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.

With the most recent Epstein release, the Economist collaborated with the folks who work on Jmail to breakdown the many pages of email between Epstein and others.

He did not waste time on middle managers. A quarter of his top non-staff contacts have a Wikipedia page. He traded emails with at least 18 current or former billionaires, including Peter Thiel and Elon Musk; celebrities like Woody Allen and Deepak Chopra; and political figures such as Ehud Barak, a former Israeli prime minister. Most back-and-forths were balanced, with similar numbers of emails sent and received; an exception was Bill Gates, whom Epstein bombarded despite few responses. (Mr Gates was happy to meet Epstein on a number of occasions, however.)

Most of the email was with staff and business partners. To find the more troublesome threads, a large language model was used to score emails with an “alarm index.” Although the strip plot above focuses on volume over content.

Meta’s smart glasses have an outward facing camera pointed at what you’re looking at. This lets you record video and take photos. As they integrate AI deeper into the product, Meta plans to bring facial recognition with that camera. The New York Times viewed an internal memo on how Meta hopes to launch this feature.

Meta’s internal memo said the political tumult in the United States was good timing for the feature’s release.

“We will launch during a dynamic political environment where many civil society groups that we would expect to attack us would have their resources focused on other concerns,” according to the document from Meta’s Reality Labs, which works on hardware including smart glasses.

It’s not surprising they were having such discussions. But still. They’re not exactly making it easy to trust them to do right with your data, information, and privacy.

The Amazon-owned security system Ring was planning to partner with Flock Safety, who supplies security footage and contracts with law enforcement. Ring has canceled the partnership.

In October 2025, Ring and Flock Safety announced our intention to work together on an integration with Community Requests. Following a comprehensive review, we determined the planned Flock Safety integration would require significantly more time and resources than anticipated. As a result, we have made the joint decision to cancel the planned integration. The integration never launched, so no Ring customer videos were ever sent to Flock Safety.

At Ring, our mission has always been to make neighborhoods safer. That mission comes with significant responsibility—to our customers, to the communities we serve, and to the trust you place in our products and features.

If Flock sounds familiar, maybe you’re remembering them as the ones who send license plate information to immigration agents. That was in August 2025.

This comes shortly after Ring’s Super Bowl commercial for dog-finding. Ring owners were already rumbling, but it seems cute dogs were not enough to calm things down. Trust is already lost.

xkcd drops the knowledge with a proper classification for the stapler. The pairwise matrix, a favorite xkcd mechanic, is used to show the groups.

During the Super Bowl, Ring ran a commercial that shows how everyone’s doorbell camera can be joined in a single system to find a lost dog. For 404 Media, Jason Koebler points out the privacy implications for when that system is used to find people.
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This week is about tracing back for context and comparing.