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.

Your body goes through a special process to digest spicy food. The sting, the sweating, the sting afterwards. For the Washington Post, Bonnie Berkowitz, Aaron Steckelberg, and Szu Yu Chen illustrate with a factory metaphor and a personified chicken wing.

This chart by Eric Wallerstein for the Wall Street Journal shows expectations against reality. They often don’t match up.

See also: how rate projections change over time.

This week’s topic comes through a FD reader who asks how I manage and organize data from analysis through visualization.

There are competitions where people complete jigsaw puzzles as quickly as they can, and some teams take it very seriously. Because of course. For the Washington Post, Chris Alcantara shows the times and strategies of the quickest puzzlers.

I would not be good at this.

Sébastien Matos used a straightforward view to show the evolution of the scrollbar, dating back to the Xerox 8010 Information System from 1981.

For NPR, Juliana Kim reports:

Deep Sea Vision, an ocean exploration company based in South Carolina, announced Saturday that it captured compelling sonar images of what could be Earhart’s aircraft at the bottom of the Pacific Ocean.

The discovery was made possible by a high-tech unmanned underwater drone and a 16-member crew, which surveyed more than 5,200 square miles of ocean floor between September and December.

For WP’s Department of Data, Andrew Van Dam notes the decline of the school bus and the rise of the private vehicle to bring kids to school. The estimates are based on responses to the National Household Travel Survey conducted by the Federal Highway Administration.

I rode the bus when I was a kid, until I switched to riding my bicycle. I am now a parent who drives my kids to school. So this data strikes the a chord.

Start with water, fire, wind, and earth and see what you can craft by combining elements. Neal Agarwal made a game, Infinite Craft, that uses Llama 2, a large language model, to build just about anything.

It’s a LLM version of Little Alchemy. [Thanks, Charlotte]