Network Effect by Jonathan Harris and Greg Hochmuth is a gathering of the emotions, non-emotion, and everyday-ness of life online. It hits you all at once and overwhelms your senses.
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Talent Lab is an application for human resource professionals to evaluate a work force. (I’m going to pretend that sentence didn’t make me feel slightly dirty.) To demonstrate, they put in data for superheroes, so that you can explore abilities, talents, and demographics. This is great for me, because I’m building an Avengers-like workgroup.

There are ample records of executions in the United States, but looking at them through the data lens can feel disconnected and horribly robotic. In a more humanized view of the subject, The Next to Die by the Marshall Project provides context for those next scheduled for execution.

On one side, a person is scheduled to die. On the other, the person did horrible things. It’s complex and the project doesn’t try to sway opinions one way or the other, but it does provide a view into what’s happening, along with a historical view of states and their laws.

Lithium-ion batteries power the iPhone (among other things), but what if we could use a different power source like coal or diesel? With some back-of-the-napkin math, Jon Keegan for the Wall Street Journal imagines what if. It’s all about the body fat-powered iPhone with nine days of battery life.

In a straightforward map, Jason Allen for Thrillist replaced station names on the London Tube map with median rent prices for a one-bedroom apartment in the area. I’m sure someone is working on U.S. subway maps at this very moment.

The ethics and future of ads to keep sites running is still up in the air. But one thing’s for sure: Ads and their trackers take up a lot of the bandwidth and load time for many sites. This is a problem especially for mobile where data caps and speed are more often an issue than on desktops. The New York Times ran tests on 50 major news sites to estimate the true cost of ads on your phone.

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In most depictions of the Solar System, planets are drawn big enough to show details and placed side-by-side to show order. The scale of the planets and the space in between them are usually a footnote. Alex Gorosh and Wylie Overstreet were curious about what you would get if you placed scale in the foreground. So they built a 7-mile model of the Solar System to scale in the middle of the desert, with Earth the size of a marble.

See also: if the moon were one pixel.

In 2014, five people died in New Orleans in a house fire. Three of them were children. There was no working smoke alarm. So the city analytics team and New York-based data group Enigma developed a model to predict which blocks in the city were at high risk.

If the city knew the areas that tended not to have smoke alarms, they could allocate resources appropriately to assure more people had the proper safeguards.

Enigma just expanded the project to more Metropolitan Statistical Areas in what they call Smoke Signals. See what areas near you look like.
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Sensible Data by Martin Hertig is an installation that asks what personal data is worth to you. Using a photo of you and an email, it gives you a self-portrait sketch and guess at your mood, age, gender, and beauty based on your words. In the last step, the user presses a button for a nice stamp. There’s a catch though.
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Statistically, probability ranges from 0 to 1 — impossible to definitely without a doubt. Math with Bad Drawings characterized what those values mean in various fields of expertise. This amuses me.

Reddit user superemmjay tracked his weight for 20 months and plotted the measurements. The annotation makes interesting what would otherwise be just some graph of someone’s weight over time.

See also: eight years of dating, the fitbit during sex, the marriage proposal heartbeat, and the quantified breakup.

There’s “letting the data speak” and then there’s this, where people who are closely familiar with their own data explain what’s there with some simple notes. Those little pointers make a big difference for outsiders who don’t know the context of where the numbers come from.

Willard Cope Brinton is credited as one of the pioneers of information visualization, and I just found out his 1939 book Graphic Presentation is available in its entirety at the Internet Archive. You can download it in various formats. The book was an update to his previous book from 25 years prior, Graphic Methods for Presenting Facts. It’s also at the Archive.

It’s always fun to read through these older publications. Naturally, there’s the historical significance and pretty graphs, along with tidbits on printing processes and paper (whatever those are).

But they talk about a lot of the same stuff that we do now—perception, narratives, attention, and all that—which always catches me off guard because we tend to think of visualization as this relatively new thing. Then it’s like oh wait, someone did this more than a century ago.

Nicky Case made an interactive explanation of how neurons work. It’s part narrated video and part game.

But the most important concept I wanted to introduce here was exposure therapy, which is part of Cognitive Behavioral Therapy. CBT is basically being mindful of your crappy neural connections, and gaining skills to retrain those connections.

I like how Case’s narrated responses change depending on what and how you click. It feels like he’s sitting there next to you.

You’ll want to set aside a bit of time to click through. It’s on the long-ish side by internet standards, and there’s no way to pick up where you left off if you come back to it later. Or, you can download the open source code and do it yourself.

Dan Burns explains some properties of time and space using marbles and two large pieces of spandex sewn together in a classroom demonstration.
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