This week, we set expectations in analysis to better prepare for the unexpected.

When you have that feeling that today is abnormally hot or cold for the time of year, historical context is useful to see if intuition matches reality. Reuters has you covered with a climate monitor that shows global temperature against a normal year.

The dashboard view has an interactive globe, the now familiar multi-line chart that aligns past years by day, and a time series by continent.

Going with the old school pile o’ money, NBC News illustrated the scale of the SpaceX IPO valuation against the Statue of Liberty, something that we know is quite large.

In the above, each block represents one million dollars, so a smaller denomination would make a bigger pile. And as of this writing, the market value for SpaceX is substantially higher. I’m no expert in company valuation, but this feels not ideal long-term.

The pandemic tested the strength of many relationships. Alvin Chang, for the Pudding, examined who stayed together and who did not over that time period. Divorce and separation were more common than usual.

At the end, you can explore the data and view the responses from each person. Plus claymation.

The project is based on the How Couples Meet and Stay Together dataset from researchers at Stanford University. Every few years they’ve run the survey, following up with the original respondents, which provides a longitudinal view of individual relationships. It’s one of my favorite datasets.

The current proposal for the arch sets the height at 288 feet above sea level. The New York Times mapped air traffic in the Washington, D.C. area to show why that’s an issue.

Among maps that show flight paths from above, a view from ground level shows how close flights from April 2026 would have gotten if the arch existed. The view rotates 360 degrees and makes the distance from arch to air traffic more obvious.

Elon Musk became the world’s first trillionaire with the SpaceX initial public offering today. For Bloomberg, Ben Steverman, with illustrations by Tim Enthoven, provides a quick ridiculous overview of what $1 trillion gets you.

See also the Chalabi classic on Jeff Bezos wealth.

The Apocalypse Early Warning System by Kyle McDonald was built on the premise that rich folks will use their private jets to get out quick in case of a global emergency.

This site watches a fixed cohort of business jets and asks a simple question: is the number currently airborne unusual for this time? It is not tracking all aircraft. The original version used an FAA-only business-jet list. The current tracker builds a broader global aircraft metadata table by merging ADS-B Exchange aircraft records, Mictronics/tar1090 records, and FAA registry data by ICAO hex. The importer classifies metadata into business jets, military aircraft, large airliners, regional airliners, non-jet aircraft, and other known types, then applies a practical business-jet filter. Each tracked aircraft is matched in live data by its ICAO hex identifier.

I think this is only partially tongue-in-cheek? Data is updated every half hour and you can sign up for updates through Telegram or text.

Another recent flip: Based on estimates from Ember, monthly solar-generated electricity reached an all-time high in May and coal reached an all-time low in April. It looks like it won’t be long until both solar and wind consistently beat coal.

Speaking of when data flips, last night in game four of the 2026 NBA Finals, the New York Knicks were down by as much as 29 points to the San Antonio Spurs. According to Mike Beuoy of Inpredictable, there was a less than 5% chance of the Knicks winning by the middle of the second quarter. With nine minutes left, the Knicks had a less than 1% chance.

Then began the biggest collapse in NBA Finals history by the San Antonio Spurs.

This week, we focus on when there is a sudden change or flip in the data that you want to highlight.

The New York Times counted Elon Musk’s promises on X/Twitter and Tesla earnings calls since 2011. Over the years, there have been more declarations, but the number of achievements per year changed little in the past five years. Instead, the rate of non-achievements appears to be rising.

It’s going to be hot in North America as the World Cup 2026 starts this week. But the level of heat will vary over time and city, which means teams will experience varying levels of heat depending on when and where they play. Bloomberg crossed the forecast with playing schedule to estimate the heat stress for each team.

Tunisia, France, and Ghana will play in the hottest temperatures. Uzbekistan, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and Spain will play in the coolest temperatures, including the sweet air-conditioned stadiums in Atlanta and Houston.

I’m saving this for later. I wonder if this affects performance in the end.

Companies use seismic airguns in the Gulf of Mexico to find oil and gas deposits. The airguns deliver air blasts in the water, and the time it takes for an echo to return can be used to estimate metrics on the seabed.

For the New York Times, Katherine Chui and Catrin Einhorn demonstrate, with visualization and audio, how the waves from the airguns interfere with whale communication.

The Gulf of Mexico, which the Trump administration calls the Gulf of America, is one of the noisiest bodies of water in the United States. Air gun blasts are the loudest element there, according to research by scientists who monitor underwater acoustics. Shipping traffic is another major contributor.

The noise could affect the ability of Rice’s whales to find food and mates, scientists say. The chronic stress of living in a loud environment could be detrimental to their health.

The maps, graphics, and sounds combine well to emphasize the problem.

For Bloomberg, Laura Millan, Kyle Kim, and Armand Emamdjomeh mapped the projected extent of melting glaciers in the Alps. The risk of avalanches and rock slides has risen, which could lead to buried towns that reside below.

In the above, the outer border represents the 2010 extent of selected glaciers. The solid blue is the extent that researchers have projected by 2100.

I think the color scheme confused me at first, because I thought I was looking at land mass with ice on top. I wonder if a second shade to indicate the melted portions would be helpful, or maybe a flipped focus to only show the melt would highlight how much is disappearing.

Traffic has been rising extra quickly these past couple of years. Unfortunately (or fortunately, depending on your point of view) it’s mostly from automated AI bots scraping all they can get. From Matthew Prince, the CEO of Cloudflare:

Welp, that happened faster than I predicted. Thought it would be end of 2027, then early 2027, but agentic traffic growing so fast that bots have now passed human traffic online for the first time in the Internet’s history.

It was only nine months ago when bots accounted for 30% of web traffic. Ninety percent next year?

LLM speed is commonly expressed as tokens per second, which is kind of meaningless for the uninitiated. Mike Veerman made a more intuitive view for what various speeds look like.

More tokens per second means faster generation, which you can clearly see through the output appearing in the box. Select between code, text, thinking, and agent models.

I’m pretty sure the tool was made with an LLM (probably Claude based on the look and feel). The obvious next step is to go full meta to show a site that is generating itself based on the selected speed.

For Bloomberg, Demetrios Pogkas, Jennah Haque, and Kiel Porter show the projected scale of SpaceX’s initial public offering later this month against the current top 100 listings globally.

Rising bubbles are the correct metaphor here. The vertical position represents offer size, the horizontal represents time, and the size of the circles represent market capitalization after the offering. SpaceX floats far above.

This week, we look past the chart and ponder its true purpose.

For NYT Opinion, Emmanuel Saez and Gabriel Zucman make a case for a billionaire wealth tax in California.

The billionaire class in California includes roughly 250 households, a mere 0.001 percent of the state’s families. Yet its wealth now amounts to more than half of California’s entire annual economic output.

This means that if these billionaires spent all of their wealth, they could buy more than half of the goods and services produced in a year in the entire state.

This extraordinary wealth does not translate into extraordinary tax contributions.

They use a tip-of-the-iceberg visual metaphor to show the relatively modest taxes on income against the majority of wealth beneath the surface in assets. California wants to charge a 5% tax on the entire iceberg spread out over a five-year period.

For NBC News, Jane Weaver, Jiachuan Wu, and Javier Zarracina report on the Ebola outbreak in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. When compared to past outbreaks since 2012, the trajectory of the current outbreak looks more intense, as indicated by a much steeper line.