Students at the National Taiwan University of Arts made popsicles using sewage runoff to highlight pollution problems in their area. Then they replicated the popsicles and made stylish wrappers for a longer-lasting display. Mmm, sewage. [via Mashable]

The new R package miner is an interface to Minecraft via some simple R commands.

The miner package provides just a few simple functions to manipulate the game world: find or move a player’s position; add or remove blocks in the world; send a message to all players in the world. The functions are deliberately simple, designed to be used to build more complex tasks.

I’m thinking walkable data worlds in Minecraft.

I bought Minecraft for my three-year-old, but he didn’t understand the point when his LEGO bricks were within arm’s reach and there weren’t any funny noises or songs. Maybe the purchase wasn’t a total bust after all.

Here’s the full miner package guide.

After the crackdown on performance-enhancing drugs, home runs in professional baseball dipped the past few years. They seem to be back up though, and new metrics on hitting angle might have something to do with it. Dave Sheinin and Armand Emamdjomeh for The Washington Post delve into the angles, along with hit speed, and how they lead to more home runs.

xkcd reading my mind somehow as usual. Not all state word maps are bad. But most of them are.

See also: 19 Maps That Will Blow Your Mind and Change the Way You See the World. Top All-time. You Won’t Believe Your Eyes. Watch.

Statistics is a game of subtleties, and you lose when you don’t pay attention to the details. Here are a handful of common mistakes when interpreting the numbers. In a nutshell: You get into trouble when you assume and ignore.

As a Golden State Warriors fan, I am obligated to dislike LeBron James, but there is no denying that he is a great basketball player. James recently passed Michael Jordan for playoff points with number 5,995, and he’s got plenty left in the tank it seems. Adam Pearce for The New York Times shows the point trajectory with a return of the scrolling visualization.

Twitch launched Stock Stream, which is a multiplayer stock market game that uses $50,000 of real money for trading. During each five-minute round, players vote for stocks they want to buy or sell, and a player earns points if the stock goes up during the five-minute period. The game runs at the open and close of the market, and the game ends if the value decreases to $25,000. [via Waxy]

Google collects much of their own data to construct their maps, whereas Apple sources most of their data externally. This difference, coupled with varying cartography that changes over time, means an interesting contrast between the two map services. Justin O’Beirne took monthly screenshots for a year to look at the differences more closely.

This clip of Obi-Wan saying “Hello there” 67 million times amused me too much.

I think there’s a lesson in averages or small multiples hidden somewhere in there.

Glaciers at Glacier National Park in Montana are melting. Using data from the United States Geological Survey and Portland State University, Nadja Popovich for The New York Times maps the shrinking glaciers with their 2015 footprint overlaid on their footprints from 50 years ago.

Roger Peng, a biostatistics professor at John Hopkins University, talks about the past and future of data analysis, using music as a metaphor for the path.

The administration released a budget proposal yesterday, which as you’d expect contains some big shifts. The New York Times calculated “the changes over 10 years, compared with projected spending under current law” and made the numbers available in a searchable table.

Game developer Oleg Dolya made a medieval fantasy city generator. Select the size you want, and get something like the above. “The generation method is rather arbitrary, the goal is to produce a nice looking map, not an accurate model of a city.”

While watching a Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood marathon, Owen Phillips for The Awl wondered about the colors of Mister Rogers’ cardigans over the years. So Phillips tallied the colors and plotted every single one of them.

There is a 16-by-16 mile grid of big X’s in the Sonoran Desert that were used to calibrate spy satellites in the 1960s. They’re no longer in use, but Julie Anand and Damon Sauer have been studying the marks and overlaying the paths of publicly-known satellites that are detected during the time of a photograph.

Lazaro Gamio for Axios used Chernoff Faces that look like emojis.

This visualization is a modified version of Chernoff Faces, a technique that maps multiple statistical values to the features of a face. Because it’s 2017, we expanded on the technique and made Chernoff Emojis. Each part of the emoji is controlled by the state’s ranking in a given metric, which range from the uninsured rate to the percent of adults who report getting enough sleep.

Fun.

The above is the desktop version, but I actually like the mobile version better, which shows face transitions between states.