GeoGuessr player rainbolt is next-level good at reading Google Maps. Given a short Vine clip, he walks through his process of figuring out the exact location of the video in about 15 minutes:

It shows what you can do with publicly available bits of information to answer very specific questions. [via Waxy]

Based on analysis by economics professor Caitlin Myers, FiveThirtyEight provides a hypothetical map that shows how access changes in terms of distance to travel and increase in patients at nearby clinics:

New bans will have outsized impacts on who can get an abortion, how far they have to drive for it and how long they have to wait for an appointment. A new analysis by Caitlin Myers, an economics professor at Middlebury College who studies abortion, illustrates how abortion access could continue to dwindle this year if key states like Florida and North Carolina pass additional restrictions.

You can select any combination of possible states and the map updates to show the shifts. Roll over any county to see the nearest county that provides access. Useful and informative.

The NBA currently uses player-tracking that estimates player position on the court in two dimensions. Imagine x-y-coordinates for a player at any given time. But of course two dimensions wasn’t enough, so the NBA is switching to the Hawk-Eye tracking system, which provides the third dimension:

The introduction of “pose tracking” provides new officiating capabilities to support better and faster decision-making, with the intent to increase the accuracy of officiating calls and the speed of play. In addition, the system will give the NBA and its teams the ability to measure and analyze athletic movement in new ways.

I think I liked sports better with just the box score. I might just be showing my age though.

Same old chart, but make it move for another dimension.

Hannah Ritchie compared electric vehicle range over the years:

The median range of EVs has increased 3.5-fold since 2011. You can see the median increasing as the red line shifts further to the right. The mid-range car in 2011 was the Nissan Leaf, where you could get 73 miles on a single charge. In 2022 this was the Chevrolet Bolt, at 247 miles.

Each line represents a vehicle type, and the red lines indicate the median range. The distributions expand and shift towards longer range.

For The Washington Post, Harry Stevens used the line chart equivalent of a bar chart race to show when China is projected to pass the United States in total emissions. There is some quiz action to pique your interest.

Despite the popularity of the bar chart race, some hold a high level of disdain for the method, because it’s hard to pick out an overall pattern. It also takes more time to animate rankings when you can often see the same thing much quicker with a line chart.

The line chart race, which I think popped up a bit after the bar chart race, also takes time to show all the data. However, it comes with a bonus that the vertical scale can adjust to the current segment of data displayed, which lets you see how the patterns evolve.

Asian characters in American films are historically less integral to the stories and written with less depth. However, things have noticeably shifted over the past few years, which you can see through the history of Oscar nominations. For The New York Times, K.K. Rebecca Lai provides a rundown Asian actor nominations.

As a world population, we’re growing taller, but South Koreans seemed to grow a lot quicker over the past century. Vox breaks down height distributions and explains the increased rate in South Korea in their Vox-y combination of paper, slides, and digital. Wealth and improved food supply appears to have helped things along.

There’s one part when the narrator Alvin Chang says he has to adjust the vertical axis to see the change in height better. My chest might have tightened as my mind went to bar-charts-start-at-zero land, but the bar chart in the video switches from height to change in height, so it was all okay. Phew.

Shooting down a floating balloon out on its lonesome seems like a straightforward task. It’s just a balloon after all. But it seemed to take a while to get that Chinese spy balloon down. For The Washington Post, William Neff, Leslie Shapiro and Dylan Moriarty explained the challenges and timing behind the task.

In a sea of endless possibilities, narrow down your visualization options by looking for what works instead of looking for what is the best.

For Bloomberg Green, Jin Wu, Laura Millan and Hayley Warren, on the challenges ski resorts face with rising temperatures:

Artificial snowmaking has become more efficient, so it uses less water and electricity. But even with advanced technology, fake snow can’t always be deployed — and climate change is creating a more difficult environment, making water more scarce and temperatures too high for it to freeze. This year, skyrocketing energy prices forced some resorts in Japan to shut down their snow cannons and wait for natural flakes to fall.

The piece starts with a horizontal scroll through the mountains and then transitions to the chart above. There’s a nice flow between the photo into the abstract view, so they don’t seem like two separate things.

Based on estimates from CarbonCounter by the MIT Trancik Lab, electric vehicles typically produce less emissions than gas vehicles when you account for battery production and charging. However, when the batteries get bigger, like they do with large electric trucks, you start to see some overlap. Elena Shao, for The New York Times, used a beeswarm chart to compare the vehicle groups.

The Economist combined two satellite imagery sources, one that estimates fire events and one that estimates building damage, to assess the extent of damage in Ukraine:

Both approaches have weaknesses. NASA’s firms cannot see through cloud cover, a particular problem in winter. sar can pick up damage even through clouds, but is much less sensitive to changes outside of urban areas. But by combining the two datasets, we can form a fuller picture of the war. Our study shows that rather than being limited to a few big offensives and grinding battles, the war has left a brutal mark on large swathes of Ukraine. Fighting has reached 14% of municipalities, and damaged nearly half the built-up area in the hardest-hit cities.

The structure of a dataset can help you pick a visualization method or chart type, but it only takes you part of the way there. To demonstrate, Ferdio started with a simple dataset with six data points and made 100 charts with it:

Every time we turn a set of data into a visual depiction, hundreds of design choices have to be made to make the data tell the best story possible. Many of the choices are unconscious, often resulting in similar solutions. The obvious and uninspired. This project goes beyond common solutions and best practice. It demonstrates how even the simplest dataset can be turned into 100 proper data visualizations telling different stories, using very limited visual properties and assets.

This is a fun one from Russell Samora and Reshad Malekzai for The Pudding. When watching basketball, one of the best things is when a player has an unexpectedly great game, so Samora looked for the greatest and most unexpected game based on data.

The video is also a nice example of how distributions and outliers can be applied in an analysis. Check out the data yourself on GitHub.

Here’s the good stuff for February.