You know what they say about assumptions.

Neal Agarwal is up to his wonderful ridiculousness again. Imagining an elevator that goes up to space, a long scroll through the skies gives you a sense of elevation up until you leave Earth. See how high birds fly, where the wild yak resides, and who was the first person to break the sound barrier in a free fall.

Maybe you’ve wished you could quickly grab the data on a webpage and instantly have it in a structured format. But you don’t know how to program or you do, but don’t want to go through the trouble of writing another one-off script. Samantha Sunne provides a short guide for scraping without programming, mainly with Google Sheets.

When you have a lot of noisy data, it can be helpful to detect signals in some sort of quantitative and automated way rather than just eyeballing it. Signal detection theory can provide some of the pieces to this puzzle. Adam Krawitz has a detailed interactive guide:

This site approaches SDT from multiple complementary points of view. First, we use SDT to fit your empirical data from an example task, and consider how well the theory accounts for the data. Second, we use SDT to make predictions by running simulations with an SDT-based model performing the task and generating synthetic data. And third, we explore the space of possible results that can be generated by SDT, providing an existence proof for its capabilities.

[arve url=”https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=inOYC2cM27o” /]

A straightforward lineup of animals that fly provide a sense of scale, from tiny to very big. I feel like some everyday objects like a car or a helicopter would’ve really driven the point, but it’s neat to see.

Reuters dug in to the science of sleep and how paying attention to our rhythms affect our health. On dreams:

Sleep itself has cycles, in which the brain and body move through phases, marked by varying brain activity. In the deepest phases of sleep, the brain waves are slowest. The lighter phases have more rapid bursts of activity.

Our most intense dreams usually happen during Rapid Eye Movement (REM) sleep, when brain activity, breathing, heart rate, and blood pressure all increase, the eyes move rapidly, and muscles are limp. Scientists believe dreams in REM and non-REM sleep have different content – the more vivid or bizarre dreams usually happen during REM stages.

See also: our actual sleep schedules.

Looking for what it means.

For The New York Times, Josh Holder and Marco Hernandez show the areas still controlled by Ukraine and the areas captured by Russia. But instead of a single map, they split up the regions into multiples and arranged them by time.

It rained a lot more than usual this winter in California. Diana Leonard and Dylan Moriarty, for The Washington Post, explain the science behind all the water falling from the sky.

Despite available vacation days, it appears that American workers are taking less and less vacation. Andrew Van Dam, for The Washington Post’s Department of Data, has the demographic breakdowns:

It does not seem to be a matter of vacation-day supply. It is true that the United States is the only advanced economy without guaranteed paid vacation. However, BLS data on employee benefits suggests that more than 90 percent of full-time, private-industry workers have access to paid vacation time, a figure that has remained relatively steady for decades. And the number of paid vacation days offered by the typical employer has ticked up in recent years.

So we looked instead at vacation-day demand: Who uses the most? Has that changed?

If you don’t use a colorblind-safe color palette in your maps and charts, a significant percentage of people will get nothing out of your work. For The Verge, Andy Baio, who is colorblind, discusses the experience across the web:

Because red and green are complementary colors opposite one another on the color wheel, they’ve become the default colors for every designer who wants to represent opposites: true and false, high and low, stop and go.

Inconveniently, these are also the two colors most likely to be mixed up by people with color vision deficiencies.

I wish every designer in the world understood this and would switch to, say, red and blue for opposing colors. But I know that won’t happen: the cultural meaning is too ingrained.

They used a slider mechanism to show what people with normal vision see and then what Baio sees. I’m usually not into the slider, which often shows a before-and-after view that is meant to highlight contrast. In this case, the views are so different that the contrast works.

For FiveThirtyEight, Geoffrey Skelley digs into the ongoing trend:

What’s behind these increasingly older Congresses? The country’s aging population as a whole is chiefly responsible, which is most apparent in the disproportionate influence the baby boomer generation has on Capitol Hill. Coupled with longer-running trends that have made it more likely for members of Congress to win reelection and stick around, this has all helped make Congress older than ever before. And the overrepresentation of boomers doesn’t just produce moments like those of the TikTok hearings — it also has real effects on the type of policies passed by the federal legislature.

This clever chart by Lazaro Gamio shows changing interest rates set by the Fed and changing projections. The animation makes it.

Focus on the goal or get lost in the sea of infinite solutions.

Jenka Gurfinkel discusses the appearance of the American smile in AI-generated images and its implications in interpreting data:

Every American knows to say “cheese” when taking a photo, and, therefore, so does the AI when generating new images based on the pattern established by previous ones. But it wasn’t always like this. More than a century after the first photograph was captured, a reference to “cheesing” for photos first appeared in a local Texas newspaper in 1943. “Need To Put On A Smile?” the headline asked, “Here’s How: Say ‘Cheese.’” The article quoted former U.S. ambassador Joseph E. Davies who explained that this influencer photo hack would be “Guaranteed to make you look pleasant no matter what you’re thinking […] it’s an automatic smile.” Davies served as ambassador under Franklin D. Roosevelt to the U.S.S.R.

My natural face is generously non-smiley, so this resonated.

The 2022 results from the State of the Industry survey, run by the Data Visualization Society, are out. Among 1,218 respondents, see the roles, the salaries, and the responsibilities:

The overall median of the annual compensation graphs is at $60,000 to $79,999 per year, with very few respondents reporting over $159,000 per year, and a small but notable increase in the number of respondents reporting annual compensation in the $240,000 per year or more category.

I’d have to look at the actual data, which you can get for this year and previous, but my hunch that the split distribution in salary is between non-tech and tech workers.

Riding a bicycle is a seemingly simple activity that we never forget how to do. However, the physics behind pedaling and movement is a balance between force and resistance. Bartosz Ciechanowski breaks it down in a visual essay filled with interactive demos.

The structure of Ciechanowski’s essays are straightforward with the interactives doing a lot of the heavy-lifting for every concept. The physics are split into many small parts for ease of understanding. It makes me wonder about a data visualization equivalent to explain a complex dataset.

We tend to use more water than is available in the world, which as you can imagine, can be problematic. In a collaborative effort, National Geographic mapped the water gap since 1980:

The result is a water gap in an increasing number of places. Humans are using more water than the water cycle can provide, and so we deplete shallow aquifers, and may need to tap into deep ones that will not be renewed in our lifetime. In the process we threaten not only our own health, peace, and well-being, but also the health of ecosystems and wildlife.

Taylor Swift is currently on tour. During a show, she sings 44 songs split up into 10 acts as she moves across a spectacle of a stage. A fan, who goes by vinoj, mapped Swift’s path and location as she performs every song, one map for each act.