The United States Census Bureau just released county-level commute estimates for 2011, based on the American Community Survey (that thing so many people seem to be against).

About 8.1 percent of U.S. workers have commutes of 60 minutes or longer, 4.3 percent work from home, and nearly 600,000 full-time workers had "megacommutes" of at least 90 minutes and 50 miles. The average one-way daily commute for workers across the country is 25.5 minutes, and one in four commuters leave their county to work.

The Bureau graphic isn't very good [PDF], but WNYC plugged the data into a map, which is a lot more informative.

There's also a link to download the data on the bottom left of the WNYC map in CSV format, in case you want to try your hand at making a choropleth map. Or you can grab some flow data from the Census Bureau.

An old one from xkcd. I'm not sure whether to laugh or cry, but I think he's implying that people who make graphs on weekends are super dateable.

Who's going to be the next pope? I know all of you are sitting on the edge of your seats. Luckily, an analytical research manager who goes by the name AJ hacked together a pope tracker.

Despite not being Catholic, the papal election fascinates me. Not sure if it’s the old rituals, the world-wide interest, or simply the fact that the Catholic Church has left a huge mark on history.

There’s no way I know enough about the inner workings of the Catholic Church to have any idea on who the next Pope may be.

Since domain knowledge is out, the next best option?

Follow the money!

He's scraping odds of possible candidates becoming pope from a betting site, and the above shows the numbers over time. The odds were bumpy at first, but there seems to be some convergence, and as of this writing, Cardinal Peter Turkson from Ghana is the heavy favorite. [via Revolutions]

I'm not into video games, and my experience has been near zero since high school, but I'm excited about SimCity 2013 coming out tomorrow. I think my excitement comes from one part nostalgia and one part GlassBox — the game engine that drives the simulations of the city you build and its citizens:

All the glowing reviews probably have something to do with interest, too. But that memory of installing SimCity 2000 from two floppy disks in my 486 totally brings back happy thoughts.

Apparently, the game makers were inspired by Google Maps and information graphics to display the data generated during gameplay. I hope Maxis releases some of that data. It could be fun to compare SimCity demographics to the real world. Then again, who's going to have time to look at the data, when we'll be too busy building arcologies?

Andrew Leonard for Salon fears what might come of the creative process if movies are based on algorithms and data and that we might turn into puppets.

For years Netflix has been analyzing what we watched last night to suggest movies or TV shows that we might like to watch tomorrow. Now it is using the same formula to prefabricate its own programming to fit what it thinks we will like. Isn't the inevitable result of this that the creative impulse gets channeled into a pre-built canal?

Because tastes never change? We don't have any choice but to watch what is handed to us? Will creators stop making things that go against the norm? Leonard concludes with us stuck in a trance, in front of our televisions.

The companies that figure out how to generate intelligence from that data will know more about us than we know ourselves, and will be able to craft techniques that push us toward where they want us to go, rather than where we would go by ourselves if left to our own devices. I'm guessing this will be good for Netflix's bottom line, but at what point do we go from being happy subscribers, to mindless puppets?

Again, the assumption is that we have no say in the matter. But when a company or service suggests that we buy or watch something, we don't have to follow.

Netflix in particular thrives by providing a service that shows us what they think we might want to watch from a selection of thousands of options. Part of that algorithm depends on our own movie ratings and preferences. If Netflix offers poor suggestions, you can leave the service. Yeah. You can stop paying 8 bucks a month.

Let's turn it around. What if Netflix analyzed viewing data not to offer their best viewing suggestions or to make shows and movies that people like but to expand people's viewing windows? Let's say that the data shows that you watch a lot of "witty, critically acclaimed comedies", so Netflix suggests you watch more "romantic dramas" to make you more well-rounded. Are you a mindless puppet if you take the suggestion, even if you end up hating the movie? Are you a mindless puppet if you ignore the suggestion and continue watching what you know you like?

From the production perspective, it makes sense to try to make something a lot of people like. From the consumer perspective, we still get to decide what we want to spend our money on.

It's good to be concerned about how companies use personal data. Data privacy, ownership, and ethics are important issues, but it shouldn't mean a fear of all things data.

From the Winnipeg Sun. Something isn't right here. [via]

Add another way to make state-level choropleth maps. Stately, a project by Intridea, allows you to approach state mapping in the browser like you would a font.

Stately is a symbol font that makes it easy to create a map of the United States using only HTML and CSS. Each state can be styled independently with CSS for making simple visualizations. And since it's a font, it scales bigger and smaller while staying sharp as a tack.

The process is fairly straightforward: Link to the Stately stylesheet, add some HTML markup (an unordered list of states) to your page, and then use CSS to color each state. Boom, you've got yourself a map.

In a follow-up to their map on most used languages in London, James Cheshire and Ed Manley, along with John Barratt, mapped the most commonly used languages in New York, based on the ones used on Twitter.

English (in grey above) is by far the most popular with Spanish (in blue above) taking the top spot amongst the other language groups. Portuguese and Japanese take third and fourth respectively. Midtown Manhattan and JFK International Airport have, perhaps unsurprisingly, the most linguistically diverse tweets whilst specific languages shine through in places such as Brighton Beach (Russian), the Bronx (Spanish) and towards Newark (Portuguese). You can also spot international clusters on Liberty Island and Ellis Island and if you look carefully the tracks of ferry boats between them.

It's not especially straightforward to know or find out what's going on with your state's government. Sites aren't maintained, are unusable, or just don't provide much information. Open States, a project by the Sunlight Foundation, aims to change that.

After more than four years of work from volunteers and a full-time team here at Sunlight we're immensely proud to launch the full Open States site with searchable legislative data for all 50 states, D.C. and Puerto Rico. Open States is the only comprehensive database of activities from all state capitols that makes it easy to find your state lawmaker, review their votes, search for legislation, track bills and much more.

Just click on a state or enter an address, and you can quickly get information that's relevant to where you are. There's also iPhone and iPad apps if you prefer those, and all the data on the site is accessible via an API or a bulk data dump.
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With Pope Benedict XVI's resignation, 116 cardinals from various regions have to come a consensus on who will be next. Amanda Cox and Graham Roberts for The New York Times wondered what a composite of all the cardinals might look like, which looks exactly how you might expect the average to look.

Chris Dancy likes to track facets of his life. A lot. Above is a bunch of automatically logged data to Google Calendar.

At the moment, he tracks everything he can, even if he doesn't see an immediate benefit, so long as it's relatively easy to collect — and he can save the data into Evernote, Google Calendar, and Excel. You never know when something seemingly pointless will come in handy in the future.

"If I'm on a call and my voice gets over 50 decibels, my phone notifies me," he says. "My heart rate after a conference call usually can give me better insight into the call and my feelings about the call."

I'm all for personal data, but at some point it's just too much, and I'm pretty sure Dancy is close to that point, if he hasn't passed it already. Do you really need an alert that pops up when your voice sounds a certain way? Data can tell you a lot of things, but it doesn't have to tell you everything. [Thanks, Mat]

On Craigslist there's a section in the personals for "missed connections" which lets people post missed chances at love with the (slim) hopes that the person he or she saw sees the random post on Craiglist. They usually start off like, "I saw you in that place, and you were..." Dorothy Gambrell mapped the most frequent location for each state.

In California, there's apparently a lot of eyeballing at 24 Hour Fitness, and in New York it's the subway, which shouldn't be surprising. I like how bars are most mentioned in North Dakota and Wisconsin, which matches up with the bars versus grocery stores map from a couple of years ago.

There's a corner of my desk reserved for books, notes, papers, and other things I am supposed to read or have written and need to rewrite. Each project I happen to be working on gets its own stack. But there is only so much space on my desk, and if I have too many stacks going at once, everything starts to jumble into one big pile. So I try not to work on too many things in parallel.

There are typically two stacks at any given time: one for books or random projects and the other for my dissertation. The former changes often and was recently cleared on the completion of the Data Points manuscript, and the latter has been persistent for several years.

But I'm happy to finally say that now there are zero stacks.

I'm finally done. I'm officially Dr. Nathan Yau, Ph.D. (but you can still call me Nathan).

It feels weird to say that but in a good way — like how I imagine lottery winners feel, suddenly being able to say they're millionaires. It's surreal at first, but once it sinks in, the sun shines brighter, food tastes better, and the feeling of possibilities rushes through your veins.

I've been asked if I would do it again knowing what I know now. After all, it took me over seven years to finish. To be honest, there were many times I wanted to quit, but now that I'm done, I can say that I would do it all again. I wouldn't do it just for the degree though. Rather I would do it for what came from going through the process: this blog, two books, countless learning experiences in school and through it, and a perspective on work that I wouldn't have gotten from anything else.

Most importantly, I found what I like to do. It's awesome.

So now it's time for a new stack. I'm excited about what it might be.

Shan Carter, Amanda Cox, and Mike Bostock for The New York Times, analyzed movie trailers for five best picture nominees. The horizontal axis represents time elapsed during a trailer, and the vertical axis represents when that clip occurred during the movie. The above is for Silver Linings Playbook:

"Silver Linings Playbook" follows the standard model for trailers, according to Bill Woolery, a trailer specialist in Los Angeles who once worked on trailers for movies like "The Usual Suspects" and "E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial." While introducing the movie’s story and its characters, the trailer largely follows the order of the film itself.

Because the order of the trailer is pretty much the order of the movie, you see a straight line with a downward slope most of the way. On the other hand, the Lincoln trailer jumps around showing a zig-zag pattern.

In addition to the charts, the healthy dose of annotation provides interesting tidbits on the reasoning behind pace and scene choice.

How big is the Moon, really? Reddit user boredboarder8 provided some perspective with this image of the Moon with an overlaid United States. It's roughly estimated (and others would be better at commenting on the accuracy better than me), but after some back-of-napkin math it seems about right. The area of the United States, not including Alaska, is a little over 20 percent of the Moon's surface area. [via io9]

Lance Hosey, for The New York Times, on design, beauty, and functionality.

We think of great design as art, not science, a mysterious gift from the gods, not something that results just from diligent and informed study. But if every designer understood more about the mathematics of attraction, the mechanics of affection, all design — from houses to cellphones to offices and cars — could both look good and be good for you.

Jon Millward explored porn star demographics using a data scrape from the Internet Adult Film Database: hair color, race, and birthplace, among other things. (There aren't any dirty pictures, but there's some terminology that might be NSFW.)

The average measurements?

I thought that maybe if the women are overestimating how light they are, they might also be a bit too generous when reporting their measurements. It turns out they probably aren’t though, because the most common bra size for a female porn star is a surprisingly handleable 34B. Not double-D, not even a D. Double-D actually came in 4th, behind B, C and D. The most common set of measurements for the women was 34–24-34.

So, if the average female porn star is a 5'5" woman who weighs 117lbs and has B-cup breasts, what colour is her hair? Blonde, presumably, if my friends' guesses were anything to go by.

Apparently not. Dark-haired porn stars outnumber blonde ones almost 2-to-1.

Millward doesn't look at changes over time a whole lot, but if the BMI of Playboy playmates is any indicator, I bet those measurements have changed over the years.

From NOAA, an animation showing a wave of cold during the Martin Luther King Jr. holiday weekend last month:

A drop in the jet stream sent temperatures across the United States plummeting over the Martin Luther King Jr Holiday weekend. The pronounced change in temperatures can be seen in this weather data from NOAA/NCEP's Real-Time Mesoscale Analysis. Areas colored blue are below freezing. The diurnal cycle of heating and cooling can be seen over time, but the pattern is clear: much of the U.S. is pretty cold.

While you're at it, you might as well check out other videos on the NOAA Visualizations YouTube channel. Some good stuff.

Neil Freeman reimagined state boundary lines based on population. He started with an algorithm and the fifty largest cities, considered proximity, urban area, and commuting patterns, and then hand-tweaked boundary lines and shapes. The state names are mostly centered around geographic features (although I would have opted for ones based on dating profiles).

"Keep in mind that this is an art project, not a serious proposal, so take it easy with the emails about the sacred soil of Texas." [via kottke | Thanks, Mickey]