A couple of years ago, Eric Odenheimer wondered: If you stand on the beach looking out to the ocean and traveled straight until you reach land, what country would you reach? He only used latitude though. However, in real life, coastline is jagged and points in all directions, so you don’t always face east and west. Cartographer Andy Woodruff took these directions into account and drew a more accurate picture.
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Robert O’Connell for the Atlantic ponders basketball analytics and the rise of Stephen Curry.

Like every sport, basketball has recently undergone a statistical overhaul. A new generation of analysts has pored over the game and come to conclusions about the efficacy of certain players and techniques. Their findings have met mixed acceptance from the old guard of coaches and executives, but at least one of their takeaways is now visible every night in the NBA. The three-point shot, for much of its history a novelty or minor part of teams’ strategies, has become an essential component of almost every team’s offensive attack. As recently as 2012, the average team took about 1,200 threes over the course of a season; last year, that number ballooned to over 1,800.

The difference between the Golden State Warriors and most other teams is that the shots go in, often in spectacular fashion. For this 2015-16 season, the Warriors put up more threes than anyone, but they made 41.5 percent of them so far, whereas everyone else is below 40.

I don’t read visualization books nearly as much as I wish I did, but there are a handful I keep on the shelf for a rainy day, which until recently was basically never here in California. I updated the books page to show some of my favorites.

I also added a few books in my queue that I hope to get to one day. Two are new visualization books that I heard good things about, one is an introduction to statistics (mostly for teaching reasons), and the last is a not-so-new one on design.

By the way, the statistics textbook is available for free as a PDF download.

“Weather data is this endless box of LEGO pieces that arise every day. It’s always a different box.” Sculptor Nathalie Miebach makes these ornate baskets based on weather data.

Peter Dodds teaches a course on complex networks, and he put together a set of tarot cards to illustrate concepts. Fun.

P.S. You can also watch the entire lecture series on YouTube.

Popular news topics change depending on where you are, as what’s important to some isn’t so important to others. Unfiltered.news from Google’s Jigsaw team shows what’s covered everywhere.

Every day, tens of thousands of publishers report the news world wide. Unfiltered News allows you to explore Google News data across all publishing languages and locations to find important global stories and perspectives that may not be covered in your location. Discover which locations report on similar topics, compare different perspectives on an issue, and track issue coverage over time.

Truth & Quantity by Gregor Hochmuth is what happens when you strip out all context from an NPR newscast and only look at the numbers.

Every day at 8am and 8pm, Truth & Quantity transcribes NPR’s hourly news update using speech recognition & natural language analysis. It then selects all plural nouns from the news script and generates two compilations: one for each month (going back to 2009) and another for various quantities, such as all instances of “7” or “100 million.”

Click on any number to get more of a sentence.

Good stuff. Find out more here.

Jellybooks is an analytics company that evaluates how people read book, in a similar fashion in how a company like Netflix evaluates how customers watch shows.
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National Geographic, in collaboration with Bestiario, looks at the improving accessibility to clean water around the world.

In 1990, as part of the Millennium Development Goals, the UN set a target to halve the proportion of people without access to safe drinking water. The world hit this goal in 2010, and as of 2015, some 90 percent of the world’s people now have access to “improved” water—water from sources such as pipes or wells that are protected from contamination, primarily fecal matter.

There’s still a lot of work to do though. In some places, such as Haiti and Mongolia, conditions worsened from a percentage perspective and about of third of the populations still don’t have access.

With election season in full swing, as far as the news is concerned at least, we get to see poll after poll in the beginning of a voting day and then reports the next day about which ones were wrong. Based on the news alone, it feels like almost every poll is just plain wrong. Maarten Lambrechts shows what’s going on here with Rock ‘n Poll. It simulates a poll and then multiple polls, showing how small differences in the numbers can seem like a lot once the voting results come in.

In 1999, the Department of Agriculture published a Natural Amenities Scale that took into account “six measures of climate, topography, and water area” to help identify desirable places to live for most people.

More recently, Christopher Ingraham for the Washington Post took a quick look at the data, and declared Red Lake County the “worst” place to live in America. That’s when it got interesting. Life in a metro area started to wear.
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Ken Doctor for Nieman Lab had a chat with Steve Duenes from the New York Times about the evolving, top-notch graphics department.

Fifteen or twenty years ago, Graphics was more of a service desk. It’s not a service desk anymore. The graphics department is really a news desk and works in parallel with the other news desks like Metro and National and International.

These days graphics are often the main part of the story, if not the entire thing.

I feel like a few years ago, media took a hard swing towards the visual, and then a little bit after took a short swing back to words. Now things seem to be balancing out. I’m curious what it looks like another twenty years from now (as I selfishly wonder if FlowingData looks anything like its current self).

Based on data from the NBA stats API and using the visual layout popularized by Kirk Goldsberry, Todd Schneider gives you BallR, made with R and Shiny.

BallR lets you select a player and season, then creates a customizable chart that shows shot patterns across the court. Additionally, it calculates aggregate statistics like field goal percentage and points per shot attempt, and compares the selected player to league averages at different areas of the court.

Fun.

The best part though is that Schneider made the code available on GitHub. See how it was done or roll your own.