The Washington Post has a straightforward calculator to figure out how much it will cost you to cut out cable television and replace it with streaming services. Just select the features you want, and the cost on the right tells you how much. Kind of fun to click at.
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A while back beckmw found the average length of a dissertation for various fields of study, based on digital archives at the University of Minnesota. Here’s a follow-up to that data scrape with average lengths of masters’ theses, again for various fields. Medical Chemistry wins this round.

By the way, the colors don’t mean anything. They’re just there for flourish.

On the upside, the R code for scraping along with the resulting data is available for download.

“If it seems as if the list of presidential candidates for 2016 is growing by the day, that is because it is, at least on the Republican side.” Alicia Parlapiano for the New York Times charts the changing campaign calendar with more candidates and earlier starts. Because you know, we’re not even halfway through 2015 yet.

On the upside: more charts.

Kevin Ferguson examined color usage in Western films from various angles. One of those was the sum image using the movie frames every ten seconds.

These shapes and colors are evocative in a way that tea leaves and tarot are: they don’t actually tell you much about what you’re looking at, but they allow you an emotional response confirmed or denied once you come to discover what the image “really” is.

The methods themselves you’ve seen before, but probably not used in this way.

There is a realtime feed for the location of Los Angeles buses. It’s a bit messy. Morgan Herlocker made it straightforward to aggregate. Have at it. [Thanks, @augustjoki]

Iowa released liquor sales data for weekly purchases at the store level.

This dataset contains the spirits purchase information of Iowa Class “E” liquor licensees by product and date of purchase from January 1, 2014 to current. The dataset can be used to analyze total spirits sales in Iowa of individual products at the store level.

There are over three million rows that contain a store name, address, liquor category, liquor vendor, and cost. I imagine this could be a fun spatial time series dataset to play with. Look for seasonal trends, when stores expect to sell more rum or vodka, brand bestsellers, or regional favorites. Even though it’s just for Iowa, there’s probably a close relationship to national sales.

See some preliminary documentation by Dan Nguyen on how to get started.

In Pieces by designer Bryan James is an animated piece that uses simple geometric shapes to depict thirty endangered species.
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In an exploration of the connection between humans an nature, artist Ren Ri uses beeswax as his medium and the bee colony as the builder. Yeah.

Because a colony will follow the queen bee and build a hive based on the pheromones that she releases, Ri is able to move the queen such that the others in the colony act accordingly.
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The Citizen Ex browser extension guesses where you’re geographically located on the web. That is, it guesses where the server — the one you just pulled that website from — is in the world. It also guesses where you are physically located. The extension keeps track of these locations and computers something called Algorithmic Citizenship.
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Western cities are growing but water supplies are decreasing. That’s not good. ProPublica, as part of their series Killing the Colorado, focuses on the fastest growing Western city: Las Vegas.
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The US government doesn’t keep a complete record of fatal shootings by police, but with recent events, it’s become increasingly obvious why such data is important. So instead of waiting, the Guardian built their own database.
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Million Base is a database of 2.2 million chess games. Steve Tung visualized chess piece journeys based on this data, for each piece on the board. Above is the footprint for the white knight. Each thin line represents 500 moves, and from what looks like a little bit of random noise to offset each line, you see a more prominent path for more frequent hops.
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After seeing an isochrone map drawn by Francis Galton, Peter Kerpedjiev was curious if he could apply the method to travel times in Europe.
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You’re headed to the subway platform and you hear a train coming. The warm musty air that blows directly into your nostrils is near. So you speed up your steps. Oh forget it, who are you trying to impress? You run to make sure you get to the platform. Yes, you made it! You hop on with your heart rate up a few beats. Nice.

But the doors stay open.

The train isn’t moving.

What gives? ARGH.

Of course, there’s a perfectly logical explanation. The Metropolitan Transportation Authority provides a scenario in 8-bit format.
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I tried playing Minecraft a couple of times but quickly lost interest. Clearly not the case for millions of others. Wired did a bunch of back-of-the-napkin math on how big Minecraft is and put it in an 8-bit video. Find answers to such burning questions such as the volume of the Minecraft world or the time it would take to explore the entire world in real life.
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Last week, graduate student Michael J. LaCour was in the news for allegedly making up data. The results were published in Science. LaCour’s co-author Donald Green requested a retraction, but the paper stayed while the request was considered. Today, Science formally fulfilled the request.
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Those who grow up in poorer families are less likely to go to college, and those who grow up in richer families are more likely. The question is: How much does the likelihood of college attendance increase as family income increases? Gregor Aisch, Amanda Cox, and Kevin Quealy for the Upshot ask you this question. Draw a curve on a blank chart, and then compare your guess to reality and other readers’ guesses.
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It’s difficult to grasp the severity of homicide around the world. Homicide Monitor attempts to at least provide a little bit of sense of what’s going on.
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Millions of peopled died during World War II, but it’s difficult to grasp what all the big numbers associated with the war mean. Neil Halloran explains in The Fallen of World War II, a hybrid between interactive visualization and documentary.
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