Last year Tyler Vigen put together a fun project that found strong correlation between random things, such as divorce rate and cheese consumption or honey production and political action committees. The continuously running script has found over 30,000 ridiculous correlations to date. Now it’s a book. It fits well in your hands as you go number two.

On Writing Well by William Zinsser is a bestselling guide on writing well. Yep. Ben Jones parallels some of the principles in the book to visualization, seven principles in particular.

As I read On Writing Well it struck me that his advice for communicating well with words applies directly to the craft of communicating visually with data. His seven principles in Part I — The Transaction, Simplicity, Clutter, Style, The Audience, Words, and Usage — could be written about visualizing data as well.

Makes sense.

Most people who use R on the regular learned the language in the context of a subject outside of programming. They learned R as they learned statistical methods, or they picked up bits of R as they learned about visualization. However, if you learn R purely as just a language — without the domain-specificity — or you already program in a different language, R might seem strange at times.

In this talk, John D. Cook explains some of the “quirks” in R and why, maybe, they’re not so strange.
Watch the talk

Gertrude Weaver, 116 years old, was the oldest person in the world for five days before she passed. These short tenures have grown more common in recent years. David Goldenberger for FiveThirtyEight looks at the tenure of previous record holders.
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Under the directive of the Federal Housing Finance Agency, started to release detailed loan-level data in 2013. Todd W. Schneider looked at the data recently, evaluating default rates — the proportion of loans that fell into deliquency — with a bit of geography.
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On April 1, Reddit posted a simple button with a 60-second timer that counted down to zero. Every time the button was pressed by a unique Reddit user, the timer reset to 60 seconds. Yesterday, more than two months and 1,008,316 presses later, the timer finally made it to zero seconds without a press.

It was the social experiment that just kept on going, and Reddit released the click data — a timestamp for each click. Could be fun if you’re looking for a time series to play with.

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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