JoeCascio.net » ecology

CL&P outage map animation – Update!

JoeC — Thu, 10 Nov 2011 14:21:05 +0000

So, here we are, a full week after I posted the last animation of the restoration of Connecticut’s “Snoctober” electricity disaster, and just 177 of the original 800,000+ CL&P customers remain without power. I have friends around the state on Twitter that were a full 9 days without electricity. Please keep in mind when watching this animation that the steps between frames are by no means even. Many times, it’s a couple of hours, but other times it’s more like 8 hours, due to simply sleeping, or being out of the house away from my computer. As I mentioned in the previous post, sometimes an animation of data reveals things that simple static pictures don’t. Any comments you have would be more than welcome.

Financial reports as thick as a phonebook

JoeC — Thu, 30 Jul 2009 22:02:43 +0000

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Today I in the mail, I received a dose of the financial reports that I’ve come to expect from various funds and stocks that I’m invested in. The one from Barclay’s Captial just offended me. It’s as thick as a local phonebook and has densely printed prose, tables and graphs on every page. My question is, who on earth is going to read any of that? This is a horrible waste of natural resources and simply denudes forests to fill up landfills. All this information is undoubtedly online but the default seems to be paper mail. I’m guessing there’s some law about disclosure that requires financial firms to publish these tomes. It wouldn’t suprise me if it was sponsored by the paper lobby!