Sunday, January 28, 2018

Visualizing shooting data

Kate asked this morning about when mass shootings really took off.

I found a dataset compiled by Mother Jones magazine, and available here.

It's not too hard to turn that dataset into some charts.

Here's the frequency of mass shootings (as Mother Jones defines them), from 1982 through 2017:

Here's total fatalities per year:

Tuesday, January 9, 2018

Morning walk with Grandpa

My cousin Dave Bass dug up some interesting information on our shared grandfather.

When he was born in Budapest in 1902, he was named Bányai Imre, but his family soon moved to America, where he became Emery Bass.

Various of Grandpa's kids had gotten different documents like wedding certificates and birth certificates, and Dave and other cousins pooled what they had, allowing Dave to track down addresses, such as the site of our great-grandparents’ wedding and the house where Grandpa was born. Dave and his wife Becky traveled to various sites in central and eastern Europe associated either with his ancestors or with hers. Afterward he sent along what he'd found.

I’m in Budapest waiting for the arrival this evening of a colleague and our students for our January course on “Life after communism,” so I took the chance this morning to follow up on the trail Dave had laid out.

My plan was to stop by Parliament to see the ceremonial raising of the flag, then hop on a bus to the Óbuda (Old Buda) neighborhood of the addresses Dave had found. But I didn’t get out the door quite as early as planned, so I got there just in time to hear from the distance the trumpet melody that sounds as the flag goes up. Now I know it ends at 8:30, so I’ll try to get there a little earlier some other morning.

On the way, however, I did see a curb-side charging station with two cars plugged in: a chargeable Prius, and what I think is a fully electric vehicle.

And this time with a framing that tells you you're in Budapest:

A little close to Parliament I got an unusual vantage on the recognizable dome, hemmed in by the buildings on the street as you approach from the south.

On the main land-side façade facing Lajos Kossuth Square, you can see the Hungarian flag on the right, and the Transylvanian flag on the left. Thereby hangs a tale, but that’s for a different post.

Walking on from Parliament, I got to the bus stop to ride to Óbuda, but I was feeling stingy about my transit tickets and didn’t mind the walk, so I continued on foot.

Some time later I remembered that one of Grandpa’s favored activities when visiting a city was to ramble through it on foot, so it seemed a fitting homage to do the same when looking for “his” Budapest.