Welcome to The Process, where we look closer at how the charts get…

Rotten Tomatoes aggregates movie reviews to spit out a freshness score for each film. There’s a problem though. For Vulture, Lane Brown reports on the flawed system:

But despite Rotten Tomatoes’ reputed importance, it’s worth a reminder: Its math stinks. Scores are calculated by classifying each review as either positive or negative and then dividing the number of positives by the total. That’s the whole formula. Every review carries the same weight whether it runs in a major newspaper or a Substack with a dozen subscribers.

If a review straddles positive and negative, too bad. “I read some reviews of my own films where the writer might say that he doesn’t think that I pull something off, but, boy, is it interesting in the way that I don’t pull it off,” says Schrader, a former critic. “To me, that’s a good review, but it would count as negative on Rotten Tomatoes.”

Studios have of course learned how to game the system, not to mention most of the site is now owned by movie ticket seller Fandango.

The New York Times analyzed water levels across the country since 1920. In more recent years, the levels aren’t looking great if we want to keep growing crops. An animated map using angled lines shows the fluctuations and decline.

Locating the best pizza depends on where you are and what kind of pizza you’re looking for. The best-of lists that favor New York-style pizza and the east coast aren’t much good when you want Chicago-style pizza on the west coast. So The Washington Post parsed Yelp reviews to find the best pizza places for a selected style and state.

For The Pudding, Russell Samora pulled songs via the Spotify API and made a unique kind of clock:

Every minute, random songs are played that contain the time in the title (e.g., 6:47 or 6:47 from Central Station). If there are at least two songs with the correct am/pm (or it is absent), then the incorrect ones will be excluded.

This is the first clock in a working series of four. The second one uses time mentioned in YouTube videos.

Here’s the good stuff for August.

It’s straightforward to share a static SVG online, but maybe you want tooltips or for elements to highlight when you hover over them. Flourish has a new template to provide the interactions easier. Seems promising.

Most of Apple’s suppliers and manufacturing happen outside the United States and in China. But because of tensions between the U.S. and China, Apple has tried to shift to other countries. Bloomberg provides the breakdowns over time, showing the biggest increases in India and Vietnam.

Infinity is an abstraction of endlessness, which seems to suggest that it cannot be measured with finite units or occur in the real world. With a fun visual project, Dea Bankova wonders otherwise.

If you want to maximize fun, a mixed toolbox is still best.

Instead of using a bunch of equations to memorize, Yi Zhe Ang visually explains matrix transformations to provide some intuition behind the math. Make it to the end so that you can transform a 3-D image of a cat.

Excel is getting a bump in capabilities with Python integration. From Microsoft:

Excel users now have access to powerful analytics via Python for visualizations, cleaning data, machine learning, predictive analytics, and more. Users can now create end to end solutions that seamlessly combine Excel and Python – all within Excel. Using Excel’s built-in connectors and Power Query, users can easily bring external data into Python in Excel workflows. Python in Excel is compatible with the tools users already know and love, such as formulas, PivotTables, and Excel charts.

Sounds fun for both Excel users and Python developers.

It’s headed to the Beta Channel in Excel for Windows and then Excel for Windows proper. They didn’t announce a timeline for Mac.

There are buildings in Toronto, Canada that make use of a deep lake water cooling (DLWC) system, including Scotiabank Arena, home of the Toronto Raptors. Cold water pumps from nearby Lake Ontario and then flows through pipes in buildings to absorb heat. For The Washington Post, Tik Root, with graphics by Daisy Chung and photos by Ian Willms, describes the system.

It sounds a lot like the system I use to cool my beer, well, wort at that point, when I’m brewing.

Sometimes passenger planes get a little too close to each other on takeoff and landing due to miscommunication and understaffing from air traffic control. From The New York Times, near collisions might happen more often than the steady flight captain’s overhead voice would have you believe.

A series of animated flight paths, albeit sped up, show the close calls.

xkcd has an informative reference for what do in case of mountain lion encounter, lightning, fire alarm, and bleeding. Very informative.

Hip-hop music producers often sample from previous works. They remake, restructure, and repurpose the samples to create a new sound. Tracklib broke down iconic hip-hop sampling over the past fifty years, using musical frequency charts to show where the bits of popular songs came from.