It’s better to err on the side of obvious than leave things ambiguous.

Speaking of the heat wave in Europe, Pierre Breteau for Le Monde charted record high temperatures using a step chart for each weather station in France:

These graphs represent, for a part of the 146 stations for which Météo-France provided us with the data, the level of the most extreme temperatures ever recorded and their date.

The data are fragmentary because it is difficult to go back beyond the 1990’s, or even the August 2003 heat wave, and only those with a historical record of at least 20 years are shown below.

Many European countries are experience record high temperatures, so The Washington Post used melting popsicles to attach something relatable to the numbers and standard heatmap. But:

It turns out that it takes popsicles much longer to melt than we had expected. In this unscientific experiment, the shortest melt time was around 12 minutes, in 90 degrees Fahrenheit, under Madrid’s beating sun. It took as long as 50 minutes earlier in the day and in the shade.

I wish they’d taken it one or two steps further with a more scientific method. Try to use the same color or type of popsicle, put the popsicles out at the same time of day, or get a time-lapse of a control popsicle so that there’s a way to compare something. As it was made, the melting popsicles are just background images.

I’m sure there were time and resource constraints across countries, but it was such a good idea.

There’s a database of feathers called Featherbase, because of course there is:

Featherbase is a working group of German feather scientists and other collectors worldwide who came together with their personal collections and created the biggest and most comprehensive online feather library in the world. Using our website, it is possible to identify feathers from hundreds of different species, compare similarities between them, work out gender or age-specific characteristics and look at the statistics of countless feather measurements.

Researchers are studying the electrical rhythms in plant cells. I’m not sure what that means exactly or what they’re measuring, but it sounds fun.

Emily Badger and Eve Washington for NYT’s The Upshot show how the housing shortage, which was mostly thought of as a west and east coast problem, has grown into a country-wide problem. The tables that compare metro areas between 2012 and 2019, while the most simple, are the most informative in this piece.

Given the current restrictions in the U.S., Kendra Albert, Maggie Delano, and Emma Weil discuss data privacy for those who track their periods:

In their investigation, police try to find evidence that someone intended to miscarry, or was otherwise endangering the viability of their pregnancy. This is because a medical abortion presents the same way as a miscarriage, and prosecutors must prove intent or willful endangerment of an embryo or fetus in order to convict someone (though being arrested at all is traumatizing and can cause severe health consequences). Prosecutors must be able to prove their case beyond a reasonable doubt — data from a period tracker app is not enough on its own to prove this, even if it’s relevant.

I think there’s understandably been nervousness around tracking your period, but it seems that from a legal perspective, there’s little risk? Albert, Delano, and Weil also recommend privacy-centric apps and discuss the more technical aspects in a companion article.

As I’m sure you know, mass shootings, which gain attention because the scale of their severity is so high, make up only a fraction of total gun deaths. Several tens of thousands of people die from gun shots every year in the U.S. The Washington Post describes the full scope, covering purchases, restrictions, race, and geography.

The NRA Children’s Museum from Change the Ref is a mile-long convoy of empty school buses in memory of lives lost to guns:

Since 2020, firearms have overtaken car accidents to become the leading cause of death in children, taking over 4368 lives.

With the advent of this horrific moment, we’ve built a mobile museum made of 52 empty school buses representing 4368 victims. Some of the buses feature an exhibit of artifacts, photos, videos, audio recordings, and personal memories of these children who have lost their lives to guns.

While some parts of visualization are formulaic, outside variables require that you adjust.

There’s a data visualization book bundle on Humble Bundle this month. Get twenty-two books for eighteen dollars — with a portion of the proceeds going to Girls Who Code. Seems like a pretty good deal.

The first public picture from the James Webb telescope is kind of cool and all, but you can’t fully appreciate it unless you know what those glowing blobs represent and how they came to be. For Washington Post Opinion, Sergio Peçanha provides context for why NASA’s recent accomplishment is so awesome:

Everything about the Webb telescope is mind-boggling. Ponder this: Humans sent a telescope the size of a tennis court into space and parked it four times farther away than the moon.

There it orbits the sun along with us, just so we can get some pictures.

You’ve probably seen the moving bubbles that show how something changes over time. NYT Opinion lowered the abstraction level and showed little people climb the steps of income. The graphic is based on research by Ran Abramitzky and Leah Boustan:

Using the data set, Mr. Abramitzky and Ms. Boustan were able to compare the income trajectories of immigrants’ children with those of people whose parents were born in the United States. The economists found that on average, the children of immigrants were exceptionally good at moving up the economic ladder.

Abramitzky and Boustan just published a book on the topic.

NASA released an image from the Webb First Deep Field telescope, which shows a whole lot of galaxies:

Thousands of galaxies – including the faintest objects ever observed in the infrared – have appeared in Webb’s view for the first time. This slice of the vast universe covers a patch of sky approximately the size of a grain of sand held at arm’s length by someone on the ground.

We are tiny specks.

The United States Department of Agriculture provides annual inventory data on livestock, crops, and various products. The tool is very ad hoc government-looking, but it seems to work well enough.

Erin Davis made some fun maps that use the data at the county level to compare livestock populations to people populations. Davis compared animals individually, but the multivariate one that compares cows, chickens, and pigs is my favorite.

From the listener perspective, we pay our monthly or annual fees and just turn on our music streams. The path those fees take from our wallet to musicians is less straightforward. For The Pudding, Elio Quinton does a good job of visually explaining where the money goes (and some of the better ways you can support artists).

Use visual metaphors to shorten the distance between data and what it represents.

Income distribution continues to stretch on the high end and squish on the low end. For The New York Times, Sophie Kasakove and Robert Gebeloff look closer at what’s happening in the middle:

Nationally, only half of American families living in metropolitan areas can say that their neighborhood income level is within 25 percent of the regional median. A generation ago, 62 percent of families lived in these middle-income neighborhoods.

You’ve probably heard of the trolley problem, a thought experiment that imagines a trolley approaching a fork in the tracks. There are five people stuck on one path and one person stuck on the other. If the trolly continues on its current path, five people will die, but if you consciously switch the tracks, you could save them and only one person dies. Do you switch or let the trolley continue?

Neal Agarwal, who continues to gift the internet with fun projects, reframes the trolley problem with increasingly more absurd choices. You also get to see how others answered, so you can compare your own choices against the moral compass of the internet.

By purchasing certain foods, we make decisions about the carbon footprint from the production of those foods. Most of us don’t have a good idea of how much difference our choices can make though. Financial Times reports on policymakers working to make the footprint more obvious through food labeling.

Based on estimates from CarbonCloud, a scale on the FT piece weighs the carbon footprint per kilogram of various foods. The scale metaphor threw me off at first, because the item with a lower carbon footprint appeared visually higher. Of course with a scale, something heavier pushes down more, but my brain was thinking in terms of x-y-coordinates. Maybe that’s just me staring at too many charts.