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.

xkcd charted optimal bowling in terms of aim, speed, spin, and weight. This is very important.

Stable Diffusion is an AI model that lets you enter text to generate images. Spectrograms visually represent sound. Seth Forsgren and Hayk Martiros combined the two for Riffusion, which lets you enter text and the model generates a spectrogram that is converted to audio.

Read more about the process here.

That can’t be for real, right? Right? A basic chart is not quite what it seems.

Volodymyr Agafonkin and his family live in Kyiv, Ukraine. He visualized when the power went out over the past two months:

As you can see, we spend 4–8 hours in blackout during a typical day. You can notice some stepping patterns in the data — this is our energy workers trying to stabilize the blackouts into some kind of schedule, although it’s often overridden due to emergency shutdowns. More blackouts happen in the evening time because of the increased load on the grid, with everyone getting home after work and cooking dinner. There’s usually no need for blackouts at night because people go to sleep, and the load falls sharply — that’s usually the time for us to charge devices, turn on the washing machine & dishwasher, and occasionally bake something nice in the oven.

Conway’s Game of Life is a zero-person game where cells in a grid live or die based on a simple set of rules. You set the initial state and the cells change accordingly. Life Universe by saharan is an infinite game of life where you can zoom in and out recursively. Trippy.

The human body has its limits, so many bodybuilders take steroids to increase those limits to build bigger muscles. Bonnie Berkowitz and William Neff, for The Washington Post, used a combination of illustration and 3-D animations to show what happens and the risks of introducing more of everything to the body.

Visualization still seems like a relatively new thing, but it has a history that goes back a few centuries. The Information Graphic Visionaries book series celebrates this history with a profile of three makers — Florence Nightingale, Emma Willard, and Étienne-Jules Marey — and their work.

The series started as a Kickstarter campaign and the books have been making their way out. I just got my copy on Marey and the graphic method. I’m looking forward to digging in.

From Reddit user neilrkaye. This is very important.

Here’s a fun one from Philip Bump for The Washington Post. Bump simply asks how many wins it would take for sports franchises to reach a .500 record over the life of the franchise. The historically bad teams bubble to the top.

Sometimes it’s not worth finishing what you start.

From Maastricht University:

What happens if a SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus enters your lung? This molecular animation visualises how the virus particle can take over the host cell and turns it into a virus factory. Eventually, the host cell produces so many viral particles that it dies and releases numerous new virus particles.

Aw, such a cute little, life-altering virus. [via kottke]