Experimenting with 3D datavis in QGIS (this is using the Qgis2threejs plugin). The data shows railway station entries/exits for 2023/24. I'm enjoying the fact that this turns London into a horrifying gothic spire.

We're using a new version of Excel at work. Good things: - The formula bar is finally in monospace font by default! No more pixel hunting! - The colour picker is huge and clear and includes high-contrast filtering Less good: - The chart "Select Data" dialog remains exactly as buggy as ever.

Interesting phrasing on today's Commons order paper. I haven't seen "the matter of" used for a general debate before - maybe it looked bad to say that the House "has considered giving every child the best start in life" as if it might say "nah, won't bother".

Well, this is exciting - I've been grumbling for *years* about how figures at Budgets and Spending Reviews are only given to the nearest £100 million, which makes data analysis needlessly difficult. And the Treasury have just gone ahead and published the unrounded data! www.gov.uk/government/p...

Summary briefing on the Spending Review is out! commonslibrary.parliament.uk/research-bri...

Time for some initial Spending Review analysis! As expected, this is a very health-centric Spending Review - most of the day-to-day spending increase goes there. Depending how you count it, 20 or so departments will have to share about £5 billion of the remaining increases.

It's out! Everything* you ever wanted to know about next week's Spending Review. *probably not everything commonslibrary.parliament.uk/research-bri...

A little pope data for you all this fine morning. I like any dataset that goes back 2,000 years (although the chart only goes back to 1404). (Source: www.theguardian.com/news/datablo...)

Today in Baffling Web Design Decisions: what on earth is going on with Glasgow City Council's year selection for their council meetings calendar?

We've published a new short article on the aid cut (and defence spending increase) announced by the PM yesterday. commonslibrary.parliament.uk/uk-to-reduce...

Behold, a 91% rural local authority! (Why? Because the ONS defines "urban" as "within a built-up area which has a population of 10,000 or more", and "rural" as everything else. And in the 2021 Census, the City of London built-up area had a population of about 7,500.)

The big news from 2024 that I missed at the time: HM Treasury have finally changed the font in their "official forecasts for the UK economy" document so that capital letters no longer have little "horns". (First image from March this year, second one from December.)

Here are some National Park Facts (TM), occasioned by my having to look at the boundaries for something for work: FACT 1: The only non-contiguous National Park in Great Britain is Pembrokeshire Coast, which is divided into four main chunks and a few islands.

Quick chart showing just how extraordinary last week's Test was. There have only been six occasions - ever - where a Test side scored as many runs in their first innings as Pakistan did and then went on to lose the match.

Shall we explore together why Google's "AI Overviews" are, um, somewhat less than helpful when you're looking for something specific? 🧵 (1/n)

Really pleased to announce the launch of a thoroughly updated version of Locating London's Past: locatinglondon.org - new functionality, better mapping, cleaner data. @ihr.bsky.social @long18thsem.bsky.social @ihrhistorylab.bsky.social

Going through old Commons Journals for something, and this keeps popping up: before the Royal Assent Act 1967, the Commons had to go and physically attend in the Lords for any bill to be passed. As this entry from November 1921 shows, this was often right in the middle of other business.

RIP to the National Rail app, which has gone from a functional (if slightly clunky) experience to...literally just running the website inside an app container. Why, precisely, would anyone bother?

Two things to note from the FCDO's latest aid stats: 1) In cash terms, the UK's aid budget in 2023 was the largest it's ever been; 2) If spending on refugees within the UK didn't count under OECD rules, aid spending would be below 2013 levels. (Source: FCDO, www.gov.uk/government/c...)

In an interesting but otherwise fairly unremarkable article about the North Korean women's football team, this sentence just comes out of nowhere. (article for the curious: www.theguardian.com/football/202...)

If you had somehow invested in stamps in 1989, that investment would now be worth more than if you had invested in housing across the UK. (Sources: ONS series D7BT, HM Land Registry, priceofastamp.co.uk)

Just found this gloriously 90s cover on an old NAO report. I miss when the internet was this fresh and exciting thing. (Report comes from here, for reference: www.nao.org.uk/reports/gove...)

Almost every paragraph of this gets more and more bonkers. Excellent article.

Great example of the counterintuitive nature of inflation stats in this morning's release. The main rate is largely up because of gas prices, but not because they've gone up - they haven't! It's because they haven't gone down as fast as they did a year ago.

To give a little context to these pictures of Yusuf Dikec looking effortlessly cool: I used to shoot air pistol competitively, and there are really good reasons to kit yourself out like this. Short thread to follow...

In the latest round of "I can't believe there's data for that", it turns out that Redbridge is the animal carcass fly-tipping capital of England. (Source: Defra, Fly-tipping statistics for England, www.gov.uk/government/s...)

Couple of things in the UK public spending world to note from here in the Library - first is our new briefing on the Main Estimates, containing over a trillion pounds of spending and going through the Commons tomorrow... commonslibrary.parliament.uk/research-bri...

Important news from the State Opening of Parliament: the royal hat-on-a-stick is still present.

A minor point, but one you'd expect the BBC to get right: solemn affirmations were originally brought in for religious people who objected to swearing an oath (specifically Quakers), not non-believers.

Even after last week's election, you can still get from the Cotswolds to the Yorkshire Dales without ever leaving Conservative-held territory. (OK, to be fair you will have to swim across the Humber, because half the Humber Bridge is in the Labour-held Kingston upon Hull West and Haltemprice.)

Today in "articles you wouldn't get on most workplace intranets":

The Royal Proclamation is out - the 2019-24 Parliament is formally over.

New broadband means new network name.

Be honest, BBC News editors - you just wanted to use the phrase "ousting Joost", didn't you?

Work in progress to (possibly) include in an upcoming briefing. Sadiq Khan got more votes than Susan Hall in 9 of the 14 London Assembly constituencies, but also tended to win more heavily in those where he was ahead.

Great Britain, split up into sectors by nearest railway station (calculated using Voronoi polygons in case you're interested). Colours are randomised, which gives quite a nice "psychedelic stained glass window" effect.

Based on the headline of a Guardian article (www.theguardian.com/travel/2024/...), I thought I'd see where in England is the furthest from a train. As far as I can tell, this chunk of Northumberland is the only bit of mainland England that is more than 30km from a railway line.

Experimenting with Democracy Club's candidate data (democracyclub.org.uk). Next Thursday there will be four local elections with 1⅓ candidates per seat, where the electorate gets to decide if the dominant local party gets three seats in that ward or merely two.

To celebrate NASA managing to revive Voyager 1, a quick chart on its apparent speed relative to Earth. Because of earth's orbit, we're actually catching up to it for about 3 months of the year. From tomorrow, it starts heading away again!

Quick experiment with OS Terrain 50 open data, rendered in Aerialod (vertical scale is heavily exaggerated). Not sure how I'd use this for work, but...pretty!

I created a cool web app using Ordnance Survey data - British Placename Mapper (placenames.rtwilson.com). It allows you to search for place names that match various criteria (starts with 'great', ends with 'burgh' etc) and plot them on an interactive map. #gis #geospatial #mapping

You may have seen the two big MRPs last week from Survation and YouGov, both predicting hefty Labour majorities at the next election. As this shows, behind the headlines their predictions have some interesting differences.

Data on average happiness levels in Great Britain. I love this because although you can see some small movements (people got slightly more unhappy in the lockdowns at the end of 2020), the main story is that when you ask a British person how happy they are, they say "err...I dunno, about 7?"

Provisional aid spending data for 2023 is now out from the FCDO. Despite the cut to 0.5% of GNI, aid spending is now higher in cash terms than ever before, largely because of spending on refugees within the UK.

This is fascinating - the full set of scenarios (linked from within the paper) is thought provoking too.

If I understand this right: - Player is fouled just before the buzzer, takes (and scores) free throws to win despite that being against the rules - Losing team is told they can appeal, despite THAT being against the rules - Authorities come up with stupidest possible solution

Non-standard hot cross buns (chocolate/toffee/etc) may be quite nice pastries in their own right, but they are pretty universally terrible hot cross buns.

🚨🗺️📊Calling all UK local data nerds… After more than a year of development, we’ve just launched #ExploreLocalStatistics, a brand new way to explore 57 datasets from across government right down to a local authority level! explore-local-statistics.beta.ons.gov.uk 🧵1/5

Properly fascinating bit of analysis from the ONS, on where people tend to spend their money. Also casually includes the not-at-all worrying snippet that Visa estimates where you probably live based on your spending habits.

Never clicked on a news story so fast.