In a recent talk, New York Times graphics editor Gregor Aisch noted that only 10 to 15 percent of readers who visit an interactive visualization on their site actually click on anything. That’s a lot of people who don’t get everything that New York Times interactives have to offer, which begs the question: Is it worth the time and effort to make these things?

As with most design-related things, it depends on the goals and the audience of your visualization. Dominikus Baur explains in detail, drawing experiences from his own work.

When you don’t know where to start with a dataset, try to come up with a question. It’ll point you in the direction you want to go, as this guide by Frédérik Ruys shows you. [via @maartenzam]

Here’s a fun piece by Karl Sluis. He looked at eight demographic metrics, such as population, age, and income (based on estimates from the American Community Survey) and found the “most typical” city in America that sat around the median of all the measurements.

According to the averages across these eight measures, the Lynchburg, Virginia Statistical Area is the most typical statistical area in the country. Made of four counties and eleven communities, Lynchburg’s statistics are less than half of a standard deviation from average across every measure. In fact, the median income of Lynchburg’s residents ($46,913) lies closer to the average ($46,871) than any other city.

Congratulations, Lynchburg. You get the award for most average.

A lot of people around the world including myself don’t quite understand the scale of what’s going on in Syria. We just know it’s bad. Hans Hack overlaid Aleppo on top of London and Berlin to give you a better idea.

As a geographical reference point, the historical center of Aleppo (The Citadel of Aleppo) has been superimposed on that of Berlin (Museum Island) and London (The Tower of London). The reprojected destruction is indicated by randomly selected buildings marked in red. To make it more representative, the distribution of the reprojected destruction has also been mapped with respect to Aleppo’s administrative borders provided by OCHA.

Spring is in the air in a lot of places, and that means it’s time to dig up the bicycle from winter hibernation and have a ride. Not much beats the satisfaction of a casual ride in perfect weather. A gentle breeze kisses your face. The sun shines on you but it’s not too hot.

But then you realize you’re on a road without a bike lane and there’s heavy traffic. A semi truck rushes past you and you feel the weight of air almost blow you off your bike. Shoot. If only there was a map that you looked at beforehand that showed you the safe places to ride.

Oh wait, there’s this bike riding map from Mapzen that colors roads by three tiers of safety. Score.

In most states, there is minimum wage and there is tipping minimum wage. For those who earn the latter, most of their income comes from tips. This is fine in nicer restaurants where tips can be substantial, but in places that depend on high turnover and low prices, restaurant servers need to work more tables per hour to earn the equivalent of minimum wage.

Kathryn Casteel and Charlie Smart for FiveThirtyEight have an interactive chart that shows how many tables servers have to work to make up the difference in different states.

Tables per hour makes the x-axis and hourly wage makes the y-axis, which means steeper slopes represents fewer tables to make up the difference. I’m not sure everyone will get that, but I like it.

That said, I hope people don’t interpret these numbers as servers at some restaurants have to work harder than others do. Service at Denny’s isn’t quite the same as service at a four-star. Rather, the main takeaway is that you should tip your servers. That’s where they make most of their income.

There were some ripples in the space time continuum recently about a pizza and a pie chart. It looked like a pie chart but was actually just a pizza with numbers around it. Those numbers didn’t sum to 100 percent, so there were pitch forks and burning and like I said, ripples in the space time continuum.
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Based on estimates from the Kaiser Family Foundation, Kevin Quealy and Margot Sanger-Katz for The Upshot compare the tax credits for individuals under the Republicans’ proposed health care plan against Obamacare.

The biggest losers under the change would be older Americans with low incomes who live in high-cost areas. Those are the people who benefited most from Obamacare.

For some people, the new tax credit system will be more generous. The winners are likely to be younger, earn higher incomes and live in areas where the cost of health insurance is low.

Hm.

There was a time when charts and infographics were drawn by hand, because computers weren’t affordable or commonplace. John Grimwade provides a run down of the tools he used back in the day. The thing above was used to draw different sized circles. On paper. With a pen.

The tools remind me a lot of my dad’s that he used to have laying around. He’s a civil engineer and used to pull out all these blueprints with measurements and codes. Now they just have giant, high-resolution computer screens.

I wonder what my kids will think of the tools I use when they’re older. “You mean you have to use your hands to visualize your data? That’s like a baby’s toy.”

As you probably know, different countries have different legal age limits for drinking alcoholic beverages. In the United States, the age is 21. In some places in the world, there is no set age. In most places, the legal age is 18 to drink a non-spirit beverage such as beer in a public place without a guardian.

The map above, based on data from Wikipedia, shows where in the world you’re legally allowed to drink a beer in a public place. It’s slightly generalized and doesn’t take into account that in some places you have to be older to purchase the beverage, but it gives you a good idea of the age limits globally.

This by the way is part of new category I’m calling my sketchbook. I need a place where I can mess around with different formats without worrying about what is the “right” way to do it.

Relevant tutorials: Choropleth Maps and Shapefiles in R / How to Make an Animated Growth Map in R

The nice thing about animated GIFs for visualization is that they can get a message across pretty quickly, which lends itself to potential shares. You’d think there would be a Twitter bot by now tweeting GIFs non-stop. In any case, Lena Groeger put together a nice collection of them.

There are two main reasons annotation is often a challenge. The first is that writing copy that is succinct with the right amount of detail is tricky. The second is that implementation can be a pain, because you always have to muck around with placement in an ad hoc fashion. To help out with the second reason, Susie Lu developed d3-annotation. It takes away much of the main of adding labels and context to your charts with d3.js.

The whole writing part is still up to you, but at least you don’t have to think so much about implementation.

Facebook released Prophet, which is a procedure to quickly forecast with time series data.

Prophet is a procedure for forecasting time series data. It is based on an additive model where non-linear trends are fit with yearly and weekly seasonality, plus holidays. It works best with daily periodicity data with at least one year of historical data. Prophet is robust to missing data, shifts in the trend, and large outliers.

Plus it’s available in both Python and R. What. Should be worth a look.

The Washington Post talked to three experts on the American workforce and innovation and how immigration restrictions to the US might impact future progress. Aside from the important topic the ratio of words to charts is interesting. I’ve gotten used to seeing pieces that are chart-heavy or word-heavy, but this is more one-to-one. I like it.

Ken Schwencke and Al Shaw from ProPublica with a set of straightforward maps that show bomb threats to Jewish community centers and organizations:

Since Jan. 1, at least 89 locations of Jewish organizations in the United States — including schools, Jewish Community Centers, and offices of the Anti-Defamation League — have received a total of 114 bomb threats. The majority have come in five of what the JCC Association of North America calls “waves” — groups of robocalls coming on a single day. So far, none of the threats have been carried out.

Gross.

Elijah Meeks is running a detailed survey about data visualization people to gain a better understanding of who we are as a community. The work we do these days spans a wide range of applications, across a wide spectrum of art to analysis, and it should be useful to see the results. Once the survey is done, anonymized survey results will be available to download.

But first, make sure you put in your voice so we get a complete picture.

Here’s a fun piece from Stephanie Merry and Shelly Tan for The Washington Post that covers the acting range of Meryl Streep, from accents to personality traits.

See also: the Meryl Streep scatterplot.

For Co.Design, Periscopic compared patent ownership between Apple and Google, which ends up providing a good idea of company structure.
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Bill Paxton, who played a storm chaser in Twister, died on Sunday. To honor him, storm spotters gathered at various coordinates to form Paxton’s initials.

I don’t know much about storm chasing or the man, but this seems special. It’s like a hello sent to the skies.