The earthquake in Nepal was big, but there’s a discrepancy in just how big. The United States Geological Survey (USGS) measured the earthquake at 7.8 magnitude, whereas the China Earthquakes Network Center (CENC) measured it at 8.1. The three-tenths difference doesn’t seem like much, but the latter is actually an earthquake that exerts twice the energy of the former. Akshat Rathi and David Yanofsky for Quartz explain in a lesson of the logarithmic scale and earthquake magnitude.

Fashion trends, such as skinny jeans and Palazzo pants, can spike and fall quickly year over year, and it can be tough to keep up. Maybe trends in Google searches for specific fashions can help. Hiroko Tabuchi and Josh Katz for the New York Times mapped a handful of fashion searches over time so you can see some of the regional changes.
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An earthquake with a magnitude of 7.8 can affect countries differently, depending on the people’s ability to withstand and recover from such a disaster. INFORM attempts to assess this risk, so that organizations can make better-informed decisions about what relief to send. Greg Myre for NPR explains with a heatmap. [via @onyxfish]

As Supreme Court hearings for same-sex marriage start today, Alex Tribou and Keith Collins for Bloomberg look back at timelines for past social issues, such as interracial marriage and abortion.
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Stereotropes, made by the Bocoup Data Visualization Team, explores the many tropes in films and the the adjective used to describe them. Some are unique to a trope and some words span multiple tropes and genders.
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The talks from OpenVisConf 2015 went up, so I’m slowly making my way through. In this one Danyel Fisher from Microsoft Research talks about the challenges of working with data that doesn’t quite fit into your standard CSV data model. The visualization has to account for the mess.
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Winter is over and it’s shorts weather these days in California. This is good for relaxing outdoor lunches but not so good for the drought. It’s sad to drive down the state and see a bunch of barren farm land. Victor Powell shows this shift in water supply through reservoir data from the California Department of Water Resources.
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A while back Alex Reinhart, a statistics instructor and PhD student at Carnegie Mellon University, was working on a guide for doing statistics right. The goal was to teach through anecdotes of statistics done wrong, from statistical significance and p-values to regression and confounding factors.

Statistics Done Wrong is a book now. If you analyze data with any regularity but aren’t sure if you’re doing it correctly, get this book. It’s a concise guide with interesting examples and a light, easy-to-read tone.
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The Avengers comic has been around since 1963 and the look and feel of characters have changed over the years. Jon Keegan for the Wall Street Journal looked at this change through color usage in the comic’s covers.
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Justin Wolfers, David Leonhardt, and Kevin Quealy for the Upshot explore the gender gap between the black male and female populations in the United States. It’s wide.
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Wealth inequality is a real thing that is complex and a result of various factors. It’s difficult to capture everything in one chart, so Urban Institute explained wealth inequality in nine charts instead.
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The Cartography and Geovisualization Group at Oregon State University and NASA visualized a one-year life cycle of carbon dioxide in an interactive video map.
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Oliver Roeder for FiveThirtyEight covered this year’s American Crossword Puzzle Tournament and the battle between Tyler Hinman and Dan Feyer.
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xkcd sectioned the United States by the background in movies. Because xkcd.

There were a couple of similar quantified self articles last week about email. They’re both joke-ish but kind of interesting with a this-is-kind-of-pointless undercurrent. In one, Paul Ford analyzes his email archive and deems it a failure after he finds nothing interesting. In the second, Emma Pierson analyzes her email in the context of a long-distance relationship.
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The “speed of light” typically means “really fast” but when it’s relative to the scale of the universe, maybe not so much. Animator Alphonse Swinehart shows what it might look like to follow a photon from the sun to Jupiter, where the speed of light can sometimes feel really slow.
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Using calculations by Nick Kasprak from the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities and Kyle Pomerleau from Tax Foundation, Amanda Cox shows tax penalties and bonuses for married couples.
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In their continued efforts to present statistics as a field that doesn’t suck, the American Statistical Association provides this pitch video. I approve of this message.
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