Artist Christoph Niemann chimed in for the New York Times about his complicated feelings towards AI tools. “Is A.I. good or bad for the creative process?” The answers vary by purpose and where we find value, but in the end:

Communicating emotions from person to person through writing, composing or painting is inefficient and inherently human. This is what makes a love letter, a doodle on a sandwich bag and (some) paintings in a museum precious. Automating the creation of art is like automating life, so you can make it to the finish line faster.

The process of making anything, visualization included, seems easy at a superficial level: Get idea. Execute idea. But it is the people behind the ideas and the evolution of person and thought that generates value.

For NYT’s the Upshot, Emily Badger, Aatish Bhatia, and Ethan Singer accounted for 900+ canceled federal grants and describe how the cancelations break the feedback loop of government-funded research.

The money the government sends to Harvard is, in effect, not a subsidy to advance the university’s mission. It’s a payment for the role Harvard plays in advancing the research mission of the United States.

This is the science model the U.S. has developed over 80 years: The government sets the agenda and funds the work; university scientists design the studies and find the answers. The president’s willingness to upend that model has revealed its fragility. There is no alternative in the U.S. to produce the kind of scientific advancements represented by these grants.

A tour through a treemap highlights specific grants and an interactive version at the end lets you poke around.

Ideally, your romantic partner for life has similar interests, hopes, dreams, and browsing behavior. At least that’s the premise of browser.dating, an actual service that you can sign up for.

Browser.dating is a project by Dries Depoorter that explores digital connections through browsing patterns.

We all leave unique digital footprints as we navigate the web. This project aims to find meaningful connections between people based on their browsing habits, creating a new kind of dating experience.

With strong privacy measures in place, browser.dating analyzes your browsing history and matches you with users who have similar digital behaviors.

Years ago, I often wondered about how we could use digital fingerprints in various ways to understand ourselves, but it never occurred to me think about coupling them.

I’m looking forward to hearing about people who met through the tabs that they had opened, or even better, those who shared a common bond in FlowingData.

This is the good stuff for June: tools to use, datasets to analyze, and resources to learn from.

There was a time when you tuned in to the Weather Channel on something called television and all you saw was a cycle of forecasts. A saxophone tune played in the background and you waited for your city to show for a second.

Michael Battaglia recreated the experience with a vintage weather view, but you can search for your location instead of waiting. The data comes via the National Weather Service API.

Be sure to turn on the sound for that melodious saxophone.

The Vera C. Rubin Observatory, jointly funded by the National Science Foundation and the Department of Energy’s Office of Science, released its first large scale image of the Southern Hemisphere sky. It is a sample of the 500 petabytes of data scheduled to be collected over the next ten years.
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Allen Frances, a psychiatrist who chaired the group to update the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders in the 1980s, explains how a change in definition led to a sudden rise in autism diagnoses.

Many large studies have come to the same conclusion: Vaccines don’t cause autism. The role, if any, of environmental toxins is still to be determined, but there is no known environmental factor that can explain the sudden jump in diagnoses. The changes we made to the diagnosis in the D.S.M.-IV can.

Why did autism-related diagnoses explode so far beyond what our task force had predicted? Two reasons. First, many school systems provide much more intensive services to children with the diagnosis of autism. While these services are extremely important for many children, whenever having a diagnosis carries a benefit, it will be overused. Second, overdiagnosis can happen whenever there’s a blurry line between normal behavior and disorder, or when symptoms overlap with other conditions. Classic severe autism had so tight a definition it was hard to confuse it with anything else; Asperger’s was easily confused with other mental disorders or with normal social avoidance and eccentricity. (We also, regrettably, named the condition after Hans Asperger, one of the first people to describe it, not realizing until later that he had collaborated with the Nazis.)

Please send to whom it may concern.

Jonathan Tirone, reporting for Bloomberg:

Notably absent from the latest International Atomic Energy Agency’s damage report are three research reactors operating at the Isfahan Nuclear Technology and Research Center. One of the so-called miniature neutron source reactors, made by China in 1991, runs on 900 grams (2 pounds) of bomb-grade uranium.

It seems we’re going to see more satellite imagery in the coming weeks.

For Tom’s Guide, Jason England reviews smart glasses by Emteq, which are equipped with sensors to track micro facial movements and then pipe the data into AI.

Sporting sensors all around the rims, it can detect the subtlest of changes in your facial expressions (even those you aren’t consciously aware of doing). With this data, paired with AI, it can become a personalized life coach for your fitness, your diet and even your emotional health.

This will not end well.

While there is value in learning about yourself through data, the quantification of your life, in a quest to optimize every bit, is no way to live.

For the Pudding, Alvin Chang uses the CANDOR corpus to explore our feelings when we do the unthinkable: talk to strangers.

The story follows a sample of 30-minute conversations between strangers with transitions between anecdotes and patterns. Each square represents an individual as ASCII art, a timer on the right doubles as a progress marker, and in typical Chang style, he keeps you connected to what the data means on a personal level.

Communicate data so that more people care and fewer glaze over and fall into a deep mental slumber.

With temperatures rising, we must prepare for how everyday life could change, other than days getting hotter. For the Washington Post, Daniel Wolfe highlights research by Mohamed Foudad from the University of Reading on how flight turbulence might increase with just a 2°C bump.

While at the University of Toulouse, Foudad led a study where he combined 11 climate models to predict where more extreme and dangerous forms of clear-air turbulence would increase. He said, “by using all these climate models … we have now a high confidence at each degree of warming that we have an increase in this turbulence.” The map above simulates the impact of a 2 degree Celsius (3.6 degree Fahrenheit) increase from preindustrial temperatures which, according to some estimates, could fall before 2055.

An interactive map lets you enter two airports to see possible changes in turbulence over a flight path.

The bill proposed by the current administration affects incomes of the poor and the rich in an unusual way. To demonstrate, for NYT’s the Upshot, Emily Badger, Alicia Parlapiano, and Margot Sanger-Katz compare the bill against previous bills.

The bill as passed by the House in May would raise after-tax incomes for the highest-earning 10 percent of American households on average by 2.3 percent a year over the next decade, while lowering incomes for the poorest tenth by 3.9 percent, according to new estimates by the Congressional Budget Office.

The shape of that distribution is rare: Tax cut packages have seldom left the poor significantly worse off. And bills that cut the safety net usually haven’t also included benefits for the rich. By inverting those precedents, congressional Republicans have created a bill unlike anything Washington has produced since deficit fears began to loom large in the 1990s.

Making charts that are accessible to those with visual difficulties might seem like a lot of work, but it doesn’t have to be. Nancy Organ provides easy-to-implement suggestions to make it work.

The good news is that the accessibility issues I encounter on a regular basis are fairly easy to solve. You don’t need any special tools or magic powers, and the result will be a visualization that is more easily enjoyed by a wide range of vision levels. And, if you’d like to go even further to include readers with a broader variety of disabilities and sensory experiences, resources like Chartability can point you in the right direction. Yes, you can make your visualizations more accessible.

As a bonus, your visualization becomes more readable in general and everyone is able to read it.

The Pentagon Pizza Report tracks pizza place activity near the Pentagon. From the Guardian:

The timing of Israel’s plan to attack Iran was top-secret. But Washington pizza delivery trackers guessed something was up before the first bombs fell.

About an hour before Iranian state TV first reported loud explosions in Tehran, pizza orders around the Pentagon went through the roof, according to a viral X account claiming to offer “hot intel” on “late-night activity spikes” at the US military headquarters.

The Pizza Meter Theory has been around since the 1990s, which is something new I learned today.

The Pizza Meter, also known as the Pentagon Pizza Orders Theory, is a theory proposing that upticks in pizza orders received by restaurants near the Pentagon can predict international conflicts and times of crisis in the U.S. government. The concept originated in the early 1990s after a Domino’s Pizza franchise owner in Northern Virginia near the Pentagon named Frank Meeks, told newspapers that before major national security events, he saw a noticeable uptick in business.

I guess there is some truth to the theory.

It reminds me of the Waffle House Index and Canadian pee times during a hockey game. What other unexpected indicators are there for real-time events?

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There was one survivor from Air India flight AI171. He sat in seat 11A.

For the Pudding, Dorothy Lu and Anna Li examine the match rate between actor ethnicity and the characters they played. The rate is higher than you might think.

On a character level, 207 out of 236 Asian main characters—88%—were portrayed by actors of the same ethnic background.

This was more accurate than we’d expected! We were ready to blame Hollywood, but it looks like casting directors have been paying attention to Asian actors’ ethnicities.

Honestly, as an Asian American, I only care that Asians are represented fairly in films. If a Korean can act Chinese or vice versa then it’s all good.

For Reuters, Dawn Chmielewski reports on the alleged copyright infringement.

In the suit filed by seven corporate entities at the studios that own or control copyrights for the various Disney and Universal Pictures film units, the studios offered examples of Midjourney animations that include Disney characters, such as Yoda wielding a lightsaber, Bart Simpson riding a skateboard, Marvel’s Iron Man soaring above the clouds and Pixar’s Buzz Lightyear taking flight.

The image generator also recreated such Universal characters as “How to Train Your Dragon’s” dragon, Toothless, the green ogre “Shrek,” and Po from “Kung Fu Panda.”

“By helping itself to plaintiffs’ copyrighted works, and then distributing images (and soon videos) that blatantly incorporate and copy Disney’s and Universal’s famous characters — without investing a penny in their creation — Midjourney is the quintessential copyright free-rider and a bottomless pit of plagiarism,” the suit alleges.