I’ve noticed that most financial market charts in the news zoom in on the area of change, rather than start with a base of zero. In some respects, this makes sense. When you’re discussing a sudden change, focusing on that part of the chart can highlight the change and illuminate details within it. However, with focus comes a loss of perspective.

Take these graphs, for example. They are based on Dow Jones closing averages from January 2 through March 20, 2020 (from the trustworthy-sounding source: Yahoo!) and are made with the Numbers app for macOS.

Changing the baseline

Charts A and B both show the exact same source data. The only difference is that the baseline of chart A is 0, while the baseline of chart B is 19,500. One looks bad, the other looks like the end of the world—like all wealth has evaporated. Chart B highlights the change, but also hides the vast bulk of value hidden below the baseline. Which looks worse to you?

Changing the scale

Charts A and C are also based on the same source data and both share the same zero-baseline. The only difference here is that chart C is squished to about half the height, while keeping the same width as chart A. The drop in chart C looks much less significant, but the numbers are identical.

Changing the baseline and scale

Let’s combine our two methods of distortion. Chart B and chart C still show the same source data. The only differences between the two are the baseline (chart B starts at 19,500 while chart C starts and zero), and the height of chart C is squished to half the height of chart B:

Always look for the baseline.

I listen to a lot of podcasts. I love them. Many of them are dedicated or adjacent to American politics, even though I live in Canada. Among these are The NPR Politics Podcast, Pod Save America & Lovett or Leave It, and The Ezra Klein Show.

While all Canadians live in the long shadow of American politics, we have no direct influence on the US political system. It is against US law for me to contribute to US campaigns. Occasionally, I’ll get outraged to the point of being driven to make some kind of small action or donation locally.

A recent episode of The Ezra Klein Show spoke to my situation. In the episode, Are you a “political hobbyist”? If so, you may be the problem., Klein interviews Political scientist Eitan Hersh about their book, Politics Is for Power (which I haven’t read). They discuss the concept of the political hobbyist.

Paraphrasing Hersh, a political hobbyist is a person who follows politics, knows a fair bit about it, but doesn’t contribute meaningfully to it, and the interest is mostly self-serving. This is me.

The concept and discussion rattled me. I know my relationship to ‘current affairs’ can be a bit like eating junk food. It’s more than that though — it’s like eating something you think is good for you, but isn’t. It’s like those granola bars that are just candy-bars in healthy-looking eco-packaging.

I haven’t made any real changes yet, and I’m not even sure I will. It continues to rattle around in my head though.

On a more positive note, I do find some real joy in podcasts. When I look at most of the podcasts I enjoy, political or not, they tend to share a common trait. They’re built around a person or small group talking about something about which they care deeply. I don’t even have to care about the thing — what matters is that they care and that makes me care too. It can be politics, movies, running a digital agency, or front-end Web development. The key is that the host love what they’re talking about.

If you had asked me how much it cost to drive a round-trip from Charlottetown, PEI to Halifax, Nova Scotia, I would have guessed about $80. Google Maps estimates the drive is about 3hr 30m.

If I thought about it a bit more, I probably could have come up with a more accurate estimate. A recent short road trip on this route gave me the exact numbers, and I thought I’d share.

This table shows the basic costs of driving from Charlottetown to Halifax (and back) on January 27, 2020 in Canadian dollars, including tax. The car was a Mazda CX-3 with all-wheel drive rented from Budget.

I didn’t include the cost of the car rental from Budget (two days for $109.26) or the taxi ride to the car-rental lot ($17). Though I suppose it’s technically possible to make the trip without Junior Mints, they are very refreshing.

Idea for the nerdiest TV show ever: A high-budget HBO-style series about an alternate history where the only difference is that Apple bought BeOS instead of NeXT.

We tried being kind — and it helped.

I loved the CBC radio show Wiretap. Sadly, the CBC website has gone through enough redesigns in the years since its broadcast that there doesn’t seem to be a canonical website for Wiretap anymore, hence the Wikipedia link.

Jonathan Goldstein, host of Wiretap, is a Canadian national treasure, even if he now works for a US company in New York since acquired by a Swedish streaming conglomerate legally based in Luxembourg.

Goldstein now hosts the Heavyweight podcast, and it is a worthy spiritual successor to Wiretap.

I usually dislike the feeling of being aware of the writer when watching or listening to a narrative like a TV show, movie, or podcast. In fiction, I find this happens when the writer is clearly smarter than the character (or worse, wants you to know how smart they are*). When the cleverness of the author bleeds through, it breaks the four wall and takes you out of the moment. That said, in episode #31 of Heavyweight, Goldstein had a line that did shine a light on the cleverness of the writer, and I was 100% on-board:

There are no mobius-strip-shaped roads in a euclidean space, like Canada.

Jonathan Goldstein, in episode #31 of Heavyweight

If you liked Wiretap, you’ll like Heavyweight. If you hated Wiretap, you’ll hate Heavyweight.

* (I am smart)

When I was a kid I wanted to be an aerospace engineer (and later, a rock star). At the time, there was no Web for which to be a Web Designer.

I sometimes wonder what jobs will come in to being by the time my own kids have careers.

• Job that didn’t exist 30 years ago: Web Designer
• Job that didn’t exist 10 years ago: Host of live-stream of launches for private rocket company
• Job that doesn’t exist today (right?): Host of self-flying helicopter fails clip show.

Speaking of CSS, I’ve run into a CSS rendering issue and I’d like to know if I’m missing something, or if it’s a genuine bug.

In Safari version 13.0.2 (14608.2.40.1.2) as of October 31, 2019 (👻), if the line-height in a <button> tag is set to 1, then the descender of tech characters like j, g, or p get cut off. For example:

button { line-height: 1; }

Here’s a Codepen example you can try.

I can easily work around this by setting the line-height: normal; or to a larger value like 1.2, but I’d rather keep the tight line-height in this case.

We had an election here in Canada yesterday. The Elections Canada website has a page with the results. There’s a little in-line bar chart to help visualize the relative values.

What is generally considered a good practice in CSS (the code used the style and layout pages on the Web) is making 33.1% look bigger than 34.4%:

This issue is fairly simple. The width of the bar-charts are defined with the em unit. Both the Conservative 34.4% bar and the 33.1% Liberal bar are to be 3em wide (they’re rounding off for the small comparison).

The trouble comes in the way the winning party row is highlighted. The winning row is set to have a larger font size (120% the regular size). Since the em unit is relative to font size, the winning row chart gets distorted to look 20% larger.

The fix is easy – use rem units (which are relative to the base document font-size rather than the local font-size) rather than em units for the bar charts.

I’ve passed this on to Elections Canada, but wanted to post here because it’s in interesting little issue that could be easily misconstrued. I also wanted you to know how smart I am.

There’s a proportional representation joke in here somewhere…

I got to join Matt Rainnie this week on the CBC Radio Mainstreet program for the SpinTime DJ segment. I got to choose three songs, which is harder than it sounds. First, I had to get over myself and realize I didn’t have to take it as seriously as those who assembled the Voyager Golden Record. I then looked for three great songs that someone listening on the way home from work on Friday might not have otherwise heard, but might enjoy.

First, I selected Coax Me by Sloan from their 1994 album Twice Removed. I was 16 years old when this came out and this song and video are burned into my brain. It’s up there with Everything You’ve Done Wrong as my favourite Sloan songs.

Next, I selected A Lot to Be Loved by Mardeen from the 2008 album Read Less Minds. Some CBC listeners might know from Mo Kenney’s cover of their song Telephones from the same album. This is a great, simple, pop/rock song.

Finally, I chose Wordwide by Adam Again from the 1992 album Dig. This is one of the best songs I’ve ever heard. If you consider the ratio of how great a song is compared to how likely people are to have actually heard it, this becomes an even more extraordinary gem.

The segment airs this afternoon some time between 4-6PM on Mainstreet on CBC Radio One, Charlottetown. It aired on Friday, September 20th, and is now available online: Mainstreet PEI with Matt Rainnie – Sep. 20, 2019: Spin Time – Steven Garrity

Thanks to Matt for having me in – he’s truly gifted at the art of conversation for the radio.