When I was a kid, I remember uncomfortably walking past the book section at a grocery store where I would see a bunch of books with a muscular man, probably Fabio, clutching to a woman as he looked deeply into her eyes. Times have changed. For The Pudding, Alice Liang analyzed the shifting style of the romance novel cover.

The Google Maps API lets you access high-resolution 3D map tiles now. Robert Hodgin has been experimenting with the new data source using Houdini, which is 3D graphics software that might as well be black magic.

For The New York Times, K.K. Rebecca Lai and Jennifer Medina show the changing checkboxes over the past couple centuries:

Over the centuries, the census has evolved from one that specified broad categories — primarily “free white” people and “slaves” — to one that attempts to encapsulate the country’s increasingly complex demographics. The latest adaptation proposed by the Biden administration in January seeks to allow even more race and ethnicity options for people to describe themselves than the 2020 census did.

What we measure and how we measure is a reflection of what we’ve cared about.

Every now and then, the work can feel like too much, but that usually means I’ve lost sight of the point.

One of the most straightforward ways to help others better understand the scale of an unfamiliar place is to compare it to familiar places. For The Washington Post, Dylan Moriarty and Bonnie Berkowitz show Gaza next to a handful of major U.S. cities.

Julia Janicki, Daisy Chung, and Joyce Chou explore Taiwan’s aging population, where in 2021, pets outnumbered children. I like the experimental views in this piece. More of this please.

Peter Atwood used NASA data to depict the wildfires in Canada this year. The realistic rendering of the fires as burning embers and smoke activity is something.

Solar power is clean and all, but what happens when the sun is blocked by the moon and there’s suddenly no sunlight for a fixed period of time? For Bloomberg, Naureen Malik, with graphics by Denise Lu, describes the preparations that power companies will take during this weekend’s solar eclipse.

The moon is going to get in the way of the sun this Saturday. For The New York Times, Jonathan Corum has the map of when and how much sun coverage we’ll see in the western hemisphere.

Whether a difference seems big or small, important or not, depends on the scale you choose.

Cloud formation depends on temperature and moisture levels, so in places of high humidity like the East Coast and Pacific Northwest, the clouds form lower. In dryer places like the southwestern United States, the clouds don’t form until higher up. For The Washington Post, Kasha Patel and Dylan Moriarty have the maps that show the contrast over the seasons.

Star Trek and related might be fictional, but they usually reference real stars, planets, and galaxies. Overview Effect mapped, charted, and spreadsheeted the possible real-life locations in space of the fictional places.

Claudia Goldin, an economist at Harvard, has won the Nobel Prize in Economics. A big part of her studies are rooted in the collection and analysis of centuries-old data:

Women are vastly underrepresented in the global labour market and, when they work, they earn less than men. Claudia Goldin has trawled the archives and collected over 200 years of data from the US, allowing her to demonstrate how and why gender differences in earnings and employment rates have changed over time.

Goldin showed that female participation in the labour market did not have an upward trend over this entire period, but instead forms a U-shaped curve. The participation of married women decreased with the transition from an agrarian to an industrial society in the early nineteenth century, but then started to increase with the growth of the service sector in the early twentieth century. Goldin explained this pattern as the result of structural change and evolving social norms regarding women’s responsibilities for home and family.

Amazing.

The illustrations by Johan Jarnestad that accompany the announcement are also really useful.

The New York Times is mapping rocket strikes, attacks, and ongoing conflict in the region.

Ben Welsh has a running list of the news organizations blocking OpenAI crawlers:

In total, 532 of 1,147 news publishers surveyed by the homepages.news archive have instructed OpenAI, Google AI or the non-profit Common Crawl to stop scanning their sites, which amounts to 46.4% of the sample.

The three organizations systematically crawl web sites to gather the information that fuels generative chatbots like OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Google’s Bard. Publishers can request that their content be excluded by opting out via the robots.txt convention.

On the web, it used to be that you would write or make something and there would be a link to the thing. Other websites could link to the thing, and people would go to the place with the thing. With this recent AI wave, a lot of the thing ends up elsewhere and no one sees the original place.

Fun times ahead.

There is going to be a solar eclipse on April 8, 2024. The moon will only partially block out the sun in most areas (if at all), but for a select few in the right path, it’ll go all dark for a few minutes. Andy Woodruff mapped the path of full eclipse-ness.

Look at individual data points separately and get more out of the small pictures.

The Washington Post goes with a tree ring metaphor to compare life expectancy in your state. Enter your sex, age, and state. The inner white circles represent how old you are, the middle yellow circles represent how many expected years you have left, and the outer red circles represent the expected years of those with the same age and sex but in Japan.

The rings are a lead-in graphic to more statistical charts. I kind of wish they went all in with the rings, but that’d probably be limiting in the points they could get across.