Mapping the entire planet is not exactly a straightforward thing to do, especially during a time when there weren’t any flying objects to take photographs from above. Jeremy Shuback rewinds all the way back to this time and asks how the first world map came to be.

Tom Brady, the quarterback for the Tampa Bay Buccaneers, is 45 years old, which makes him the oldest player in the National Football League. Francesca Paris, for NYT’s The Upshot, places Brady’s age under the perspective of other occupations. For example, Lilian Thomas Burwell, who is an artist at 95 years old, is well in the upper percentile for those in her field (and the general population).

See also: the distributions of age and occupation.

Lensa is an app that lets you retouch photos, and it recently added a feature that uses Stable Diffusion to generate AI-assisted portraits. While fun for some, the feature reveals biases in the underlying dataset. Melissa Heikkilä, for MIT Technology Review, describes problematic biases towards sexualized images for some groups:

Lensa generates its avatars using Stable Diffusion, an open-source AI model that generates images based on text prompts. Stable Diffusion is built using LAION-5B, a massive open-source data set that has been compiled by scraping images off the internet.

And because the internet is overflowing with images of naked or barely dressed women, and pictures reflecting sexist, racist stereotypes, the data set is also skewed toward these kinds of images.

This leads to AI models that sexualize women regardless of whether they want to be depicted that way, Caliskan says—especially women with identities that have been historically disadvantaged.

People have been having fun with generative AI lately. Enter a prompt and get a believable body of text, or enter descriptive text and get a photorealistic image. But as with all things that are fun on the internet, there are those who are looking to exploit the popularity. Maggie Appleton discusses the trade-offs:

There’s a swirl of optimism around how these models will save us from a suite of boring busywork: writing formal emails, internal memos, technical documentation, marketing copy, product announcement, advertisements, cover letters, and even negotiating with medical insurance companies.

But we’ll also need to reckon with the trade-offs of making insta-paragraphs and 1-click cover images. These new models are poised to flood the web with generic, generated content.

You thought the first page of Google was bunk before? You haven’t seen Google where SEO optimizer bros pump out billions of perfectly coherent but predictably dull informational articles for every longtail keyword combination under the sun.

In the department of tedious and thorough, Reddit user _tsweezy_ tracked every hour of his life for five years. It’s like a personal American Time Use Survey diary for slightly longer than a single day. I’m sure there’s some estimation or fill-ins after-the-fact, but still, that’s a lot of days and hours.

Animals are going extinct at a faster rate. Reuters shows a developing pattern across species:

Losing hundreds of species over 500 or so years may not seem significant when there are millions more still living on the planet. But in fact, the speed at which species are now vanishing is unprecedented in the last 10 million years.

“We are losing species now faster than they can evolve,” O’Brien said.

There appears to be a trend of using human names for pets. Alyssa Fowers and Chris Alcantara, for WP’s Department of Data, asked the natural questions that come after: “How human is your dog’s name? How doggy is your name?” Enter your own name or a dog’s name to see where it falls on the dog to human scale.

Jon Keegan on how USGS researchers collected data for 125 square miles of sea floor:

In 2004 and 2005, two research vessels, Ocean Explorer and Connecticut set off into the waters off Cape Ann, Massachusetts on a U.S. Geological Survey mission to map a section of the bottom of the sea. Equipped with cameras, advanced sonar and bathymetric scanners, these ships mapped 125 square miles of the sea floor capturing a detailed dataset that allowed U.S. Geological Survey scientists to characterize the makeup of the sediment and bedrock in waters up to 92 meters deep.

The year’s almost up, so let’s get right into it. Here’s the good stuff for December.

There were a lot of flight cancellations this week, but Southwest Airlines is on another level. This straightforward chart by Matt Stiles for CNN says it all.

We like to complain about changing time an hour back or forward, and usually it’s in the context of our own geography. Maybe one area gets a lot of later sunsets, but then another gets much less. FiveThirtyEight made a map that lets you put in your preference to see how the rest of the country is affected:

Unfortunately, no solution will make every American happy. Even if you’ve found a combination that satisfies your personal preferences, you may have noticed that those preferences could negatively impact other parts of the country. And advocates for changing the system we currently have — whether for or against DST — feel strongly that their personal preference is the best.

We all know the solution here. Everyone gets to sleep, wake, and work whenever they want. Easy.

Sometimes it feels like a foregone conclusion that most of the money ends up with a small percentage of people. Alvin Chang, for The Pudding, describes the Yard-sale model, which shows how such a skew in distribution inevitably happens even when an individual’s chances seems fair.

This is a fun one. It’s got illustrations, simulations, and interaction to show you how the (simplified) model works and applies to your life.

Visualization for the sake of visualization is a drag and fleeting. Find purpose for your work.

Kaitlyn Facista, of Tea with Tolkien, made a four-part Venn diagram that shows the intersection between Gandalf, Dark Lord Sauron, and Tom Bombadil from Lord of the Rings and Santa Claus.

We often talk about emotions in more basic terms, such as disgust, joy, sadness, and anger, but of course it goes deeper than that. When talking to others, it helps to have the words to express these more complex feelings. Abby VanMuijen and Michelle McGhee, for The Pudding, take you on a tour of what it means to feel.

Bringing it down the Census tract level, Nadja Popovich, Mira Rojanasakul and Brad Plumer, for The New York Times, mapped emission estimates so you can see the impact of your neighborhood:

A map of emissions linked to the way people consume goods and services offers a different way to view what’s driving global warming. Usually, greenhouse gases are measured at the source: power plants burning natural gas or coal, cows belching methane or cars and trucks burning gasoline. But a consumption-based analysis assigns those emissions to the households that are ultimately responsible for them: the people who use electricity, drive cars, eat food and buy goods.

The estimates are based on research from the University of California, Berkeley.

We often think of big cities as dirtier and more pollution-heavy. By absolute counts, because there are more people, this is a correct statement, but from a per household point of view, the contrast is flipped.

With the holidays just about here, I’m sure there’s nothing you’d rather do more than listen to hours of visualization research talks from VIS 2022. Lucky for you: all the talks are online.

Just sit back, relax, and let the knowledge wash over you.