The Washington Post used satellite imagery, photos, and videos from when the blue paint was applied to the Reflecting Pool to figure out what caused the tears in the lining.

Of the identified locations with tears, every failure occurred where a layer of paint overlapped another. So the installers with the no-bid contracts probably did a terrible job.

We are in strange times.

This week, I provide an update on my own process from start to finish, in 2026.

If you’re into visualizing networks, cosmos.gl looks like a fun library to play with. At a glance, it seems quick and responsive, and even my old computer can run the demos without the fan whirling.

MapTap is a daily guessing game for geography. You get a location in the world, you mark where you think that location is, and you see how close you are. The closer the guess to the actual location, the higher the score.

I am not good at this game.

AI Compass is a quiz of thirty questions that asks for your opinion on various topics. At the end, you are given an archetype that sits somewhere in an x-y-space with overhyped to transformative on the x-axis and bad to good on the y-axis.

I have a feeling this quiz and the classifications were made with AI, so take it as you like. I came out as the Org Chart Survivor:

Your company made you ‘AI Lead’ on top of your actual job. You use it, it helps sometimes, and you’ve stopped trying to explain to leadership what it can and can’t do. You run little experiments and post the results. Just try things, you keep saying. Just try things.

That’s number 16 in the chart above, right around the middle of the space, which seems about right.

The internet runs on a foundation of open-source software, but codebases, the learning process, and project maintenance grows more muddled as it gets easier to produce code without knowing what any of it means. For the Financial Times, Sam Learner reports on the fragile balance (paywalled).

As Learner describes, there’s a lot of relying on a few small bits, like the xkcd comic with all the blocks dangerously weighing down on one.

Alexander Bogachev is making animated data portraits for each match:

A football match is one of the densest data objects in sport: thousands of passes, hundreds of shots, ninety minutes of shifting pressure. Most visualisations flatten all of that into charts a specialist has to decode. Data Portraits does the opposite — it turns the whole array back into something everyone already understands: two teams, a pitch, and the feeling of a game swinging one way and then the other.

A border line indicates which team is pressing, hills move up when shots are made, and spikes pop when goals are scored.

Care of Fox 8 in New Orleans, a baseline just below 92 degrees Fahrenheit makes a two-degree difference look like a lot. Stellar work. Bar charts do not work like this, of course. [via @tkeskinturk]

Roberto Serrano, a Brown University economics professor, gave a take-home midterm and it seems most of the students used AI handle the work. Suspicious of cheating, Serrano required the final exam to be taken in-person. For Inside Higher Ed, Emma Whitford charted the discrepancy between high midterm marks against much lower final marks:

Education needs to figure out new ways to grade progress, and students need to figure out how to think deeply for themselves. Unless you’re student number one, in which case you may carry on.

This week, a bar chart was the wrong choice.

Netflix shows tend to draw a lot of viewers in the first season and experience a drop-off in the second. Lucas Shaw reporting for Bloomberg:

Yet the sharp drop in viewers is a major source of concern for the company, which has been studying its data to figure out why this is happening, according to people familiar with the matter. The service is ending The Night Agent after its next season. It renewed two comedies, Running Point and The Four Seasons, even though both shows surrendered more than 50% of their audience from season one.

This is probably obvious to many Netflix subscribers.

I paused the service a few months ago after spending more time flipping through the catalog than watching. I wonder what the views will look like for the K-Pop Demon Hunters movie sequel. I suspect similar to the shows above.

For dumb reasons, there are people in power who like to put down immigrants. However, for most people in the United States, you don’t have to look back very far to see where we came from. For the New York Times, Albert Sun, Jeff Adelson, and Larry Buchanan mapped American ancestry:

The lines of American ancestry today are not neatly drawn, and groups overlap and spill into one another. Some people don’t answer the census questions about their origins at all. For others, it’s complicated. Descendents of enslaved people, for example, may identify themselves as African American because they are unable to trace their roots to a specific place.

Many areas have truly mixed populations, with people of several different ancestries nearly equally represented.

Based on data from the American Community Survey, the shade of each region is a mix of colors that correspond to the mix of ancestries.

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.