Microchips have gotten tiny. Like smaller than a red blood cell tiny. Financial Times goes Powers-of-Ten to show the scale and process of manufacturing itty-bitty microchips.

There’s a total eclipse (a real one, not of the heart) happening on April 8, 2024. The next one isn’t until 2045, so if you don’t want to wait two decades, now’s your chance. For Bloomberg, Denise Lu shows where, when, and how the eclipse will go down across the United States. She covered pretty much every angle, so there’s no need for anyone else to make an eclipse map.

For CNN, Amy O’Kruk and Kenneth Uzquiano asked what would happen if we didn’t have leap years. Without the extra day every four years, we’d eventually have seasons time-shifted by half a year.

Also, because the exact time it takes the Earth to orbit the sun is just under a quarter of a day, leap year adjustments are slightly off. We’ll have to adjust by one day every 3,333 years. I never thought about it, but it makes sense.

Harry Jefferies shared his grandfather’s 30-year project:

My grandpa who is 85 started making this rock map of Scotland in 1992. He collected rocks during amateur geology trips over 30 years. He says it had to be geologically correct and also aesthetically pleasing. He asked if I could share online as He wants to go viral so please share

Thirty years. I’m a sucker for slow data collection and physical visualization.

Every month I collect tools and resources that help you make better charts. Here’s the good stuff for February.

Ben Ashforth set out to visit a street named after a day of the year for each date. He used OpenStreetMap to find the streets and then algorithmically routed a trip. Then he followed through and went on the trip. In a five-minute lightning talk, he describes the journey. See a photo for every day here. [via Waxy]

During the 2024 NBA All-Star weekend, the basketball court was essentially a giant LED screen on the second day. The company behind the panels talked about the technical side for a WTHR news segment, shown above.

The court was fun to watch but also distracting. It draws your eyes to the ground when the action is ahead and above the rim. So the technology seems less than ideal for an actual game. Maybe good as an expensive practice and training tool? I couldn’t believe not a single shot chart was shown during the three-point contest.

Based on data from the USDA Census of Agriculture, this map by John Johnson shows the predominant domesticated animal in each county in the United States. It nonchalantly includes humans.

To decide if values are high or low, sometimes you have to divide the numbers for a relative comparison instead of an absolute one.

This American Life tells the tales as old as time:

When it comes to finding love, there seems to be two schools of thought on the best way to go about it. One says, wait for that lightning-strike magic. The other says, make a calculation and choose the best option available. Who has it right?

Spoiler alert: there is a mix of practicality and feel. They each inform the other.

K.K. Rebecca Lai ran her first marathon. She recounts her training and the day of the event with a series of maps and charts. It reads like a data-driven journal entry, which I am always up for.

Caitlin Clark, a basketball guard for the University of Iowa, has been steadily adding to her point total over the past four years. Clark broke the NCAA record this past week. But as we all know, it’s not official until there’s a step chart that shows the rise over time.

People like to judge charts by pointing out all the things that are wrong, which is limiting in practice.

From CRAN:

Blind users do not have access to the graphical output from R without printing the content of graphics windows to an embosser of some kind. This is not as immediate as is required for efficient access to statistical output. The functions here are created so that blind people can make even better use of R. This includes the text descriptions of graphs, convenience functions to replace the functionality offered in many GUI front ends, and experimental functionality for optimising graphical content to prepare it for embossing as tactile images.

Has anyone tried this yet? It sounds really useful.

You’ve probably heard various renditions of The Star-Spangled Banner, and sometimes singers put a little extra something in the anthem. A bit of flourish. Some attitude. For The Pudding, Jan Diehm and Michelle McGhee quantified that extra something into what they’ve dubbed a Diva Score.

Out of the 138 versions they scored, the highest belong to Chaka Khan at the 2020 NBA All-Star game and Patti Labelle at the 2008 World Series.

For NYT Opinion, Nate Silver compares consumer confidence between two surveys. The University of Michigan’s Index of Consumer Sentiment focuses more on personal spending, whereas the Conference Board’s Consumer Confidence Survey. Usually, the estimates follow each other, but there’s been a split the past few years, as shown in the difference chart above.