“Sorry this letter is so long, I didn’t have time to write a short one”

Summarising information requires effort.

A couple of years ago, when things were getting a bit frantic around the pandemic, we had friends sharing opinions that ranged from “It’s just a cold” to “We’re doomed”.

In order to sidestep misinformation, we put some effort into making a simple page that we could point our friends at. The page did nothing more than scrape public data off the internet and present it in a way that was easy to digest. It ended up being a relatively lengthy piece of R code that summarised data at the country-level.

We still glance at it occasionally (llvll.ch) and there are enough little things in the code that could make it useful for someone building something similar.

Predictably, and because we have no shame at the inelegance of our code, we popped it on GitHub.