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.
In early 2021, the average rate for a 30-year fixed rate mortgage was under three percent. According to Freddie Mac, the average rate for the past week was 7.23%. That’s a big enough increase to feel the difference in your monthly payment, but it stings even more when you compound the cost over the length of a mortgage.
Use this chart to see how many times over you’ll pay over the original loan amount, given the annual rate and the number of years of paying.
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.
Process the data into a usable format, which makes the visualization part more straightforward.
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.
Among households in the United States, 68% are owned and 32% are rented, based on estimates from the American Community Survey in 2021. That breakdown isn’t uniform across the country though. In Maine, almost 80% of households are owned, whereas in California, less than 60% is owned. In Washington, D.C., it’s less than half. Here are the splits for each state.
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.
[arve url=”https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hIGNaDk9eIA” /]
Visualizing time series data often assumes that your data points are evenly spaced over time, which is not always the case.
For The New York Times, Miles Marshall Lewis highlights the etymology of five words in the English language heavily influenced by hip-hop: dope, woke, cake, wildin’, and ghost. A fun design using GIFs, images, and rotating discs you can click for music take you through the history.
It keeps getting hotter around the world. Not every single day. But over time, there are increasingly more hot days and fewer cold days.
For Bloomberg, Zahra Hirji, Rachael Dottle and Denise Lu lean into layered density plots to show the shift and the path towards extreme climates.
They show distributions, which can be a challenge for non-data people to understand. So they take their time in the beginning to explain what the chart type shows, with a combination of color, animation, and labeling that stays consistent through the article.
A supermarket chain in New Zealand offered an AI-based recipe generator, and of course people started throwing in random household items to see what it would make. For The Guardian, Tess McClure reports:
The app, created by supermarket chain Pak ‘n’ Save, was advertised as a way for customers to creatively use up leftovers during the cost of living crisis. It asks users to enter in various ingredients in their homes, and auto-generates a meal plan or recipe, along with cheery commentary. It initially drew attention on social media for some unappealing recipes, including an “oreo vegetable stir-fry”.
When customers began experimenting with entering a wider range of household shopping list items into the app, however, it began to make even less appealing recommendations. One recipe it dubbed “aromatic water mix” would create chlorine gas. The bot recommends the recipe as “the perfect nonalcoholic beverage to quench your thirst and refresh your senses”.
Visualize This: The FlowingData Guide to Design, Visualization, and Statistics
Available now.
