Shortlife is a clock by artist Dries Depoorter that simply shows the percentage of your life lived, based on life expectancy from the World Health Organization. It has a warranty of six months. I k… | Continue reading
Ben Smith for The New York Times got an internal document that outlines TikTok’s recommendation system. This quote caught my eye: Julian McAuley, a professor of computer science at the Univer… | Continue reading
Life360 is a service that lets families keep track of where members are based on phone location data. For The Markup, Jon Keegan and Alfred Ng report on how Life360 then sells that data to third pa… | Continue reading
Wombo Dream is a fun app that lets you enter some words to output a related AI-powered artwork in various styles. You can get the app, or you can play with it in your browser. | Continue reading
It’s been a while since we got our regular reminder that the Mercator projection is better for navigation on the tradeoff for distorted area at the poles. Neil Kaye provides an animation: Ani… | Continue reading
Research by M. Pusceddu et al. shows that honeybees use social distancing when a parasite is introduced to the hive. In a parasite-free hive, activities are spread throughout the hive, whereas clus… | Continue reading
It seems clear that Ethereum (and other cryptocurrencies) in its current state is bad for the environment, but it’s hard to say how bad it really is. Kyle McDonald estimated emissions and ene… | Continue reading
I’m opening the print shop for a few days. Get your order in, and I’ll try my best to get it to you before Christmas. | Continue reading
Here’s the good stuff for November. | Continue reading
In a multi-faceted piece, The Washington Post described the rapidly growing cities in Africa that are projected to be the most populated cities in the world: In three projections by the University … | Continue reading
Using data from Project FeederWatch, which is a community tracking project to count birds around feeders, Miller et al. estimated the pecking order among 200 species. This was in 2017. For The Wash… | Continue reading
This chart, made by someone who is against vaccinations, shows a higher mortality rate for those who are vaccinated versus those who are not. Strange. It shows real data from the Office of National… | Continue reading
When you compare the price of things today against prices one year ago, almost everything increased in cost at a rapid rate. While out of the ordinary, it’s definitely not the first time this… | Continue reading
With candy corn as her medium, Jill Hubley mapped corn production in the United States, based on data from the USDA. With just three hues of yellow, orange, and white and three heights to match, Hu… | Continue reading
For NYT’s The Upshot, Alicia Parlapiano and Quoctrung Bui outlined all of the provisions of Biden’s Build Back Better bill and where the $2 trillion over 10 years will come from. A tree… | Continue reading
Choosing a place to live is always full of trade-offs, but it’d be nice if there was a way to minimize those trade-offs. For NYT Opinion, Gus Wezerek and Yaryna Serkez, made a calculator that… | Continue reading
We all have our routines, but from person-to-person, the daily schedule changes a lot depending on your responsibilities. | Continue reading
Some people point out that vaccinated people are still hospitalized as a defense against getting vaccinated. But they ignore the inverse which compares the number of those who are not hospitalized.… | Continue reading
Statisticians David Spiegelhalter and Anthony Masters for The Guardian on reframing risk estimates: An earlier UKHSA study estimated two Pfizer/BioNTech doses gave around 99.7% (97.6% to near-100%)… | Continue reading
What is the best french fry shape? Curly of course. But Chris Williams took it a step further and used 3-D models of various fried potato forms to find out. It’s all about the ratio between c… | Continue reading
It’s a shift from answering “What is this data?” to “So what?” | Continue reading
While still relatively rare, maternal mortality in the United States increased over the years. In most other developed countries, rates decreased over the same time period. From NYT Opinion: Over t… | Continue reading
Andrew Van Dam for The Washington Post used a bar chart with corrections to show new monthly estimates from the Bureau of Labor Statistics for job growth: After the revisions, disappointing months … | Continue reading
Pitch Interactive and the Census 2020 Data Co-op, supported by the Google News Initiative, made a tool that lets you easily map population shifts since 2010. It’s called Census Mapper. Built … | Continue reading
David Leonhardt for The New York Times looked at the partisan gap for Covid deaths and cases. It keeps getting wider: The brief version: The gap in Covid’s death toll between red and blue America h… | Continue reading
This is a fun map by Matt Dzugan. Search for a city, and see the segments of highway in the United States that are headed that way: I set up thousands of queries to Google Maps, asking for directio… | Continue reading
We know the oceans are deep, but it’s difficult to grasp the scale of just how deep, because, well, it’s underwater. MetaBallStudios, a YouTube channel that focuses on perspective and 3… | Continue reading
Patrick Sisson for The New York Times reports on the growing popularity of tracking customer movement in stores: Complicating efforts to address privacy concerns is a lack of regulatory clarity. Wi… | Continue reading
A term to indicate that visual elements add nothing meaningful has itself become nonessential to making and discussing charts. | Continue reading
Palm oil is in our food, cosmetics, cleaning supplies, and biofuels, but it has no flavor or color, so we’re not really aware of how much we use — on average 8 kilograms per year. Bloom… | Continue reading
Sergio Peçanha and Yan Wu for The Washington Post made a calculator that shows how much time you spend commuting in a year and what you could do with that time instead. The input, interaction, and … | Continue reading
Over the years, more women have entered the workforce while the percentage of men has gone down slightly. The chart below shows the shifts since 1960. The breakdowns from 1960 to 1990 come from the… | Continue reading
xkcd poked fun at the sometimes questionable color choices of researchers. | Continue reading
Using Consumer Price Index, Alyssa Fowers and Rachel Siegel for The Washington Post show how the prices of everyday things rose since 2019. A set of baseline charts show lines moving up much more t… | Continue reading
All the tools is a product of visualization’s many uses, which isn’t so terrible. | Continue reading
Valentina D’Efilippo, Arpad Ray, and Duncan Geere visualized and sonified Covid-19 rates and vaccinations in London Under the Microscope. Best viewed with headphones on. Geere on the sound: H… | Continue reading
Based on five years of data from EPA models, ProPublica mapped areas in the United States where cancer risk is higher due to air pollution: In all, ProPublica identified more than a thousand hot sp… | Continue reading
If you’ve taken classes that cover image processing, you’ve likely come across the Lenna image. It’s a headshot of Lena Forsén taken from Playboy Magazine in 1972. For The Pudding… | Continue reading
The USDA recommends that you cook your chicken to at least 165°F to kill salmonella bacteria (time is also a factor), which appears to be more common than I would hope. ProPublica has a Chicken Che… | Continue reading
The IEEE VIS 2021 conference is running virtually this week, and there’s a lot of work that’s caught my eye but I haven’t had the chance to look through it all yet. One of those t… | Continue reading
Here’s the good stuff for October. | Continue reading
There has been progress since the Paris climate agreement in 2014, but there’s still more to do. Brad Plumer and Nadja Popovich for The New York Times look at the possible paths we could take… | Continue reading
You could use a package, but then you couldn’t customize every single element, and where’s the fun in that? | Continue reading
Earth is getting warmer, and the previously abstract concept seems to grow more concrete every day. Probable Futures mapped increasing heat, decreasing cold, and shifting humidity under different w… | Continue reading
For Scientific American, Cédric Scherer and Georgios Karamanis charted drought extent by region using a grid of stacked bar charts. Each cell represents a year for a corresponding region, and color… | Continue reading
Here’s how the distribution of genres has changed since 1945 up to present. | Continue reading
Mona Chalabi has a new podcast Am I Normal? and it’s very good: We all want to know if we’re normal—do I have enough friends? Should it take me this long to get over my ex? Should I move or s… | Continue reading