases comparable to the other indicators?

I dont like the 'AI imports' label, but whatever you call it this is fascinating about how computers and related products are so important and fast growing in US imports.

I really do think there's no longer a place for April fools given we all already have such cognitive load telling apart sarcasm, trolling, disinformation, misinformation, stupidity, 'waves hand' reality, and the occasional good faith controversy.

This was (I think) my first use of the {{owidapi}} #rstats package by @christophscheuch.bsky.social to access @ourworldindata.org data, and it worked very nicely.

A selection of the best responses to this question. (from @sameyler.bsky.social @jordanw2382.bsky.social @interfluidity.com @pamherd.bsky.social)

Pacific island countries are *extremely* dependent on oil and gas products - particularly diesel - for electricity generation. Brief blog with #rstats code at freerangestats.info/blog/2026/03... 1/2

I genuinely think we should use these as our definition of neoliberalism and we might have more meaningful discussion, whether people are for or against these things:

How to Criminalize Poverty in PNG

At a UN press briefing, @fao.org Chief Economist @maximotorero.bsky.social warned that disruption to the Strait of Hormuz is triggering one of the most severe shocks to global commodity flows in recent years. More here 🔗 https://bit.ly/4m4oHdh

I see the Kurdish revolt, the Return of the King, the popular uprising, and the coup by Moderate Elements have all failed to eventuate.

In short: are *American* farmers doomed - no, I think @sarahtaber.bsky.social is right. But the global effects to a rupture in the food supply could be really bad for countries that lack the tremendous resources of the United States, whose populations are far more precarious than most Americans.

29 years of #rstats community knowledge was sitting in hard-to-search pipermail archives. So I built a more modern home for it. Introducing the R Mailing List Archives: 631,000+ messages from 32 lists, fully searchable and available as open data. r-mailing-lists.thecoatlessprofessor.com

A few weeks ago I noticed a team building workshop agenda that had a session on "types of losses and our ontological way of being". Then today I noticed on LinkedIn someone who described themselves as an Ontological Coach. Did some research, and apparently this really is A Thing. WTAF?

UPDATE: Historians have not, in fact, got 1066 'all wrong'. www.marcmorris.org.uk/2026/03/did-...

I have blogged at more length than usual on Pacific #demography issues, tying together with narrative the charts produced in six #rstats posts starting late last year. The theme is the obvious that people movement is critically important in the Pacific. freerangestats.info/blog/2026/03...

I learnt some stuff and meta-stuff about Easter from this interesting (old now) read.

As a big milk drinker, I resent that it seems to have become white-supremacist and/or fascist coded.

7/ In summary: automated AI procedures for empirical work are leaning even MORE on diff-in-diff -- a concerning development. If anything, my view is we are doing too much DiD nowadays for empirical applied causal work.

Aid cuts, inflation, illegal war - I explain why this is going to be a perfect, deadly storm for foreign aid: open.substack.com/pub/terencew...

Lots of speculation on the US trying to seize Kharg island, which is obviously extremely difficult and would require 10s of thousands of personnel, ships in the Gulf, and real casualties. But what would be the point - can anyone point me to arguments this would help the situation for US objectives?

Many countries of origin have shifted from concerns about "brain drain" to actively promoting emigration. New @cgdev.org paper by @charlesjkenny.bsky.social outlines how emigration *can* contribute to growth, but only if the right policies are in place. www.cgdev.org/publication/...

The case to ban cookie banners (which are those pop-ups asking if you agree to the site using cookies, for privacy reasons - this may be unfamiliar terminology to others as it was to me). "Users ... learn not to assert their rights but to surrender them reflexively."

Immediately after your interview, every panel i have been on spends ten minutes debriefing and scoring the candidate. It's all over bar reference checks. What can an email an hour or a day later do other than bother the recipient?

Every day is a good day for sharing one of the most useful papers about research data ever written. PLEASE get your people to understand and follow this advice. www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....

🚨 New Blog Post 🚨 I wrote my very first blog post 😊 This post is for quantitative researchers working with negatively worded Likert-scale items and haven't heard that these items can cause problems. I outline key issues, describe alternatives, and recommend lit. yannicmeier.de/2026/03/03/w...

Claude tells me you'd actually need around 2,000 thermonuclear warheads to build that shortcut canal, putting aside any political or religious sensibilities from the current owners of the land. This seems more plausible than 12, but still less than I'd thought.

Using LLMs for writing code, analyzing text, summarizing work for yourself - I reckon these are less harmful uses than using LLMs to generate prose to increase the number of papers you write. /2

The funny thing is, that Americans study math and play sports, but Australians or British study maths and play sport.

Well, this seems like as good a time as any to revisit the Lin Wells memo while having a cigar and a nice snifter of cognac in front of a fire made from dozens of books, articles, and planning documents about China.

If you refuse to share your code, I refuse to take your results seriously.

Could the oil price hike cause the AI bubble to burst? Actually not implausible.

Brent Crude has nearly reached the 2022 peak.

Remittances - payments from relatives or other contacts abroad - are astonishingly high in some Pacific island countries. I round out my series creating visuals related to Pacific #demography issues with a blog post with #rstats code at freerangestats.info/blog/2026/03...

I loved the David Eddings Belgariad books as a teenager, but now can't get past the racial essentialism. Also heard he abused his foster children, but this is separate.

Essentially impossible to identify (easily generated) fake regression results, unless data and code are available.

Let me start a belated thread of Aotearoa New Zealand silvan birds. To lead things off, a New Zealand Bellbird photographed on Kapiti Island.

The within-country comparisons are fine, but some of the other comparisons are uninterpetable given this weighting acheme

This makes me think of a fun captcha game I played once called I’m not a robot - neal.fun/not-a-robot/