Throughout NBA basketball history, there are many what-ifs and fan-forced asterisks for championships won. For the Pudding, Russell Samora calculated which teams over the past 25 seasons benefited the most from opponent injuries, using a scale of least “ethical” to most.

Samora uses the traditional pile-o-heads method to visualize the number of missed games due to injury. Heads are sized by how much a player added to team wins.

As a Warriors fan, I am obligated to say that injuries are part of the game and sometimes randomness swings in your favor.

Fun stacked area chart by Todd Whitehead for Sportradar, showing the share of minutes among the 2003 NBA draft class. Old man James stands alone:

That was some draft class.

Oil companies have funded research for decades to figure out how to store carbon dioxide pollution underground. The goal is to let people continue using traditional fuel, or at least that’s the supposed premise. ProPublica illustrates the challenges of this underground approach and how few results research has produced.

The aesthetics on this piece remind me of the segments on PBS kid shows that explain concepts. The cutouts and illustrations add a nice visual layer.

Also, it seems like we should focus our energy on solar generation instead of continuing with oil-as-usual.

National parks are increasingly crowded, which kind of detracts from the peaceful wilderness aspects of a visit. For Bloomberg, Gordy Megroz, Marie Patino, and Denise Lu used AllTrails data to figure out when to avoid the crowds and then layered in weather data to define the best times to go.

Radar chart haters can shut it. I also like the bulls-eye graphics for each park that show precipitation, maximum temperature, and visitor volume aligned by time of year.

Seán Doran stringed together time-lapse photos from the International Space Station and interpolated the frames in between to make a smooth high-resolution video.

5,234 images from 2 time-lapse sequences photographed by ESA astronaut Sophie Adenot & NASA astronaut Jessica Meir on ISS Expedition 74 are repaired, remastered & retimed. 33,946 additional frames are created to complete this 4x real time video footage. A method called frame interpolation is used to calculate the extra video frames required to re-create the smooth motion of ISS orbiting Earth.

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This week, a framework of AI agents enter the game to automate all the steps of data to charts to insight. We’re not cooked, yet.

Dries Depoorter makes the “burning money” metaphor more literal with a tick-marked candle to indicate how much money you’ve actually burned.

The R Core Team was awarded the biennial Rousseeuw Prize for Statistics, which includes a monetary award of $1 million:

R started in the early nineties, when Robert Gentleman and Ross Ihaka created another implementation of S, for which John Chambers would receive the 1998 Software System Award of the Association for Computing Machinery. Initially meant for classroom use and to allow experiments with the computer language itself, their initiative was soon joined by volunteers from academia sharing a vision of together developing an open source, state-of-the-art system, freely available on all major software platforms.

Since mid-1997, this `R Core Team’ has been stewarding the development of the core systems of R. A subset of the R Core Team created and keeps maintaining the Comprehensive R Archive Network (CRAN) which provides an actively maintained repository of over 23,000 interoperable packages that work with current and development versions of the base system. It has extensive graphics capabilities. It is also the basis of the Bioconductor software for research on genomic data.

Well deserved.

Gallup has been surveying U.S. adults about American pride since 2001. The question: “How proud are you to be an American — extremely proud, very proud, moderately proud, only a little proud, or not at all proud?” Those who said very or extremely proud has been in decline and dipped more than usual this past year.

When Gallup first asked this question in 2001, 55% of U.S. adults were extremely proud to be American. Pride surged after 9/11, with 65% to 70% of Americans expressing extreme pride through 2004. Extreme pride declined after that but held at majority levels through 2017. Since 2018, no more than 47% of U.S. adults have said they are extremely proud. The latest figure, from a June 1-15 poll, is down eight percentage points from last year and is tied for the largest year-over-year change in the trend, along with 2004-2005.

Among Republicans, the change looks less dramatic. Most of the decline is among Independents and Democrats, which sounds right.

The administration ordered a ban on methods that allow statistical agencies to publish detailed without sacrificing privacy. For NPR, Hansi Lo Wang reports:

The order by the Commerce Department, which oversees the bureau, bans “noise infusion.” It’s one of the main privacy protection techniques the bureau has used for decades to make certain data fuzzy — to ensure that individual people, including members of minority communities, can’t be identified.

Instead, the Trump administration’s new policy, which also applies to the Bureau of Economic Analysis, leaves both statistical agencies with two options going forward: releasing “coarsened” statistics with fewer details or not releasing some statistics at all.

So we get less detailed data or no data at all. That sounds like a lose-lose situation, especially for rural areas and towns with small population. It’s going to be more difficult for these areas to argue for resources when they’re classified as missing values in national datasets.

Venezuela does not have a government-operated earthquake alert system. However, Google runs a system that relies on accelerometer data from Android phones. As reported by Amy Graff and Martín González Gómez for NYT, the system sent 11.4 million alerts to Venezuela residents to seek cover before the earthquakes hit full-force. While the current death toll is over 1,700, this backup system of sorts seems worth whatever it cost if it saved at least one life.

Here in Northern California, I get these kind of alerts sometimes. Got one just last week. I’m glad they exist.

Monuments and buildings in Washington were planned and placed over a couple centuries with intention and meaning. For NYT’s the Upshot, Emily Badger and Larry Buchanan rewind to the 1800s to show what architects were thinking, and then contrast to plans in the present day, which seems less careful.

I missed these illustrations by Mona Chalabi showing the ridiculous scale of one trillion dollars. One trillion is a giant number that goes beyond our perception, but one coin versus a Scrooge McDuck-style money vault is easier to imagine.

If it’s any consolation, Musk is not a trillionaire at the time of this writing. He is just a multibillionaire. So ha.

The administration closed Climate.gov last year during the takedowns, so a group formed a non-profit to bring back an equivalent. Climate.us went live this week:

Climate.us is the nonprofit successor to Climate.gov, delivering climate data and information to promote public climate literacy and to equip people to turn knowledge into meaningful conversations and climate-conscious actions. At a moment when critical climate information was being deleted or distorted, we stepped up to rescue key climate resources—including the U.S. Global Change Research Program’s now-deleted Fifth National Climate Assessment—and to ensure the public has continued easy access to the facts.

Our goal is to build an enduring, independent, and scientifically rigorous platform that the world can rely on for climate communication, education, and engagement.

This is what happened in June.

Trucks getting bigger means visibility declines and crashes become more deadly, which is a terrible deal for pedestrians. The New York Times illustrated how bad it has gotten using simulations and a first-person point-of-view.

I already have a bias against oversized trucks tailgaiting on the highway, but I did not realize how bad the blind zones are from the driver’s seat in one of these things. NYT does a good job showing what changed over the years.

Shri Khalpada, for PerThirtySix, breaks down musical sounds into math to illustrate how synthesizers work. Interactive graphics let you play with the parts and hear how the sounds change.

This would’ve been useful in that Fourier transform course I took in college, twice a week for two hours after lunch in a dark room using static PowerPoint slides.

A recent Gallup poll shows less than half of U.S. adults say they can consistently afford healthcare, or “Cost Secure,” a five-year low. The youngest and oldest experienced the most decline.

Adults aged 18 to 29 have experienced the sharpest decline in healthcare affordability since 2021, with the share classified as Cost Secure falling from 46% to 32%. This group also exhibited one of the largest year-over-year declines between 2024 and 2025, decreasing by seven percentage points.

Adults aged 65 and older, who are typically covered by Medicare, remain the most likely to be Cost Secure, but this group has also seen meaningful declines. The share of Cost Secure older adults fell from 73% in 2021 to 61% in 2025. Similar to young adults (those aged 18 to 29), those 65 and older showed a substantial year-over-year decline, from 69% in 2024 to 61% in 2025.

The poll is in collaboration with West Health, who has been tracking healthcare over the decade. There is more data on cost, quality, and access.

If you’re in the right pocket demographic of a short-form video algorithm, you might have seen someone place a large bet on Polymarket that looked like a big payout. The problem: it might have just been a staged marketing campaign by Polymarket to boost numbers. The Wall Street Journal investigated the practice through publicly available videos and data.

They found a staging website created by Polymarket, “winnings” that would’ve been losses if they happened in real-time, and a familiar format across thousands of videos.

Put the fake videos on top of most people losing money, your best bet is probably to avoid Polymarket entirely.

The renovations to the Washington reflecting pool were supposed to make the water appear “American flag blue.” However, millions of dollars later, paint is peeling and the pool is filled with algae. For the Guardian, Anna Betts flips the color coding to show the American flag reflecting the color of the water over the past couple weeks.