With hundreds of thousands of Ukrainian drone flights every month, countries have had to dramatically shift their strategies. Financial Times illustrates how things are different.

Kyiv claims Moscow suffered 35,000 losses in December alone. Volodymyr Zelenskyy, Ukraine’s president, said there was now a “clear price” for every kilometre of extra land seized on the Donetsk front: 156 Russian soldiers.

The pressure of aerial surveillance has also lengthened rotations. Infantry, as well as drone, anti-tank and mortar operators, remain in position for extended periods, because relief movements are so dangerous.

There are countless stories of troops spending months dug in at forward posts.

In celebration of the lunar new year, many people release a lantern into the night sky on the last day of festivities. Taiwan Data Stories made a fun interactive that lets you customize and release your own lantern.

One of the festival’s most iconic traditions is the release of sky lanterns (天燈), especially in Pingxi (平溪) in New Taipei City. As evening falls, thousands of glowing lanterns drift into the night sky, each inscribed with handwritten wishes for the year ahead. In the Year of the Horse, many lanterns feature the character 「馬」, reflecting the horse’s cultural associations with vitality, speed, endurance, and forward momentum.

I hope next year they turn this into a community interactive that shows everyone’s lanterns and hopes floating around.

A decade and a half ago, there used to be a site called 43 Things where people listed their goals in life. I made a now defunct interactive that showed goals floating by as people entered new items. It was calming to watch so much hope move across the screen.

For Businessweek, Cecilia D’Anastasio, Olivia Solon, and Leon Yin analyzed the unusual luck of streamers while gambling on Stake. The rapper Drake and streamer Adin Ross in particular seemed to have relatively high win rates, which isn’t that weird on its own, but is a lot more weird when compared to other streamers.

There were a lot of words in this article that I did not know initially. I am now more in tune with modern times. Thank you, Businessweek.

Really, I’m just here for the data, beeswarm chart made of stars, and the spinning callout to read more. Find the authors’ methodology here.

Imagine points for each piece on a chessboard. They move to x-y positions and then upwards for each move. Santiago Ortiz used this scheme to visualize famous chess matches. The above represents the second game between Garry Kasparov versus Deep Blue in 1997.

Isotype, or International System of Typographic Picture Education, is a picture language used to communicate concepts and ideas. The method is often paired with or used as visualization. RJ Andrews cataloged examples from his historical collection of works, which you can browse by chart type and feature.

The folks who made Dark Sky, my once go-to weather app that was inevitably acquired by Apple, are back with a new weather app: Acme Weather. Instead of oversimplifying a forecast only to show what is most likely, you also get other possible ways the day can go.

Understanding this uncertainty is crucial for planning your day. Most weather apps will give you their single best guess, leaving you to wonder how sure they actually are, and what else might happen instead. Will it actually start raining at 9am, or might it end up pushed off until noon? Will there be rain or snow? How sure are you? You can’t plan your day if you don’t know how much you can trust the forecast, or know what other possibilities might arise. Rather than pretending we will always be right, Acme Weather embraces the idea that our forecast will sometimes be wrong.

Embracing uncertainty. Just like the Nicolas Cage title character in the movie The Weather Man. It’s not just wind.

They also have fun things in the works like rainbow alerts and beautiful sunsets. I might have to switch.

Here is what happened in February.

Mechanical Pencil is a project by Bryan Macomber that illustrates the mechanical bits in everyday objects. The process:

I take the product apart. CAD it up. Illustrate each view. Then animate and lay it out for the web. That sounds quick, but it does take me quite a bit of time to create each one.

The leading object is, naturally, a mechanical pencil. Did you know that the plastic part that holds the lead in place is called a chuck? Other items so far include a Pez dispenser, a pen, and a lighter.

The interactive illustrations are satisfying to open, close, click, and release. I want more.

The challenges continue for women who want clothes that fit properly. For the Pudding, Amanda Sakuma, with Jan Diehm, explains the variation in women’s size and shape, the inconsistencies in sizing across stores, and how the overlap between these two creates sizing chaos.

This piece does a good job of showing and explaining distributions, which is a tough concept to grasp for non-data folks. The illustrations of women instead of just dots on the beeswarm help keep you focused on the variation.

LLMs are based on data and text collected from the internets, so as you might expect, when you query for opinions about places in a chatbot, you get output that reflects the inputs. For the Washington Post, Geoffrey A. Fowler and Kevin Schaul chart and map the opinions for cities and states in ChatGPT output.

This is based on the work of researchers at the University of Oxford and the University of Kentucky. Apparently you can’t ask what region is the best or worst straight up, but you can put one region against another and ask which is better or worse. The researchers ran various tests for various qualities and calculated the percentages.

The project reminds me of when people were putzing around with Google suggestions to find stereotypes for states in the U.S. and countries. These were funny at the time, because you knew the suggestions were based on what people search for. With chatbots, the sourcing and output format makes opinion look a lot like facts, which will lead to much confusion.

People are usually not great at remembering exact colors. Dialed is a fun memory game to test that theory. You get five seconds to memorize a color and then adjust hue, saturation, and lightness to match. Each attempt gets a score.

I wonder if FlowingData readers, who often have to match shades in a chart with color legends, will naturally do better. I only scored 39, which I’ll take as reinforcement that direct labeling is better than legends and not that I have a terrible memory.

Using an analysis from Focaldata, the Guardian used the angled arrow approach to map countries that shifted towards China’s voting patterns between 2024 and 2025.

By measuring how closely each country’s voting record correlates with those of the US or China, researchers have been able to map how the geopolitical centre of gravity is further away from Washington and closer to Beijing than at any other point this century.

The total number of countries strongly aligned with the US has crashed under Trump, in contrast to China, which has maintained its allies.

It turns out countries are less enthusiastic about the current U.S. administration’s global approach. This is very shocking.

Focaldata calculated United Nations voting patterns by country, relative to the United States and China. The more a country voted the same as the United States votes, the more to the left it appears (as a dot). If voting was more similar to how China votes, the country appears more to the right. Watch the changes from 1992 to 2025.

The U.S. Supreme Court ruled the administration’s “emergency” tariffs to be illegal. This stacked area chart from Lazaro Gamio and Keith Collins for the New York Times shows the effects of the ruling. I suspect this chart is going to see a lot of flux over the next few weeks.

For Bloomberg, Krishna Karra and Stephen Wicary map blackouts in Cuba due to the U.S. administration’s block on fuel shipments.

Available electricity has plummeted since the start of the year. And it’s disproportionately affected rural areas and provincial hubs, according to a Bloomberg News analysis of satellite imagery. The level of light emitted at night in major eastern cities like Santiago de Cuba and Holguin has dropped as much as 50% compared to the historical average.

This analysis and others before it (see also the New Orleans power outage during Hurricane Ida and fading lights in Ukraine from war-damaged infrastructure) are made possible by NASA’s Black Marble, which tracks nightlight around the world and makes the data publicly available.

ProPublica and the Texas Tribune report on the spike of claims over the past year, which make previous volumes seem almost like nothing:

So far this year, immigrants are filing on average more than 200 of these cases, known as habeas petitions, daily across the country, with California and Texas accounting for about 40% of new cases, a ProPublica analysis of federal court filings found. To keep tabs on this historic rise, ProPublica is publishing a habeas case tracker.

Paul Ford, for NYT Opinion, on his outlook for making software by vibe coding:

My industry is famous for saying no, or selling you something you don’t need. We have an earned reputation as a lot of really tiresome dudes. But I think if vibe coding gets a little bit better, a little more accessible and a little more reliable, people won’t have to wait on us. They can just watch some how-to videos and learn, and then they can have the power of these tools for themselves. I could teach you now to make a complex web app in a few weeks. In about six months you could do a lot of things that took me 20 years to learn. I’m writing all kinds of code I never could before — but you can too. If we can’t stop the freight train, we could at least hop on for a ride.

The simple truth is that I am less valuable than I used to be. It stings to be made obsolete, but it’s fun to code on the train, too. And if this technology keeps improving, then all the people who tell me how hard it is to make a report, place an order, upgrade an app or update a record — they could get the software they deserve, too. That might be a good trade, long term.

The trouble is that we don’t know where the train is headed. Some paint a hopeful picture of some kind of utopia, and others point towards a dystopia where a few benefit at the expense of everyone else. I have no idea. I remain cautiously pessimistic.

This week is about how we rank from best to worst and use visualization to highlight order.

For Reuters, Ally J. Levine and Tiana McGee illustrate and chart the rise:

Then there’s the music itself. “You don’t have to understand every single historical reference in a song like ‘La Mudanza’ to want to dance to ‘La Mudanza’,” said Diaz. “Everyone’s getting something different, with or without the lyrics.”

The data show Bad Bunny’s formula is working. He ranks consistently on Billboard’s list of top artists, and his albums remain popular years after release.

Prior to the Super Bowl, many people were not familiar with the artist Bad Bunny or his music, which made many wonder why he was performing for the halftime show. At the same time, millions of other people listen to Bad Bunny’s music and he has been breaking streaming and awards records over the past few years.

There are some fun charts in this piece. I like the one above that uses palm trees to represent popularity index and flowers to show Billboard ranking. The playful quality is more in tune to the subject.