K-pop grew mainstream-popular in countries outside South Korea over the past few years. This growth partially comes from efforts to internationalize the music genre with changes in language and group members from around the world. For Bloomberg, Sohee Kim, Jin Wu, and Jeremy C.F. Lin have the data rundown.

Plus points for the variable width bar chart and a star microphone for a cursor.

Kirk Goldsberry, with help from Andy Woodruff, combined two joys — basketball and maps. The result is ATLAS, which is a basketball that is also a globe. Genius.

The limited first run already sold out, but they’re taking pre-orders for a larger run now.

To show the counties with more or fewer jobs when comparing 2023 to 2019, Ben Casselman and Ella Koeze for the New York Times use a county map with up and down arrows. Green and up means a gain, whereas orange and down means a loss.

We’ve seen similar maps with arrows, but they’re usually angled or swooped. I guess I always assumed arrows going straight up and down would jumble together, but this seems to work.

Every month I collect tools and resources to help you make better charts. This is the good stuff for August 2024.

To show poverty in the Pacific Region between age groups, gender, and location, Kristin Baumann used a plant metaphor. Each element on the interactive represents an attribute. As a whole, the better the plant grows for a country, the lower the poverty.

Pretty.

The project was centered around a Pacific data challenge, but it’d interesting to see a whole bunch of plants for a lot more countries.

In a riff on Climate Stripes, which shows global temperature change as a color-coded barcode chart, Air Quality Stripes uses a similar encoding to show pollution concentration from 1850 through 2021.

In the latest of the genre I-followed-AI-advice-blindly-here-is-what-I-got, Ceylan Yeğinsu for the New York Times, tried AI trip planners for a Norway itinerary:

Overall, Mindtrip — with its polished, dynamic interface that allowed me to cross-check details with maps, links and reviews — was my favorite. While it gave some good recommendations, Mindtrip needed more prompting than Vacay, which offered a wider variety of suggestions in more detail. Unfortunately, Vacay doesn’t save chat history, which I discovered halfway into my planning after closing the website’s tab on my browser.

The biggest drawback was the absence of phone apps for Mindtrip and Vacay, which led me to rely on ChatGPT’s basic A.I. assistant when I needed on-the-spot guidance. Mindtrip, I’ve since learned, is planning to debut an app in September.

This seems like the natural next step from searching Tripadvisor for top reviewed things to do in a given place. So the experience seems as expected.

But I can’t wait until AI just takes the entire trip for you and then we won’t ever have to go anywhere. When is that going to happen? Amazing times ahead.

Annette Manes, a retired widow and single mother who saved by spending little, was scammed out of $1.4 million of her life savings. Bloomberg shows the large deposits and withdrawals through Manes’ JPMorgan checking account with a step chart. There’s also a Sankey diagram to show the splits and bank-specific timelines that make you wonder why the banks’ systems didn’t start alerts sooner.

The style of annotation and scrolling through time reminds me of the 2015 chart showing one person’s weight loss diary.

The Data GIF Maker is a fun tool from Google that lets you add movement to a handful of straightforward charts. Enter up to five values and select from four chart types. Get a downloadable GIF that you can stick in a presentation.

Here’s a small example for a stacked bar with two values:

The charts are simple and the animations are just bringing the data into view. I prefer to show charts outright, but if this is your thing, the tool makes it really easy.

Ben Grosser made a personal mini-site that indicates whether or not he’s on TikTok:

Stuck in the Scroll is a compulsive scrolling monitor that reveals, in real-time, whether I’m currently scrolling TikTok. Think of this work as a last-ditch effort, a sort of public confessional as therapeutic tool aimed at defusing the intense compulsion I feel every day to endlessly scroll the world’s most popular video app.

Combine this with counting the days you have left in life and you’ve got yourself a proper YOLO app.

You spent time and effort on a data project and it ends up in unexpected places. Do you just shrug and let it pass or do you try to get a handle on the work so that it’s not misconstrued out of context?

The climate is changing, and researchers believe that after some point, there will be no going back. The balance will be too out of order to fix. For the New York Times, Raymond Zhong and Mira Rojanasakul map the possible places affected, along with timelines for where we are and when the change might happen.

I appreciate the illustrative aesthetics. A sort of fragile uncertainty in our future.

Living in city centers with little space to spend time outside and a lot of space for cars is not ideal. However, the elimination of roads for cars to drive on is also usually not ideal. Superblocks, as Amanda Shendruk for the Washington Post illustrates, is an urban planning compromise that gives way to pedestrians in the center and cars around the perimeter.

Speaking of data projects in unexpected places, David Mora repurposed one of my alluvial diagrams on meat consumption over time in the video below. He uses a wooden ladle to commentate as if it were a meat race. Yep.

I’m into it. Maybe all time-based charts with multiple categories should get the sports commentary treatment. Put them on ESPN8 The Ocho.

See the original chart and more food categories here.

A few years ago, I made an interactive chart that guesses your name as you type. It considered your sex and decade of birth. For some reason it regained some momentum this month and it ended up on New Jersey 101.5.

It was the Deminski & Moore show on August 13, around the 32-minute mark. People called in with their first initial and the hosts guessed the name for about half an hour. It was fun to hear people so amused by names data.

Neal Agarwal made a game of sorts where you either click for the sun or the moon. The points and the positions change based on how quickly you and others click in real-time.

It’s so dumb. It’s so good. I’m guessing Agarwal drew inspiration from the recent but now laid to rest one million checkboxes.

It’s gotten relatively easy to replace mouth movements in video and to generate speech to sound like a specific person. So of course scammers are using the tools that are readily available to steal people’s life savings. For the New York Times, Stuart A. Thompson shows how deepfake Elon Musk videos are used in fake ads to promote junk.

I can’t see how any of this ends well for us.

One Million Screenshots, by Urlbox, is a collection of 1,048,576 homepage screenshots in a browsable grid layout. Search for a website or browse to random ones.

Sites are chosen based on rank in the Common Craw web graph, and new screenshots are taken on the first of each month.

More popular sites are closer the middle of the grid, and they seem to be loosely organized by dominant color. There’s some weirdness in the bottom left quadrant where gray squares seem to suggest broken screenshots.

If you run a site, it’s a good way to make you feel extra tiny.

Choosing colors can seem like a burden when you just want to make something quick, which is why some people just use default color schemes. But the few extra minutes is worth it.