Frustrated with the size of pockets on women’s pants, Jan Diehm and Amber Thomas for The Pudding, measured pocket sizes in 20 popular jean brands. They compared men’s and women’s pockets and calculated what actually fits in the mix of sizes.

[W]e programmatically determined whether various everyday items could fit in an otherwise empty pocket in jeans that aren’t being worn. (If an object won’t fit in the pocket of a pair of jeans on the hanger, it certainly won’t fit when you’re wearing them.) Only 40 percent of women’s front pockets can completely fit one of the three leading smartphone brands. Less than half of women’s front pockets can fit a wallet specifically designed to fit in front pockets. And you can’t even cram an average woman’s hand beyond the knuckles into the majority of women’s front pockets.

Impressive and informative work.

It reminds me of the Amanda Cox graphic that compared women’s dress sizes for different brands in 2011. There’s also the broken waistline measurement.

Let’s just all wear sweats from now on.

Made-by-hand visualization has been making a mini comeback as of late, and it’s been fun to see what people do with data away from the computer.

Of course, we don’t have the time to draw every chart and map by hand, but there are some parts of the practice we can use in our own work.

Peter Aldhous for BuzzFeed News delves into the increasing number of wildfires in California:

Most of California’s rain and snow falls in between October and March, which means that fire season peaks in the summer, as vegetation dies and dries out. In Southern California, the season extends into the fall, when Santa Ana winds, which blow from the dry interior toward the coast, whip up small fires into major conflagrations.

As the state has dried and warmed, the fire season has started earlier and larger areas have burned. Similar changes have occurred across the western US.

Grab the data and code to look for yourself.

The Mendocino Complex Fire, now the largest in California ever, continues to burn. I live a couple of hundred miles away, but the sky is yellow and orange at times, and it was smokey a few days ago. It’s a bit crazy. Lazaro Gamio for Axios provides a quick view to show scale with an animated graphic compared against Washington, D.C. and Manhattan.

Map-making is a tricky business with many variables to consider that can directly change how someone interprets the land and people in a location. The Cartography Playground is a simple site to test these variables interactively. Learn about algorithms, mess with appearance, and toggle through representations.

A gray piece of paper moves along a gradient. You won’t believe your eyes.

A demo of lightness perception pic.twitter.com/BSVpgcuIw1

— Akiyoshi Kitaoka (@AkiyoshiKitaoka) August 12, 2018

The Padma River in Bangladesh is constantly shifting its 75-mile path. Joshua Stevens for the NASA Earth Observatory shows what the shifting looked like through satellite imagery, over a 30-year span.

Kasha Patel:

The upper section of the Padma—the Harirampur region— has experienced the most erosion and shows the most notable changes. The river has become wider at this section by eroding along both banks, although most activity occurred on the left bank. Using topographic, aerial, and satellite imagery, scientists found that the left bank shifted 12 kilometers towards the north from 1860 to 2009 and developed a meandering bend. The river left a scar where the water once flowed, as you can see in the 2018 image.

See also the dramatic shifts of the Ucayali River in Peru.

The camera on the slightly creepy arm takes a picture of the pages in the book, the software uses OpenCV to extract faces, and the faces are passed to Google Auto ML Vision comparing the faces to a Waldo model. The result: There’s Waldo.

Wherever more attention or the appearance of it equates to more money, there are those who try to game the system. Michael H. Keller for The New York Times examines the business of fake YouTube views:

YouTube’s engineers, statisticians and data scientists are constantly improving in their ability to fight what Ms. O’Connor calls a “very hard problem,” but the attacks have “continually gotten stronger and more sophisticated,” she said.

After the Times reporter presented YouTube with the videos for which he had bought views, the company said sellers had exploited two vulnerabilities that had already been fixed. Later that day, the reporter bought more views from six of the same vendors. The view count rose again, though more slowly. A week later, all but two of the vendors had delivered the full amount.

Sometimes the visualization takes care of itself. Photographer Tim Whittaker filmed sheepdogs herding thousands of sheep, and the flows one place to another are like organized randomness.

[arve url=”https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2BSI3aKtvXk” /]

Popular summer songs have had a bubbly, generic feel to them the past several years, but it wasn’t always like that. Styles used to be more diverse, and things might be headed back in that direction. Sahil Chinoy and Jessia Ma charted song fingerprints over the years for a musical comparison.

Turn up your speakers or put on your headphones for the full experience. The song and music video snippets provide a much better idea of what the charts represent.

The New York Times published an election map. A lot of people did not like the map, arguing that it was an inaccurate representation. Those who did like the map argued that one must consider intent before throwing a map to the flames.

What happens when intended use and actual use do not match up?

We usually visualize data on computers, because it’s where the data exists and it’s a more efficient process. But as long as you can make shapes and use colors, you can use just about any material. Amy Cesal, as part of a 100-day creative project called Day Doh Viz, is using Play-Doh.

Ever since my son shifted his art station to my office, I’ve been drawn to his crayons, markers, and masking tape. The manual labor of it forces a shifted thought process that’s less technical and more about what you want to show. It also feels more like playing. Recommended. [via Visualising Data]

There are many mistakes you can make when you first get into visualization. Yan Holtz and Conor Healy catalog the common pitfalls as part of their project From Data to Viz. While there are a lot, keep in mind that you’ll learn these as you go. But it’s good to at least be aware of them from the start.

From xkcd, a blockbuster idea right here.

Levees are intended to prevent flooding in the areas they are built, but they change the direction and speed of flowing water, which can cause unintended flooding in areas upstream. ProPublica and Reveal collaborated with the St. Anthony Falls Laboratory to build a scale model to show how this can happen.

An interactive graphic lets you shift flow rate up and down to see the changes yourself. The video coupled with the illustration makes the effects super clear.

Genetic algorithms are inspired by natural selection, where the system is given a set of inputs and the “best” iteration is chosen until there’s some kind of convergence to a solution. Joel Simon applied this process to floor plan design.

The creative goal is to approach floor plan design solely from the perspective of optimization and without regard for convention, constructability, etc. The research goal is to see how a combination of explicit, implicit and emergent methods allow floor plans of high complexity to evolve. The floorplan is ‘grown’ from its genetic encoding using indirect methods such as graph contraction and emergent ones such as growing hallways using an ant-colony inspired algorithm.

The results were biological in appearance, intriguing in character and wildly irrational in practice. It was a fun learning experience and I plan to re-use methods in other projects.

[via kottke]

Apple’s value passed $1 trillion on Thursday, and as tradition requires, we must consider the scale of such a large number. We must compare the value of Apple against the sum value of a surprising number of small and medium companies. The New York Times has you covered with a bucket of blobs metaphor.

So blobby. So bucket-y.

NPR used video from a thermographic camera to explain why cities tend to be hotter than their surrounding areas. Straightforward and a good complement to the video.

[arve url=”https://www.npr.org/templates/event/embeddedVideo.php?storyId=631560598&mediaId=633050850″ /]

Welcome to the new members-only newsletter: The Process. In this first update, a certain data graphics expert seems to really dislike R, which prompts a look into the visualization tools we use and what one might get out of a bigger toolbox.