Vox delves into why Ls and Rs often get replaced by Asian speakers using English as a second language. Some sounds aren’t prevalent in other languages, and it’s not the same across all Asian languages.

For The Guardian, Niko Kommenda shows the decrease in coal usage for power since 2012. As of this writing, it’s been just under 11 straight days with 0% of power generated by burning coal.

The data comes from Gridwatch, which in turn scrapes reports using the Balancing Mechanism Reporting Service from Elexon. Is there a US equivalent?

For The New York Times, Keith Collins shows the growing popularity of summer sequels among the big movie studios. If there is money to be made, they will come.

People misinterpret charts all of the time, because they go in with the wrong expectations before they even fully interpret what a chart is about.

Shelly Tan, for The Washington Post, has been counting on-screen deaths in Game of Thrones over the past few years. As the season ended, Tan described her process in an entertaining Twitter thread:

This graphic had a lot of numbers, so here are the final ones:

– 5 years of working on this project
– 6887 deaths
– 290 character illustrations
– Far too many hours of sleep lost

And now, at the end of it all, my watch has finally ended. Thanks for following along pic.twitter.com/w7VUPjJHE8

— Shelly Tan (@Tan_Shelly) May 22, 2019

I kept thinking about how her process transfers to counting all things. You know, like the decennial Census. The hand-wavy process always seems so straightforward. It’s like, sure, it’ll take a while, but the challenge is just time. But then you get into it, and there’s all these small bumps along the way that make everything more complicated. And then you’re like, great, well, I’ve already come this far. Better keep on counting.

Ivana Seric is a data scientist for the Philadelphia 76ers who tries to improve player effectiveness by analyzing tracking data. Aki Ito for Bloomberg:

[arve url=”https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MpLHMKTolVw” /]

I really want to see the relationship of winning and teams who more deeply follow statistics. Is it at a place yet where this actually helps or is still more about gut and heart?

For FiveThirtyEight, Amelia Thomson-DeVeaux and Gus Wezerek categorized and mapped new abortion restrictions enacted by state legislatures from 2011 to 2019:

The result is a complicated patchwork of abortion laws that have made it more time-consuming and expensive to get the procedure in certain parts of the country. In addition to counseling, waiting period and ultrasound requirements — all of which can increase the time and cost associated with the procedure — clinics have been steadily closing over the past few years because of a combination of factors, including the new state laws.

Giorgia Lupi, whose work exemplifies the use of data and visualization outside of analytic insights (think Dear Data), is now a partner at design consultancy Pentagram. For FastCompany, Mark Wilson with the news:

At Pentagram, where she’ll have access to the biggest brands in the world, Lupi believes she can find a greater reach for data design in general. “It’s a good opportunity to expand graphics beyond the niche field of data visualization, and figure out how data visualization can be part of our daily experiences–in the things we consume, wear, and see,” Lupi says. “I want to explore things I don’t think have been done before.”

Whoa.

Rachael Dottle, for FiveThirtyEight, looked for political differences in cities and ranked them, based on precinct voting margins for the 2016 election:

To see just how politically segregated America’s urban areas are, we used each city’s 2016 election results to calculate its dissimilarity index — basically, a number that tells us how separated its Republicans and Democrats are from one another, with higher numbers indicating more segregation. This technique is most often used to measure racial segregation, but political scientists have also used it to calculate partisan segregation. (One drawback of this method: A place that votes almost uniformly for one party — Democrat-soaked San Jose, California, for example — will have a low dissimilarity score. But that doesn’t mean Republicans and Democrats live next to each other in these places; it may just mean that the larger region is politically segregated, leaving the whole city as essentially a one-party enclave.)

Unsurprisingly, political and racial segregation are related.

The Upshot asked a similar question last year using similar data and mapping scheme, but they framed it differently.

The last episode is coming. Some people don’t like how it’s ending, and the IMDB ratings seem to reflect this. For The Upshot, Josh Katz and K.K. Rebecca Lai charted the changes over the seasons.

Reminds of me of the (now defunct) Graph TV a while back.

Frans Block wondered what the world would look like if water and land were flipped. The deepest spots in the ocean become the highest mountains and the highest mountains become the deepest part of the sea:

It is an extraordinary planet, this inverted world. It has more than twice as much land available as our own Earth. Which does not mean, however, that twice as many people can live there, because only a small part of this surface is green. After all, the rain must come from somewhere.

Particularly Pacifica, almost completely surrounded by high mountain ranges, is one big desert. Great for the fans of desolate stony plains, and I count myself among them. But not very suitable for agriculture.

[via kottke]

Visualization is all about making comparisons. If you have nothing to compare to, then the chart fails. In this issue I describe some of the ways you can make your charts more comparable.

For Bloomberg, Lauren Leatherby and Paul Murray describe the heightened eagerness to enter the race for United States president. The stacked timelines, looking like squished bunches of Twizzlers, show when people entered and withdrew during past election seasons.

We’re 536 days out and 23 Democrats are in. In contrast, there were 8 around this time in 2008.

Kevin Simler uses interactive simulations to explain how things — ideas, disease, memes — spread through a network. It always looks like concentrated chaos to begin, but then the things infect quickly. Adjust variables, press play, and watch them go.

If you’ve seen a basketball shot chart in the past few years, it was probably made or inspired by the work of Kirk Goldsberry. Coming from a cartography and data visualization background, Goldsberry applied his skills to basketball data, and he has a new book called Sprawlball. It tells the story of how this modern era of shooting threes at high volume came to be.
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Pitch speed starts to decrease with a baseball player’s age at some point. This makes sense. That’s why athletes retire. The Statcast pitch distributions show when this happens for individual players, categorized by pitch type. I like the transparent distributions for past seasons as a mode of comparison. [via @statpumpkin]

Diet around the world is growing more similar. National Geographic charted estimates of the similarity over time:

People increasingly eat the same types of food. They now get more calories from wheat, rice, corn, sugar, oil crops, and animal products. Meanwhile, consumption of grains such as sorghum, millet, and rye and of root crops such as cassava and yams has fallen.

Comparing diets by country, the international agricultural research group CGIAR tracked five decades of change.

There was renewed interest in — gasp — truncated axes this week, a never-ending debate about whether starting axes at non-zero is misleading.

Ted Mellnik and Reuben Fischer-Baum for The Washington Post describe the changes to the 2020 Census, which will lean more heavily on technology:

The coming census also will break with history with a controversial restoration of a citizenship question, as well as with the adoption of new technologies that change how the count is performed

The census will move away from paper as the primary way to collect data, for the first time since it began in 1790. You will be able to answer the census on the Internet, and census workers in the field will use mobile phone apps.

For the first time since 1880, census workers probably won’t visit your neighborhood to confirm your address. Instead, they’re relying mostly on high-resolution imagery to verify their maps.