You know those graphics that use icons of people to represent units or counts of people? The Wee People font by Alberto Cairo and Scott Klein makes it easier to use such icons on the web. Just add the CSS file and you’re ready to go.

Well this is awesome. The Winter Olympics start this Friday, and The New York Times published this piece using augmented reality. Point your phone’s camera somewhere flat in your room, and you see four olympians in a still action shot. Walk around them, walk up to them, and see the details.

My four-year-old got a kick out of it.

For the last Winter Olympics, The Times aimed to make the extreme scales that athletes compete on more relatable. So it’s interesting to see them go the other direction, zooming in close to individuals.

I’m looking forward to the 2022 Winter Olympics when I get to experience the events through the athletes themselves and then pick the tricks that they do Choose-Your-Own-Adventure style.

Professional tennis player Roger Federer won his 20th Grand Slam title recently. He’s in year 20 of his career, and over time, he rose, he dominated, he declined, and he came back. Schweizer Radio and Fernsehen visualized Federer’s achievements over the years and compared him to other tennis stars in the process.

It reminds me of the Serena Williams piece by The Los Angeles Times a while back. This one is more refined though. I especially like the updating time series line that stays with you as you scroll. It shows where you are contextually, and provides progression for different parts of Federer’s career.

The Wallace–Bolyai–Gerwien theorem says that if you have two polygons of equal area, you can cut one into pieces, and then place them back together to form the second piece. Dima Smirnov and Zivvy Epstein made an interactive to demonstrate. Draw two shapes and watch the magic happen.

Odds are if you’re reading this, you know what statistics is already, but if not (or you want to explain to someone else), Crash Course just started a series to explain the basics. Watch below.

FiveThirtyEight asks, “There’s a lot of complaining about gerrymandering, but what should districts look like?” Looking for an answer, they imagined redistricting with different goals in mind, such as gerrymandering favoring Republicans or Democrats, promoting competitive elections, and maximizing majority-minority.

Check out the possibilities for the nation or zoom in to a specific state. The latter provides a further breakdown by district and then race. So yeah, if you’re into this stuff, set aside some time to poke at this one.

Musician Kaki King’s daughter suffers from a condition (Idiopathic Thrombocytopenic Purpura) where her body attacks her own platelets, which leads to spontaneous bruising and burst blood vessels. In coping with the stress as a parent who can only do so much for her suffering child, King collaborated with information designer Giorgia Lupi.

The result: a mix of personal data collection, reflection, music, and data art entitled Bruises — The Data We Don’t See.
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Last year, fitness tracking app Strava released a high detail map of public activity data. Looking more closely, security student Nathan Ruser noticed activity in various parts of the globe that revealed secret US army bases.
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This fake follower piece by Nicholas Confessore, Gabriel J.X. Dance, Richard Harris, and Mark Hansen for The New York Times is tops. In search of shortcuts to greater influence, many buy followers, likes, and retweets on Twitter. The numbers go up, but a lot of extra “influence” is just automated fluff.

The Times focuses on one company, Devumi, and investigates the follower pattern of some of the customers, as shown above. The scroll-y explanation is good. It’s even got pseudocode in there to explain the type of bots.

Good stuff.

Inspired by Dear Data, the data drawing pen pal project, designers Josefina Bravo, Sol Kawage, and Tomoko Furukawa use the postcard medium to send each other weekly how-to instructions for a wide variety of everyday things. The only rule is that they can’t use words.

As of writing this, they’re on week 37, which covered how to roll maki, how to eat an apple like a boss, and how to make mayonnaise.

Evie Liu and William Davis, reporting MarketWatch, looked at release strategies of Oscar nominees over the past few years. Some go for the wide release with the movie playing in over 1,500 theaters, whereas others choose a platform release with the movie playing in fewer than 50 theaters. The last seven of eight Best Picture winners went with the latter route.

Max Fisher and Amanda Taub, for The New York Times, answer the question with a video and charts. And if you’re wondering how they generated a high resolution chart to video, Adam Pearce has you covered.

Population data typically comes in the context of boundaries. City data. County data. Country data. With their Population Estimate Service, NASA provides data at higher granularity. You can request estimated population in the context of a world grid.

Here’s an interactive map to demonstrate the API. Click and drag a shape across any region in the world and get an estimate of the population within that shape. [via kottke]

According to NASA estimates, 2017 was the second warmest year on record since 1880. Henry Fountain, Jugal K. Patel, and Nadja Popovich reporting for The New York Times:

What made the numbers unexpected was that last year had no El Niño, a shift in tropical Pacific weather patterns that is usually linked to record-setting heat and that contributed to record highs the previous two years. In fact, last year should have benefited from a weak version of the opposite phenomenon, La Niña, which is generally associated with lower atmospheric temperatures.

Good times ahead.

New data dump from the Wikimedia Foundation:

The Wikimedia Foundation’s Analytics team is releasing a monthly clickstream dataset. The dataset represents—in aggregate—how readers reach a Wikipedia article and navigate to the next. Previously published as a static release, this dataset is now available as a series of monthly data dumps for English, Russian, German, Spanish, and Japanese Wikipedias.