Sometimes it’s not worth finishing what you start.

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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]

Every ten years since 1952, Sight and Sound, a British film magazine, has asked critics to list the greatest movies of all time. The magazine announced the results from the 2022 poll. There was a clear shift in the rankings. The New York Times highlights the shift with a look through past polls and this year’s newcomers.

The pointers and film callouts bring meaning to an otherwise straightforward ranked list.

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Disney Research demonstrates their use of neural networks to seamlessly age and de-age someone’s face across a continuous range. Sure what is real anymore anyway.

Knowing the impact of an asteroid falling in your city might not seem immediately relevant, but if there’s one headed toward Earth and NASA is unable to knock it off course with one of their rockets, you will definitely want to know what will happen and prepare accordingly.

Good thing Neal Agarwal, based on research from Gareth Collins and Clemens Rumpf, made an asteroid simulator. Set the material, size, speed, impact angle, and location, and see the effects from the resulting crater, fireball, shock wave, wind, and earthquake.

Twitter Blue is a subscription service from Twitter that primarily provided premium features like link aggregation and tweet editing. However, after the acquisition, the service primarily let people acquire a fancy blue checkmark. Stuart A. Thompson, for The New York Times, used data collected by Travis Brown to show who paid for their checkmarks.

It’s a big scatterplot. Each dot represents a Twitter user, plotted by registration date on the x-axis and follower count on the y-axis. The scrolly piece guides you through the dots.

Speaking of old homes and energy efficiency in the UK, The Economist describes renovations that can help reduce energy usage, which is of heightened interest to the British government because it’s footing £40bn of citizens’ energy bills.

They include this small chart on energy efficiency by type of home and when it was built. It took me a second to separate the numbers on the right from the bars on the left, but I eventually got there. The Economist’s self-imposed space constraints for their charts must be fun to think about.

Philip Kennicott, Simon Ducroquet, Frank Hulley-Jones and Aaron Steckelberg, for The Washington Post, tour the evolution of UK architecture and temperature control:

Last summer, staff members at Hardwick Hall, a historic Elizabethan landmark in Derbyshire, were keenly aware of the excessive heat. The house, built during a period of exceptional cold known as the Little Ice Age, is a masterpiece of British architecture. With its glittering array of tall windows, it was vulnerable to the cold, but key design elements made it surprisingly efficient at managing the climate of its day.

As you’d expect, money plays a big role in the changing efficiencies.

Here’s the good stuff for November.

Aaron Williams, for The Pudding, shows upward mobility through his own experiences, moving as a child from a low-income city to a higher-income city.

It’s unclear what my mom meant by “better opportunities.” Still, I got the gist that it was about the socioeconomic measures think tanks, policymakers and researchers use to measure progress: education, housing and income.

I thought, “can I actually measure if moving made a difference?” Indeed, your environment impacts your future outcomes, but to what extent?

I like the nod to W.E.B. Du Bois through style and geometry.

I had a short chat with Alberto Cairo and Simon Rogers on The Data Journalism Podcast. They talk to people about data journalism. It’s a podcast. Thanks to Alberto and Simon for having me and luring me out of my bubble.

Connie Hanzhang Jin and Kaitlyn Radde, for NPR, used illustrations to explain how ranked-choice voting works. Instead of picking a single candidate, you can rank your choices, and if someone does not win outright, the rankings kick in.

You might have heard that Elon Musk bought Twitter, and among the many recent changes to the platform comes what appears to be an ideology shift. Gerrit De Vynck, Jeremy B. Merrill and Luis Melgar, for The Washington Post, show the shift through the lens of a baseline chart and follower counts among popular Democrats and Republicans.

How to Build a Happy Life from The Atlantic is a podcast on finding happiness:

In our pursuit of a happy life, we build, we structure, and we plan. Often, we follow conventional wisdom and strategize. But what happens when our plans fall through and expectations don’t meet reality—when the things that should make us happy don’t?

In season 3 of our How To series, Atlantic happiness correspondent Arthur Brooks and producer Rebecca Rashid seek to navigate the unexpected curves on the path to personal happiness—with data-driven insights and a healthy dose of introspection.

I’m late to this, but I had some downtime during the Thanksgiving break and liked the data- and research-centric episodes. As you might expect, there’s a lot of fuzziness in the numbers and there’s more than one way to find happiness.

Mark Doman and Alex Palmer, for ABC News, show the depth of the Tonga volcano that erupted earlier this year with a 3-D model. “While the depth of the caldera shocked him, the fact the rest of the volcano appeared to be largely unchanged was equally as surprising.”

Nick Evershed, for The Guardian, describes Noisycharts, an experimental component for their in-house charting tool:

What does rising global carbon dioxide sound like? Or the crash of the pound? How about Sydney’s record-breaking rainfall, or the share value wiped out following Facebook’s pivot to virtual reality?

While all of these things have been frequently graphed, now we can turn them into audio as well.

Noisycharts is a new tool created by Guardian Australia to easily turn data into sound, with an animation to accompany it.

One of the examples uses a modulated dog bark to demonstrate how the sounds can match with the context. That seems like a fun path to explore.

Unfortunately, it’s not meant for public use (yet?). For that, you might want to check out TwoTone.

Chris Dalla Riva analyzed key changes in songs that made the Billboard Hot 100, between 1958 and 2022. Key changes are near non-existent after 2010. The most interesting part is why:

Thus, if you changed the key of “Juicy,” Biggie wouldn’t necessarily have to change how he raps, but if you changed the key of “Over the Rainbow,” Judy Garland would have to sing different pitches. If you picked the wrong key, those pitches might be outside of her vocal range. In short, key doesn’t matter as much in hip-hop.

As hip-hop grew in popularity, the use of computers in recording also exploded too. Whereas the guitar and piano lend themselves to certain keys, the computer is key-agnostic. If I record a song in the key of C major into digital recording software, like Logic or ProTools, and then decide I don’t like that key, I don’t have to play it again in that new key. I can just use my software to shift it into that different key. I’m no longer constrained by my instrument.

See also the increasing similarity of Billboard songs.

Mira Rojanasakul, for The New York Times, dug into current and historical energy sources in Europe. With the war in Ukraine, Russia cut off natural gas supplies to other countries, but based on estimates from Ember, it looks like the biggest shifts recently are in other energy categories.

Monthly line charts are used for each country and energy source. Lines for previous years rest in the background in a light gray to serve as a point of comparison, whereas the lines for 2022 sit in the front with a bolder color and thicker width to indicate the point of interest.

Qatar spent $300 billion with a ‘b’ over the past twelve years to host the World Cup. For Bloomberg, Simone Foxman, Adveith Nair, and Sam Dodge show what that money went towards through satellite imagery. The shift is striking with a transition from desert flat land to stadiums and high rises over a short period of time.

These before-and-after satellite imagery pieces usually go the opposite direction, like after a natural disaster. So the sudden shift from nothing to a whole lot more is jaw-dropping.

Set the scales to highlight the changes in the data without abandoning the accuracy of the data.