Boeing panel that blew off during flight

A refrigerator-sized panel popped off a Boeing 737 MAX 9 during the ascent of an Alaska Airlines flight. Reuters illustrates what that panel is for, other airlines with the same configuration, and … | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 10 months ago

NYT Flash-based visualizations work again

In the 2000s, if you wanted to make interactive or animated visualization for the web, Flash was the main option. When Flash lost support and fell off the internet, a solid decade of great visualiz… | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 10 months ago

Map with a receipt printer

Aaron Koelker used a receipt printer to print a six-foot long map of the Wakulla River in Florida. He outlined his process with Adobe Illustrator and the printer. I kind of want a thermal printer n… | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 10 months ago

Coin flips might tend towards the same side they started

The classic coin flip is treated as a fair way to make decisions, assuming an even chance for heads or tails on each flip. However, František Bartoš was curious and recruited friends and colleagues… | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 10 months ago

AI-based things in 2023

There were many AI-based things in 2023. Simon Willison outlined what we learned over the year: The most surprising thing we’ve learned about LLMs this year is that they’re actually quite easy to b… | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 10 months ago

Repairing Panama Canal water levels

For Bloomberg, Peter Millard and Michael D. McDonald report on the efforts to maintain water levels in the Panama Canal. Falling levels limit the number of ships that can pass through the waterway … | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 10 months ago

Psuedo-charts with Microsoft Image Creator

With each new AI-based tool that comes out, I begrudgingly kick the tires to see what kind of charts it spits out. I need to know when it’s time to hang the old data boots and switch careers.… | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 10 months ago

Oppenheimer movie timeline

By Reddit user Pitazboras, a movie timeline for Oppenheimer with running time on the x-axis and chronological time on the y-axis. I haven’t seen the movie, so I cannot speak to the accuracy. … | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 10 months ago

Best Data Visualization Projects of 2023

Data continues on its upwards trajectory and with it comes the importance of visualization. Many charts were made in 2023. These are my ten favorites from the year.Tags: best-of | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 11 months ago

✚ Visualization Tools and Learning Resources, December 2023 Roundup

Here is the good stuff for December in the last roundup for 2023.Tags: roundup | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 11 months ago

A phone charger that only works when you recharge yourself

Recharge, an art installation by Dries Depoorter, uses a system that detects when you close your eyes. Recharge yourself and your phone gets to also. | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 11 months ago

Estimating the size of YouTube

YouTube doesn’t offer numbers for how big they are, so Ethan Zuckerman and Jason Baumgartner estimated the size using a method they equate to drunk dialing. Consider drunk dialing again. Let’… | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 11 months ago

Breaking down the holiday movie formula

NYT’s The Upshot looked at 424 holiday movies released by the Hallmark and Lifetime networks since 2017. Like most forms of entertainment, the movies look identical from a zoomed out view. Th… | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 11 months ago

Tracking operations in an online scam labor camp

Neo Lu was scammed into a labor camp. In an effort to escape and expose the operation, he began to send information to The New York Times from within. Mr. Lu said he pleaded to be freed, but his ca… | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 11 months ago

✚ Fun With Data

Here are some fun things to make with data in case you're looking for a chart-ish distraction.Tags: fun | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 11 months ago

Scale of all the things, compared to you

Kurzgesagt illustrates the scale of the tiniest of things and the biggest of things by zooming in and out, but unlike videos before, they focus on human scale by comparing everything against it at … | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 11 months ago

Visual history of Yahoo Pipes

For Retool, Glenn Fleishman looks back to a time when data on the internet flowed more freely and you were able to direct the streams with a click-and-drag tool called Pipes for Yahoo! With Pipes, … | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 11 months ago

Excel World Championship

The Microsoft Excel World Championship 2023 wrapped a couple weeks ago, and the three-hour final that was streamed is available for your viewing pleasure. I know I should be focused on the clicking… | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 11 months ago

A hotter year, again

This year, 2023, was the hottest year on record. For Reuters, Gloria Dickie, Travis Hartman and Clare Trainor highlight the rising temperatures and the bad stuff that follows. This year’s added war… | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 11 months ago

Data portrait of a life with long Covid

Giorgia Lupi, known for using data visualization to connect real life and numbers, has been dealing with long Covid for the past three years. In a visual guest essay for NYT Opinion, Lupi describes… | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 11 months ago

✚ Relatable Units

Numbers are challenging to understand for many (most?) people, so it can help to use units of measurement that are relatable to readers to reduce friction between data and clarity.Tags: relative, units | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 11 months ago

Common Millionaire Household

The status of seven figures is maybe not as rare as it seems.Tags: income, wealth | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 11 months ago

Generative plants

Generate your own plant with Max Richter’s interactive. Adjust leaf shape, density, and curvature. The plane updates in real-time in the browser. | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 11 months ago

World map of illustrated animals

During a three-year span, Anton Thomas illustrated a world map of 1,642 animals native to each region. It’s called Wild World. The New York Times highlighted the work: “We don’t see the latit… | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 11 months ago

Cost of assisted living where you are

Assisted living can be expensive. For The Washington Post, Bonnie Berkowitz, Lauren Tierney, and Chris Alcantara show the variation in cost by state: Two-thirds of Americans will need some type of … | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 11 months ago

High concentration of intrastate pipelines in Texas

By keeping gas pipelines within the state, companies can avoid federal regulations. This is perhaps good for profits, but it is less of a positive for consumers when the energy companies can increa… | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 11 months ago

Fields of Study and the Jobs of Young People with Higher Incomes

We often associate high income with older people, but young people can also earn higher incomes. Let's see what those people studied and what they do for a living.Tags: income, work, young | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 11 months ago

✚ Figuring Out How a Visualization Was Made

One of the best ways to learn how to visualize data is to recreate a chart, but sometimes it's unclear how that chart got made. What tool was used? What are the steps to make the chart with your own tools?Tags: components, steps | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 11 months ago

Life in the Gaza Strip

The New York Times put together an image of what life is like in Gaza right now: bombing, death, food and water shortage, and limited medical supplies. A 3-D basemap of the Gaza Strip sets the foun… | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 11 months ago

Steps for getting started with data visualization

Getting started with data visualization can be tricky because of all the resources and tools available these days. Approaches also change with what you want to visualize data for. For Datawrapper, … | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 11 months ago

A wide view of visualization with ‘The Art of Insight’

The Art of Insight, by Alberto Cairo, highlights how designers approach visualization with a wide view. In the narrowest view of data visualization, you use charts to pull quick, quantitative infor… | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 11 months ago

ER visits for Christmas decoration injuries

A lot of Christmas lights went up this past week. I hope you weren’t one of the thousands who ended up in the emergency room. USAFacts shows the ramp up after Thanksgiving and the mini-spikes… | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 11 months ago

Inflation high, cost of living no good

Usually inflation is more of a slow thing that you don’t notice so much until you think back to the time when a burger was only a dollar. Prices increased much faster over the past few years … | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 11 months ago

✚ Visualization Tools, Resources, and Datasets – November 2023 Roundup

Welcome to The Process, the newsletter for FlowingData members that looks closer at how the charts get made. I’m Nathan Yau. Every month I collect tools and resources to help you make better … | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 11 months ago

How much more income people need to be happy

For the Wall Street Journal, Joe Pinsker reports on income and happiness, or more specifically, on the raises people said they needed to be happy. The more people have the more they need. | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 12 months ago

Failed community notes to stop misinformation on Twitter

Twitter has a Community Notes feature that attempts to flag posts that contain misinformation. This might work well in theory, and the notes are often informative, but it works slowly and is often … | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 12 months ago

Running out of space to grow food

For Associated Press, Christina Larson and Nicky Forster examined the growing population and the land required to feed all the people. A map shows spreading farmland over the centuries and at some … | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 12 months ago

Change in commute times in major cities

Using GPS data processed by Replica, Lydia DePillis, Emma Goldberg, and Ella Koeze, for The New York Times, show how commutes have changed post-pandemic. The roads in major cities are a little bit … | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 12 months ago

Toddlers and stochastic parrots

For The New Yorker, Angie Wang draws parallels between toddler learning behavior and training large language models, but more importantly, where they diverge. They are the least useful, the least c… | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 1 year ago

Parallel lines of old

This doesn’t have labeled axes, so I assume it only shows a zoomed in portion of the earlier years. The slope of the top line starts to level out at older ages, because my lines are about to … | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 1 year ago

Attitudes towards tipping in the U.S.

Tipping seems to be in a confusing spot right now. On the one hand, customers want to support workers, but on the other, tip suggestions seem to be rising towards uncomfortable rates and in places … | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 1 year ago

Jobs with Higher Income and Fewer Hours

So people earn a six-figure income without working all the time. What do they do?Tags: income, occupation, work | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 1 year ago

Building fair algorithms

Emma Pierson and Kowe Kadoma, for Fred Hutchinson Cancer Center, have a short and free course on Coursera on practical steps for building fair algorithms: Algorithms increasingly help make high-sta… | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 1 year ago

✚ Charts Options When You Have Little Space

As more charts shift to smaller screens, we have to find ways to save space but keep the data readable. There are options.Tags: mobile, options, responsive design | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 1 year ago

Carrier pigeon vs. internet upload speeds

In some rural areas, upload speeds are crawlingly slow, which can make it difficult to send things on the internet. In some cases, a carrier pigeon might even be faster. For The Washington Post, Ja… | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 1 year ago

Premiums on electricity during Covid lockdowns in Italy

During Covid lockdowns, power companies in Italy charged premiums to cover increased prices for electricity, but it appears that isn’t the full story. For Bloomberg, Vernon Silver, Eric Fan, … | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 1 year ago

Claim file request generator

Health insurers reject claims often, and if this happens, you can file an appeal. However, before you file the appeal, it can help to see the records insurers used. ProPublica made a letter generat… | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 1 year ago

Animated map shows the search for the best path

When you look up directions with a mapping application, there are algorithms that run to find the shortest route. Jan Pánek made an interactive map that animates the search with various algorithms.… | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 1 year ago