Twitter slows competitor links

When you click a link on Twitter, you go through a Twitter shortlink first and then to the place you want to go. When you click on a link that points to one of Twitter’s competitors, by compl… | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 1 year ago

✚ Calming Data

Chart-making provides a perspective that's beyond my own, which can be calming.Tags: calm, feeling, insight | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 1 year ago

Crows might understand probabilities

Researchers at the University of Tübingen are studying crows’ abilities to understand statistical inference. For Ars Technica, Kenna Hughes-Castleberry reports: To do this, Johnston and her t… | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 1 year ago

Cooling a city

Tall buildings in dense cities can trap heat and restrict air flow, which can make living in an area really hot. It’s worse when the environment as a whole is also warming. So Singapore is sp… | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 1 year ago

Life Expectancy of Pets

When looking into getting a pet, it’s important to consider life expectancy. You probably don’t want to accidentally sign up for a twenty-year commitment with an impulse adoption at the pet store.Tags: life expectancy, pets | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 1 year ago

Evolution of Lego brick colors

Lego started with five brick colors: red, yellow, blue, white, and clear. The selection peaked in 2004 but then surprisingly decreased to cut costs. For The Washington Post, Kati Perry shows the ev… | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 1 year ago

Where the Older and the Younger Live

States aren't uniformly young and old. Well, other than Maine. This is the breakdown by age group and regions.Tags: age | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 1 year ago

✚ Why I Use R More than Python

Debates about which is best are useless. Go with what works for you, and never mind the rest.Tags: Python, R, tools | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 1 year ago

Visualization to better see true values in data

For Scientific American, Jack Murtagh describes the importance of visualization in understanding the roughness of data: One maxim that should be etched into the walls of all scientific institutions… | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 1 year ago

Very Expensive Maps

In the Very Expensive Maps podcast, cartographer Evan Applegate interviews other cartographers about how they got into the field, the thoughts behind their design choices, and the more technical bi… | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 1 year ago

Tattoos and impulsiveness dataset

For their research on tattoos and choice, Bradley Ruffle and Anne Wilson provide the dataset for perusal: Survey and experimental evidence documents discrimination against tattooed individuals in t… | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 1 year ago

Shifting causes of death over the decades

Saloni Dattani, for Our World in Data, used a set of heatmaps to show how causes of death changed by time (on the horizontal axis) and age (on the vertical axis) in France. Each panel represents a … | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 1 year ago

Are we back yet?

In 2020, our everyday routines shifted dramatically, but over the past few years, it's felt like things are getting back to where they were. How back are we?Tags: time use | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 1 year ago

✚ Chart Options for When the Scale is Squished by the Full Range of Data

Welcome to The Process, where we look closer at how the charts get made. This is issue #255. I’m Nathan Yau. When your dataset has a few values that are a lot bigger than the rest, the scale … | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 1 year ago

Flawed Rotten Tomatoes ratings

Rotten Tomatoes aggregates movie reviews to spit out a freshness score for each film. There’s a problem though. For Vulture, Lane Brown reports on the flawed system: But despite Rotten Tomato… | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 1 year ago

Declining groundwater

The New York Times analyzed water levels across the country since 1920. In more recent years, the levels aren’t looking great if we want to keep growing crops. An animated map using angled li… | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 1 year ago

Looking for the best pizza for different styles

Locating the best pizza depends on where you are and what kind of pizza you’re looking for. The best-of lists that favor New York-style pizza and the east coast aren’t much good when yo… | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 1 year ago

Clock plays a song with the current time in its title

For The Pudding, Russell Samora pulled songs via the Spotify API and made a unique kind of clock: Every minute, random songs are played that contain the time in the title (e.g., 6:47 or 6:47 from C… | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 1 year ago

✚ Visualization Tools and Learning Resources, August 2023 Roundup

Here's the good stuff for August.Tags: roundup | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 1 year ago

When the Cost of a Mortgage is a Multiple of the Original Loan

Use this chart to see how many times over you'll pay over the original loan amount, given the annual rate and the number of years of paying.Tags: mortgage, spending | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 1 year ago

Turn a static SVG into an interactive one, with Flourish

It’s straightforward to share a static SVG online, but maybe you want tooltips or for elements to highlight when you hover over them. Flourish has a new template to provide the interactions e… | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 1 year ago

✚ How I Made That: Network Diagrams of All the Household Types

Process the data into a usable format, which makes the visualization part more straightforward.Tags: Illustrator, Python, R | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 1 year ago

Apple’s global suppliers

Most of Apple’s suppliers and manufacturing happen outside the United States and in China. But because of tensions between the U.S. and China, Apple has tried to shift to other countries. Blo… | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 1 year ago

Infinity abstractions

Infinity is an abstraction of endlessness, which seems to suggest that it cannot be measured with finite units or occur in the real world. With a fun visual project, Dea Bankova wonders otherwise. | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 1 year ago

Renting vs. Owning a Home, by State

Among households in the United States, 68% are owned and 32% are rented, based on estimates from the American Community Survey in 2021. That breakdown isn't uniform across the country though.Tags: households, rent | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 1 year ago

✚ Visualization Integration

If you want to maximize fun, a mixed toolbox is still best.Tags: tools | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 1 year ago

Explorable explanation for matrix transformations

Instead of using a bunch of equations to memorize, Yi Zhe Ang visually explains matrix transformations to provide some intuition behind the math. Make it to the end so that you can transform a 3-D … | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 1 year ago

Python is coming to Excel

Excel is getting a bump in capabilities with Python integration. From Microsoft: Excel users now have access to powerful analytics via Python for visualizations, cleaning data, machine learning, pr… | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 1 year ago

Using cold lake water to cool buildings

There are buildings in Toronto, Canada that make use of a deep lake water cooling (DLWC) system, including Scotiabank Arena, home of the Toronto Raptors. Cold water pumps from nearby Lake Ontario a… | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 1 year ago

Passenger planes flying too close

Sometimes passenger planes get a little too close to each other on takeoff and landing due to miscommunication and understaffing from air traffic control. From The New York Times, near collisions m… | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 1 year ago

xkcd: Pairwise matrix of what to do in an emergency

xkcd has an informative reference for what do in case of mountain lion encounter, lightning, fire alarm, and bleeding. Very informative. | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 1 year ago

Visual breakdowns of iconic hip-hop samples

Hip-hop music producers often sample from previous works. They remake, restructure, and repurpose the samples to create a new sound. Tracklib broke down iconic hip-hop sampling over the past fifty … | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 1 year ago

✚ Chart Options for When Time Data Has Uneven Gaps

Visualizing time series data often assumes that your data points are evenly spaced over time, which is not always the case.Tags: gaps, options, time series | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 1 year ago

Hip-hop’s influence on the English language

For The New York Times, Miles Marshall Lewis highlights the etymology of five words in the English language heavily influenced by hip-hop: dope, woke, cake, wildin’, and ghost. A fun design u… | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 1 year ago

Shifting towards more hot days, fewer cold days

It keeps getting hotter around the world. Not every single day. But over time, there are increasingly more hot days and fewer cold days. For Bloomberg, Zahra Hirji, Rachael Dottle and Denise Lu lea… | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 1 year ago

Supermarket provides AI-driven meal planner and is disappointed by the internet using it to output weird recipes

A supermarket chain in New Zealand offered an AI-based recipe generator, and of course people started throwing in random household items to see what it would make. For The Guardian, Tess McClure re… | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 1 year ago

Cultural Midwest, not technically

The U.S. Census Bureau defines the Midwest as the region of twelve states cornered by North Dakota, Kansas, Ohio, and Michigan. Comedian Luke Capasso convincingly argues that while that is technica… | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 1 year ago

Map of Lahaina buildings destroyed in wildfire

Most of the Maui town Lahaina was destroyed by wildfire. The Wall Street Journal reports. The map shows the buildings that were destroyed in red. Terrible. Here is a list of reputable sources to do… | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 1 year ago

✚ Chart Options for When You Have Lots of Categories

A long bar chart can be a bit much, so here are simple options to make it less jumble-ish.Tags: categories, debug | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 1 year ago

Losing ice in the Antarctic

In this chart from The Economist that shows ice extent from 1972 up to present, that falling line for 2023 looks not good. | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 1 year ago

Greenhouse gas from wasting food at home

Almost half of wasted food comes from homes, and almost half of that goes to landfills. The rotting food then produces methane. For Reuters, Ally J. Levine and Daisy Chung illustrate why that’… | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 1 year ago

Rarity of songwriters who are women for popular songs

It’s common to see singers who are women, but the people who write the songs that end up in the Billboard Hot 100 are still mostly men. For The Pudding, Chris Dalla Riva, with design by Ashle… | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 1 year ago

Finding a troll’s identity

A troll kept leaving comments on a woman’s TikTok videos, so she figured…Tags: privacy, TikTok, trolls | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 1 year ago

Save recipes to your email

Yums, by Matthew Phillips, is a quick and simple way to save recipes via email: Yums is a recipe storage system built on top of email. Content on the web disappears with time, but email you have co… | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 1 year ago

Directory of date-me docs

Instead of using dating apps, some have turned to the date-me doc, which is a single, view-only page about the individual. It’s appealing, because it’s a flexible format that lets you i… | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 1 year ago

✚ Range of Possible Answers, Maybe

In Statistics, analysis is more often about finding a range of possible answers than it is about finding a precise one.Tags: range, uncertainty | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 1 year ago

Honesty research likely faked data

Research by Dan Ariely and Francesca Gino suggested that people were more honest in a survey when you ask them about honesty at the beginning. The problem is that the data in the analysis was likel… | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 1 year ago

Taylor Swift pop charts

Taylor Swift has been filling up stadiums across the United States and will head overseas soon to fill more seats. For Reuters, Clare Trainor and Dea Bankova break down the songs, albums, and ticke… | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 1 year ago