We saw a similar video of boundary development over the centuries before, but I like this one as a contrast to it. The first is really default-looking, whereas this one has a little bit of production value.

Get the data files here to put together your own version. [via kottke]

Wikipedia has a list of predicted dates for when apocalypse strikes, because of course it does. For kicks and giggles, Jeff Fletcher put the dates on a timeline. The horizontal position of each dot represents the predicted date. The vertical position doesn’t mean so much, other than there are a lot of dates around that time.

Luckily, we got past the most recent September 1, 2015 prediction and the grip of ones before that. Phew. Next up: 2020.

Meat as a cause of cancer has been the news as of late. Aaron Carroll for the Upshot describes why we should make a note but not freak out about it.

This means that, if I buy what the W.H.O. is saying, if I decided today to start eating an extra three pieces of bacon every day for the next 30 years, my risk of getting colon cancer might go from 2.7 percent to 3.2 percent. In other words, if 200 people like me made that decision, one extra person might get cancer. The other 199 would be unaffected.

It’s about understanding risk.

We recently fell back an hour with the end of this year’s Daylight Saving Time, and as per usual, we had to discuss why or why not we should shift out clocks at all. But the main question is — what it all really comes down to — what have you done for me lately, Daylight Saving Time? Keith Collins for Quartz put together an interactive that shows you an answer, based on the waking and sleeping times.

The blue area shows the daylight you experience, and the black represents the dark you get. Some quick math on the bottom of the chart shows how many more hours of daylight you get, thanks (or no thanks) to Daylight Saving. [Thanks, Steve]

This map-centric piece from the New York Times is good. They keep refining the art of storytelling with a mix of mediums and are clearly a step above the rest. In this case, the map navigates you as you scroll and shows you where to look.

From Gemma Correll. I am amused.

To introduce Convolutional Neural Networks, Andrej Karpathy looked at millions of selfies, left the computer to its own devices, and tried to find what makes a good selfie.
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This is years old, but it still tickles the neurons every time. It’s a straightforward demonstration of the Pythagorean theorem, also known as

With a right triangle, the hypotenuse squared is equal to the sum of squares of the other two sides. It will now be referred to as glub, glub, glub.

Vizable is a free iPad app from Tableau Software that helps you explore data, specifically through tap interactions. The focus seems to be exploration that’s quick, easy, and fun. Gonna have to find a working iPad to try this with.

Gavin Schmidt shows different types of particles that swirl around in our atmosphere:

“Different kinds of particles are a different color,” explains climate scientist, Gavin Schmidt. “The easiest to see are the reddy-orange particles; those are dust and you can see them streaming them off the Sahara,” Also worth noting: white particles (pollution from burning coal and volcanoes); red dots (fires over a particular period); and blue color (seasalt being whipped up into air by the wind).

Nice.

Data wrangling — formatting and cleaning — is a sore spot and stumbling block for many, but you often can’t do much visualization- or analysis-wise until the data is in order. My projects folder is filled with one-off Python scripts written for specific datasets (and steps within steps).

Trifacta Wrangler aims to streamline the process with a click interface and automation. The desktop software is free to use and available for PC and Mac.
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Bloomberg Business has an interesting stock trading game with a simple premise. A time series line starts at the beginning of a stock’s life and runs its course all the while you buy and sell trying to profit.

Click and hold the mouse button to buy, and release to sell. The key is to click when the stock price is low and to release when it’s high. Of course, this is when uncertainty comes into play and is what makes the game fun.

DaveE from the Brickset Forum was curious about the changing LEGO color palette, so he looked at newly released bricks over the years and charted the color results. I would’ve preferred a stacked area chart (more like this) over the multiple pies, but I appreciate the topic more than I dislike the layout.

Nicholas Felton released his 10th and final annual personal report. It’s the end of an era and what I can only imagine as a sense of freedom and completion by Felton.

Here’s a nice scroller from Katie Park for the Washington Post. It shows dwindling water levels in major reservoirs in California. At its core, there’s only a handful of data points to look at, but instead of a line to represent the top of a bar chart, Park used an animated water line that makes the numbers feel less abstract. I like it.

Earlier this year, ProPublica reported on the decline of Workers’ Compensation at the state and national levels. Continuing their efforts, they look specifically at Texas, where companies are “allowed to opt out and write their own benefit plans.”

An interactive shows the plans of about 40 companies in the state. Each row is a company, and each column is a body part. Orange squares represent the value that each plan places on a body part, and you’ll notice a wide range. Probably the most noticeable is what’s missing.

According to the New York Times, 158 families funded about half of the presidential campaigns so far. With great effect, the Times used Monopoly house and hotel pieces to show this number. The main point of impact comes from the scaled comparison at the beginning, against the backdrop of the White House.