PerThirtySix made a communal plot that asks for your opinion via scatterplot and you can see how you compare against the aggregates. A new poll goes up every day.

The inspiration for this comes from a whiteboard in an office I used to work at. Every so often, a new pair of questions would be posted and people would contribute their answers by marking where on the scatterplot they belonged. It was fun seeing how my answers compared to others, and guessing who might have answered where. I hope this tool brings you some of that fun!

From the oldie-but-goodie department, this fun program uses a genetic algorithm to drive car thingies across a bumpy terrain. Change parameters. Watch the cars go. See how far the winner travels before crashing.

The code is available on GitHub.

In case you’re unfamiliar, a genetic algorithm creates mutations in a population of objects or systems. Those that perform better move on to the next generation. The algorithm keeps going until you get an optimized point. In this case, the algorithm tries to optimize travel distance.

See also evolving floor plans and an optimized brewery road trip. [via kottke]

For Reuters, Mariano Zafra, Anurag Rao, and Jon McClure describe how bird flu can pass between mammals, but, while not impossible, transmission to humans is still unlikely.

Because of the heavy viral load in milk and mammary glands, scientists suspect the virus can spread between cattle during the milking process, either through contact with infected equipment or with virus that becomes aerosolised during cleaning procedures.

One in five commercial milk samples tested in a nationwide survey contained particles of the H5N1 virus, according to the FDA. The agency said, though, there is no reason to believe the virus found in milk poses a risk to human health and that pasteurisation effectively killed the virus.

Maybe one day AI tools will be advanced enough to process a random dataset and produce valuable insights that incorporate the context of the real world. That day is not today.

Stephen Wolfram gets into modeling biological evolution:

Why does biological evolution work? And, for that matter, why does machine learning work? Both are examples of adaptive processes that surprise us with what they manage to achieve. So what’s the essence of what’s going on? I’m going to concentrate here on biological evolution, though much of what I’ll discuss is also relevant to machine learning—but I’ll plan to explore that in more detail elsewhere.

I mostly put this here as a bookmark for myself, but I have a feeling you’ll read through this before me.

You might’ve heard a little something about AI these past few months. If the ideas seem kind of fuzzy, Nicky Case and Hack Club are collaborating on a guide for how these things work and the issues that we should address as AI-based things grow more common. It has comics.

While the current tools are fun to play with, there are and will be real safety challenges as the systems slurp up more data and process faster. It grows more likely that the systems will directly affect your day-to-day life. So it seems worthwhile to know a bit how they work instead of blindly trusting companies than run with different motivations than you.

It’s been over 200 years since the cicadas of Brood XIII and Brood XIX came up at the same time. For the New York Times, Jonathan Corum revisits old cicada maps by Charles L. Marlatt from 1922. The spatial distributions look similar to current patterns and show how predictable these things are, even though they’re in the ground for so long.

The cicadas are coming. This year is unique, because there are two broods that are arriving at the same time in the midwestern and southeastern United States. Usually it’s just one at a time. CNN has a visual guide for where the cicadas will be and why they’re here now. Basically, one brood emerges every 13 years and the other every 17, and there’s overlap.

Marc Benioff, the CEO of Salesforce, set out to plant and conserve 1 trillion trees by 2030. Bloomberg uses small dots to show how much more is left to achieve the target amount. The gray dots are what still needs to be planted. It’s kind of a lot, but fingers crossed.

The TikTok account Globetrots combines Google Earth and text-to-speech to show top-ten lists with various statistics. For example, what cities in the United Kingdom have the most people on benefits? A Google Earth shot pans to the different cities as text-to-speech narrates.

A good number of their videos have gained popularity (or the TikTok algorithms are pushing novelty). And the account recently subbed text-to-speech for a song format, which I think uses TikTok’s AI song feature? Just watch:

It’s really corny, but we might also be seeing the beginning of something.

Knowing what’s next can help you work through a tedious step, because you know it’ll be worth it.

A deeply insightful map from xkcd.

See also: 19 maps that will blow your mind and change the way you see the world.

Based on estimates from the Crowd Counting Consortium, the Washington Post shows the increasing number of protests on college campuses over the past few weeks.

A set of maps show the locations, and a set of packed-circle charts show the increase of three weeks. Larger circles indicate larger crowd size. Darker yellow and black border indicate police presence.

Reddit user ChangsManagement mapped where NHL hockey players were born, based on data from Hockey Reference. As someone who knows next to nothing about hockey, except the bits I picked up while living in Buffalo, I’m surprised that the distribution is so far north, but it makes sense.

Daniel Shiffman, who you might know from his enthusiastic YouTube channel The Coding Train, updated his book The Nature of Code. The original version from 2012 focused on Processing. The new version uses p5.js, while still focusing on “understanding the mathematical principles behind our physical world.” You can find the free-to-read online version here.

The Pudding ran an experiment that asked people to trace a shape. They would string together the sketches to make a flipbook to see where a single line or a circle would end up. They published the results:

Every shape devolved into a scribble, which I feel is a metaphor for information on the internet.

They also ran a sidequest that tested anonymity and the tendency to draw inappropriate things online. While the results were underwhelming, I appreciate the effort to see how many times a phallic sketch appears. Four times out of several thousand.

See also the Aaron Koblin works — a collaborative Johnny Cash music video, a song by 2,008 voices, and a hundred dollar bill drawn by thousands — that inspired the flipbook project. Although nothing beats Reddit’s pixel wars in 2017.

Hong Kong banned single-use plastics often used for food takeaway containers. For South China Morning Post, Kaliz Lee and Davies Christian Surya describe the ban and the scale of the waste. It’s a lot of plastic.

Here are the useful tools and resources that came out of April.