Neven Mrgan describes what it was like to get an AI-generated email from a friend:

I knew that I didn’t want an algorithm to design layouts and draw illustrations “so I don’t have to,” but prior to this email, I never even pondered whether I wanted AI to call me up on behalf of people in my life. It had simply not occurred to me—and now that it has occurred to me, I definitely do not want small talk and relationships outsourced to server farms. This stuff shouldn’t feel hard or taxing; it’s what our presence here on Earth is mostly made up of. The effort, the clumsiness, and the time invested are where humanity is stored.

I got an alert for a link to FlowingData, and it was for a sloppy AI-generated site. The site covered a hodgepodge of topics with generated titles, text, and cover images. It looked like a news site on the surface but stripped of all meaning once you tried to read.

One of the “articles” was a “summary” of something I wrote. It felt lazy and offensive, which sounds familiar to what Mrgan felt about his friend’s “email.”

It’s abnormally hot in a large portion of the United States, and it’s going to stay that way for a few days. The New York Times has a heat tracker to show the areas with dangerous high temperatures and how long it will last.

A searchable line chart shows background bands for heat index levels, and a subtle gray to black gradient on the line reinforces the peaks.

Stay indoors and stay hydrated.

Vivek Rao likes to play Sudoku, enough that he collected data on his gameplay and analyzed his strategies:

In January 2023, I made a breakthrough. I started tracking what grids I fill out and how I fill them out1. And in the weeks after, I started to analyze my performance to look for patterns and ways I could speed up. As a throwback to my high school self, I decided to analyze 100 easy sudokus to see what I could learn about my performance.

Thinking about life and randomness, Cameron Sun modified the classic game of Tic-Tac-Toe. You choose where you want to go but don’t control the outcome:

[I]n any given game of Probabilistic Tic-Tac-Toe you can do everything right and still lose (or do everything wrong and win.) However, the better player always rises to the top over time. These are characteristics that I find interesting about a lot of other games, and I thought they’d be fun to apply to an otherwise boring, solved game like tic-tac-toe. They’re also highly relevant to my life philosophy – that every outcome is effectively random, but our actions can often skew the odds in our favor. Bad breaks are inevitable, but good judgment is always rewarded (eventually, and given enough chances.)

The code is available on GitHub.

Visualization tends towards familiarity and convenience, which is useful for getting things done and reading data quickly. But the familiar is also less fun and can be stifling.

I talked to Cole Nussbaumer Knaflic about my early motivations, FD origins, the new book, how I work, and data things. Listen to the episode here.

Cole, who runs storytelling with data, came around not long after FD. Although she has a team now, I count Cole as one of the few long-term, independent visualization folks. It was fun to finally get to chat.

Stamen, whose design breakdowns I always appreciate, discusses why they took a different route to to show the uncertainty of wind speeds:

Wind speed probability data shows you the likelihood of sustained wind speeds that denote a category 1 hurricane (74+ mph). The way the data appears on a map is through concentric polygons that denote progressively less likely areas to experience a category 1 hurricane. We had bands showing the breakdown by 10%, but felt that given how much other data we needed to show, paring back the number of circles would be best. We ultimately decided on showing 90%, 50%, and 10% chance areas of category 1 hurricane. The team, and our stakeholders, agreed that this way of showing hurricane forecasting was far more precise than the cone of uncertainty. Wind speed probability data shows specific degrees of hurricane likelihood compared to only emphasizing one area like with the cone. Put simply, the cone of uncertainty tries to do too much at the cost of specificity.

See also: the challenges in reading the more common cone of uncertainty.

Ren Yuan visualized the GitHub commit history for the PyTorch library. The virtual rendering shows commits flying towards a repository with events sonified over time.

I wish this was a physical installation or could be experienced in VR. That would be fun.

Find Yuan’s other experiments with visualization and sonification on his site or his more frequently updated X feed. They will get the ol’ imagination going.

During the Dallas Stars away games during this year’s NHL playoffs, fans could attend watch parties at the home arena. The team used projectors and player tracking to show movements on the ice in real-time.

They should’ve used a colorblind-safe palette to differentiate the two teams instead of red and green. But this is a fun use of tracking technology that uses the hockey rink as a plotting space. I guess it brings the away fans closer to the game, too. Now do holograms.

Dr Pepper steadily rose and Pepsi steadily declined over the past couple of decades. Now they’re tied, according to estimates from Beverage Digest. For the Wall Street Journal, Jennifer Maloney reports (Apple News link):

The 139-year-old soda brand is now tied with Pepsi-Cola as the No. 2 carbonated soft drink brand in America behind Coke. The regular versions of Pepsi and Dr Pepper are neck and neck in a spot that Pepsi has held nearly every year for the past four decades, according to sales-volume data from Beverage Digest.

You’ll always be number one in my book, Dr Pepper.

Sometimes the noise in a dataset makes it hard to see the worthwhile patterns when you visualize it. Here are chart options for you.

For NYT, Sam Anderson, with illustrations by Gaia Alari, tells the story of his family dog Walnut. The storytelling and animation format work well to depict the love of a pet.

For some reason, someone started cutting onions while I was reading.

Currently is a prototype ambient display that shows where your energy comes from. The display cycles through a set of radial stacked charts that provide the breakdown over time.

It reminds me of eco-related projects from the late 2000s. I like it.

The Painted Ladies houses, which includes the house from the 1990s sitcom Full House, is a set of seven houses in San Francisco. Six of them are basically the same, but the annual property taxes are not. For the San Francisco Chronicle, Nami Sumida shows why through a set of charts and illustrations, using the differences as a way to explain California property taxes.

This is also why I will never move.

A Wheel of Fortune contestant employed strategies outlined in a NYT Upshot analysis and won in the bonus round:

Last December, the Upshot published a guide to Wheel of Fortune strategies, using data from more than 6,000 bonus-round puzzles. Our guide has influenced the behavior of at least one contestant. Scott Menke, a data analyst from New Jersey, won $52,690 in cash and prizes on an episode last month after creating a strategy based on our article, he said.

Data for good.

There might be times when you want to visualize data with area, but want to use irregular shapes that aren’t strictly squares. This straightforward tool by Krisztina Szucs lets click-and-drag for custom shapes. Enter values and drag the corners to make longer, shorter, wider, and narrower.

Here’s the good stuff for the month.

I had a chat with Jon Schwabish on The PolicyViz Podcast. We talked about the new book and more generally, how data visualization changed over the past couple decades.

You also get to hear me realize in real-time that I had not talked about these things out loud in a long while.

I mean it’s great and you should definitely listen. Jon’s podcast has been in my listening queue for years, so it was fun to be in an episode.