Jane Solomon collected tweets that used the gun emoji, and looked at what emojis were used before and after as a way to see how people used the gun.

It seems that the sarcastic and reflexive gun emoji pairings are extremely popular, which matches my expectations and the knowledge I brought into this exercise. One result that surprised me was the high collocation with the gun and various heart emoji. I had never personally associated the gun emoji as a means to express heartbreak, but it’s there in the data.

[via Waxy]

Kevin Quealy for The Upshot looks at political party registration of religious leaders, along with their demographics. Some groups like Reform Judaism and Fundamental Baptist are predictable, whereas others (most) are mixed.

Geocities was a place on the web you could create your own space of blinking lights and MIDI tunes. There were millions of spaces modeled after a city. In an update to his 2011 piece, Richard Vijgen visualized the 2009 backup as a digital map.

This website is an interactive visualisation of the 650 gigabyte Geocities backup made by the Archive Team on October 27, 2009. It depicts the file system as a city map, spatially arranging the different neighbourhoods and individual lots based on the number of files they contain. In full view, the map is a data-visualisation showing the relative sizes of the different neighbourhoods. While zooming in, more and more detail becomes visible, eventually showing individual html pages and the images they contain.

Does it make me an old coot for liking the Geocities days better than the social media ones we’re in now? [via Waxy]

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.

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

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.

[arve url=”https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qFtJaq4TlqE” /]

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.”