Hot surfaces, stored energy

In hot places, the ground can heat to higher temperatures than the air, which causes severe burns to someone who stumbles or accidentally touches a surface. For Reuters, Mariano Zafra describes the… | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 1 year ago

Comparing home run in distance different stadiums

In Major League Baseball, a player hits a home run when the ball flies over the outfield fence. However, the distance between the hitter and the outfield fence varies by stadium, which means a home… | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 1 year ago

Barbie and Oppenheimer themes for charts in R

Matthew Jané made a small R package called Theme Park, which is meant to supply movie-based themes for ggplot. For now, it just has Barbie and Oppenheimer themes. | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 1 year ago

✚ Visualization Tools and Learning Resources, July 2023 Roundup

This is the good stuff for July.Tags: roundup | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 1 year ago

Racing amateurs against Tour de France cyclists

It takes strength and dedication to race in the Tour de France. It’s just that when you see the leading cyclist alone on a steep climb, they kind of look the same as some random person riding… | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 1 year ago

John Snow’s cholera map, an animated version

Sarah Bell made an animated version of John Snow’s classic map from 1854.…Tags: animation, cholera, John Snow, Sarah Bell | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 1 year ago

When is Dinner, By State

These are the states that eat dinner the earliest and latest, along with everyone else in between.Tags: dinner, time use | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 1 year ago

Increasing alcohol-related deaths

Alcohol consumption, based on ethanol volume estimates, has been rising over the past couple of decades. The pandemic appears to have sped that up, leading to more deaths. For The Washington Post, … | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 1 year ago

A race to find the best route to the Jersey Shore

To find the fastest route from Philadelphia to the Jersey Shore, The Philadelphia Inquirer got five of their reporters to race via different routes and modes of transportation. Overlaid on a map of… | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 1 year ago

✚ Mundane Data Stories

A bunch of boring data points makes a pattern.Tags: mundane, patterns | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 1 year ago

Understanding the SVG path element, a visual guide

The SVG path element can be useful for drawing regular and irregular shapes. However, if you just look at how a path is defined, it’s not entirely clear how to use it. Nanda Syahrasyad made a… | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 1 year ago

Manual data labeling behind the AI

One of the things that makes AI seem neat is that it sometimes feels like magic when you enter a question and get a reasonable answer in a human-like tone. For Bloomberg, Davey Alba reports on how … | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 1 year ago

Age shifts around the world

The world is getting older overall. For The New York Times, Lauren Leatherby broke it down by country with a set of animated frequency trails, along with charts for more demographic shifts. I like … | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 1 year ago

Flowchart showing the splits, mergers, and acquisitions of the former Bell Telephone Company

Bell System’s monopoly broke up in 1984 leading to independent phone companies, which have merged with or were acquired by other companies. The Wall Street Journal used a flowchart to show th… | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 1 year ago

✚ When I Switched Visualization Tools

With all the new tools available, maybe it's time to add to the existing toolset.Tags: tools | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 1 year ago

Outsourced work and generative AI

For Rest of World, Andrew Deck turned the AI focus on outsourced workers, whose jobs have been directly affected as of late and will probably shift much more. Deck profiled and commissioned four wo… | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 1 year ago

A rubber stamp for graph axes

For graphing on the go, Present & Correct offers a rubber stamp with a grid and x-y-axes. I think I need this. | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 1 year ago

Introduction to statistical learning, with Python examples

An Introduction to Statistical Learning, with Applications in R by Gareth James, Daniela Witten, Trevor Hastie, and Rob Tibshirani was released in 2021. They, along with Jonathan Taylor, just relea… | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 1 year ago

Wimbledon grass patterns

This might surprise you, but the grass at the Wimbledon tennis tournament is not the same as the grass in people’s backyards. It has to stay short so that tennis balls maintain speed and boun… | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 1 year ago

Focusing on the majority of students not affected by affirmative action

For NYT Opinion, Richard Arum and Mitchell L. Stevens, with graphics by Quoctrung Bui, turn their attention to the four-year colleges that accept most applicants, which is most schools: While the S… | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 1 year ago

✚ Learning to Use One Visualization Tool Really Well

There are many tools, which makes it tempting to learn them all. Instead, learn one tool really well and the logic carries over to the others.Tags: thinking, tools | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 1 year ago

Fonts primer

The Washington Post provides an introduction to fonts with mini-quizzes and straightforward examples. You can also change the font of the article: You make font choices every day. You pick type des… | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 1 year ago

xkcd: Real estate analysis

xkcd provides the analysis we all need. I can’t believe Jupiter scored so…Tags: humor, real estate, xkcd | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 1 year ago

Competitive hot dog eating requirements

Nathan’s Famous hot dog eating contest, so gross to watch but impossible to look away, is coming up in celebration of America’s independence. Joey Chestnut is likely to win another title. For… | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 1 year ago

Mosaic, a framework for scalable and linked visualization

From the University of Washington Interactive Data Lab, Mosaic is a research project that aims to make it easier to show a lot of data and make it interactive between views: Mosaic is a framework f… | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 1 year ago

Oddly specific ad profiles

Advertising funds a big chunk of the web, but for advertisers to continue to spend, their placements have to deliver results. So companies collect data about people’s online activity and crea… | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 1 year ago

✚ Visualization Tools and Learning Resources, June 2023 Roundup

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


@flowingdata.com | 1 year ago

Astericking NBA champions

It seems to have grown more common for basketball fans to complain that whoever wins the championship didn’t have to go through a legitimate challenge. If so and so wasn’t injured on th… | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 1 year ago

Noise and health

The New York Times explores how noise impacts health: Anyone who lives in a noisy environment, like the neighborhoods near this Brooklyn highway, may feel they have adapted to the cacophony. But da… | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 1 year ago

Password game requires more ridiculous rules as you play

Password rules seem to get more strict and weird over time. Neal Agarwal takes it to a ridiculous level, as Neal Agarwal likes to do. Enter a password that fits the rules, and another rule pops up … | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 1 year ago

A year of flight paths, for someone with an unlimited pass

United Airlines sold a lifetime unlimited pass in 1990 for $290,000. Tom Stuker bought one and has since flown 23 million miles over the decades. For The Washington Post, Rick Reilly, with graphics… | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 1 year ago

Map of electric grid required for cleaner energy

To power the United States with more clean energy, you might think it’s just a matter of building more solar farms and wind turbines. But of course it’s more complicated. For The New Yo… | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 1 year ago

Crochet lake map

Andrew Hahn crocheted a map of Lake Mendota in Wisconsin. Each stitch represents 300 square meters and each layer represents 10 meters of depth. I should learn to crochet. | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 1 year ago

✚ Chart Practice: Branch Out Beyond the Visual Bits

Learn more about your data and have more to visualize.Tags: practice | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 1 year ago

An interactive guide to color and contrast

Color and contrast choices often are a product of personal preferences, but you can of course go deeper with it. Nate Baldwin provides an interactive guide on the perception of color and ties it to… | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 1 year ago

Switching from Python to R

If you’re looking to switch or just want to expand your skills, this starter guide by Stephanie Lo provides some translations: Are you curious about delving into the world of R programming? W… | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 1 year ago

Friend simulation system, with ChatGPT

Philippe Vandenbroeck and Santiago Ortiz were curious about a system that incorporated knowledge from a real person and ChatGPT, which is good for smushing text together in a coherent format. So th… | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 1 year ago

To make electric vehicle batteries, China must be involved

For The New York Times, Agnes Chang and Keith Bradsher ask if it’s possible for the world to make EV batteries without China. Going over manufacturing and the materials involved, it looks lik… | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 1 year ago

Where people are moving in the U.S.

Based on migration data recently released by the IRS, Nami Sumida for the San Francisco Chronicle mapped where people moved to and away from. Enter your county to see what’s happening in your… | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 1 year ago

✚ Chart Practice: Changing the Audience

Learn about who is looking at your work and how they interpret it.Tags: audience, practice | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 1 year ago

Life timeline in a spreadsheet

Coming up on 40 years old, Emmett Shear, perhaps best known as a co-founder of Twitch, reflected on his time so far using a spreadsheet. He marked where he lived in the left column, years run top t… | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 1 year ago

Objectiveness distributions

Putting this joke chart up for posterity, because it deserves it. The earliest version of this chart I could find was from 2019, but I’m almost certain it’s older than that. Please let … | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 1 year ago

Using gaps in location data to track illegal fishing

Speaking of non-location in the seas, researchers at the University of California at Santa Cruz, NOAA Fisheries, and Global Fishing Watch are trying to use the absence of data to identify boats fis… | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 1 year ago

Fake location signals from oil tankers avoiding oversight

The New York Times tracked oil tankers faking their location as they ignore sanctions but keep insurance that is contingent on following the sanctions: “It’s significant when you look at dollar ter… | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 1 year ago

Generative AI exaggerates stereotypes

Perhaps to no one’s surprise, generative artificial intelligence models contain bias rooted in the data that drive them and by the people who design the systems. For Bloomberg, Leonardo Nicol… | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 1 year ago

Smoke from Canada wildfires over the U.S.

Wildfires in one area means smoke and pollution travels to surrounding areas, even thousands of miles away. For NYT’s The Upshot, Aatish Bhatia, Josh Katz, and Margot Sanger-Katz have the map… | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 1 year ago

✚ Artificial Data Visualization

Just thinking out loud about when the robot overlords will come for the analysis and visualization jobs.Tags: AI, jobs | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 1 year ago

NYC city council district voting guide

With New York 2023 elections coming up, The City and NY1 put together a straightforward guide for information and voting history for each district. I want something like this for my area, a vast im… | Continue reading


@flowingdata.com | 1 year ago