We’ve been hearing a lot about inflation rates lately on a national scale. However, how inflation impacts you depends on what you spend your money on. Ben Casselman and Ella Koeze for The New York Times provide an estimate for you.

For Swee Kombucha, Bedow used a stacked chart as a food label to show the ingredient breakdowns for various beverages. The greater the area is, the more ingredient by volume there is in the drink.

This project takes me back. See also nutritional facts redesigned, alcoholic beverage pie charts, the engineer’s guide to drinks, and coffee drink breakdowns. The two-year span from 2010 to 2011 was quite the renaissance period for beverage percentages.

The United States is about to reach one million confirmed Covid deaths, or already passed the mark if you consider excess deaths. There’s no way to truly feel that number, but Axios visualized the scale, with comparisons against city populations and historical events.

A diamond shape represents counts, and as you scroll, shapes fill the screen until you only see the tips. The shapes overflow beyond what we can or want to understand. The time series line on the bottom shows cumulative deaths over time, leading towards the one-million mark.

Joey Cherdarchuk used a lightning metaphor to visualize the outcomes of races from the 2021 season. The x-axis represents how far ahead or behind the each racer is compared to the average. The y-axis represents laps. Racing and thunder sounds play in the background for dramatic effect. I’m into it.

The rules around a car’s aerodynamics for Formula 1 racing changed a lot this year, which means new challenges and big shifts in team rankings. Josh Katz and Jeremy White, for The New York Times, illustrated the changes and how modifications affect a car’s performance.

The @LpzfuersKlima team have completed painting a giant representation of the Warming Stripes on the Sachsenbrücke in Leipzig, thanks to crowd funding.
Already starting conversations for those using the bridge. #ShowYourStripes pic.twitter.com/OFY9Jeq1zH

— Ed Hawkins (@ed_hawkins) April 27, 2022

It amazes me how many places in the world Ed Hawkins’ Warming Stripes appears. My favorite has still gotta be the shower tiles.

Use the tool that works for you.

The Washington Post has a set of charts showing the current status of abortion in the United States. The treemap above shows counts by state in 2017, based on estimates from the Guttmacher Institute.

Twelve percent took place in states that have trigger bans, laws passed that would immediately outlaw most abortions in the first and second trimesters if Roe were overturned. (Those states are already some of the most restrictive.) And 27 percent occurred in states that plan to enact other new restrictions.

If Roe v. Wade is overturned, over 200 clinics would potentially have to close. Bloomberg mapped it, along with charts showing more than half of child-bearing people in the United States with new restrictions.

People like beef. To raise more cattle, companies need more land. Sometimes to get more land, companies turn to unethical methods. Terrence McCoy and Júlia Ledur for The Washington Post:

By reviewing thousands of shipment and purchase logs, and analyzing satellite imagery of Amazon cattle ranches, The Post found that JBS has yet to disentangle itself from ties to illegal deforestation. The destruction is hidden at the base of a long and multistep supply chain that directly connects illegally deforested ranches — and ranchers accused of environmental infractions — to factories authorized by the U.S. government to export beef to the United States.

Matt Dray is developing a package in R that runs a text-based game. Part of that game requires procedural dungeons that are different each time you play.

If Roe v. Wade were overturned, abortion policies would change in many states. From last year, Daniela Santamariña and Amber Phillips, for The Washington Post, mapped what would happen.

[arve url=”https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7WhRJV_bAiE” /]

I’ll probably never tire of these sort of videos. It starts at human scale and then zooms in closer and closer until it gets to quarks.

Tucker Carlson hosts a nightly show viewed by millions. The New York Times analyzed the changing structure of the show and Carlson’s recurring speaking points, over a span of 1,150 episodes. NYT shows the results with a mix of audio and video clips and wideout views like the one above, which mark episodes that use specific types of rhetoric.

In 2017, a study posited that human behavior complexity peaks at age 25 and then declines, especially after age 60. The researchers estimated complexity through people’s ability to make up random patterns. Russell Goldenberg and Arjun Kakkar, for The Pudding, let you put the theory to the test and discuss why the original researcher’s findings were questionable.

Nuclear energy has bad memories linked to it, which tends to draw fear from the general public. Harry Stevens, for The Washington Post, explains why some feel the fear is unwarranted:

This explanation vastly oversimplifies a great deal of sophisticated engineering. However, the basic concept of a steam-powered electricity plant had been worked out by the late 1800s. “The only thing the 20th century gave us was a new way to make steam by heating it with nuclear fission,” said James Mahaffey, a retired nuclear engineer who has written several books on nuclear energy.

The piece includes cartoon circles with eyes to describe a fission chain reaction. Classic Stevens. Stevens should include cartoon eyes in every piece he makes for his own bit of branding.

Here’s the good stuff for April.

There’s a subreddit where people share a story and ask if they’re the asshole. WTTDOTM and Alex Petros trained AI models based on the responses so that you can enter your own story and see what the AI outputs as responses:

AYTA responses are auto-generated and based on different datasets. The red model has only been trained on YTA responses and will always say you are at fault. The green model has only been trained on NTA responses and will always absolve you. And the white model was trained on the pre-filtered data. Have fun!

Unfortunately you only get three responses from your input, one from each model. It would’ve been fun if the AI tried to make a final call.

Lorenzo Franceschi reporting for Motherboard on a leaked Facebook document:

“We do not have an adequate level of control and explainability over how our systems use data, and thus we can’t confidently make controlled policy changes or external commitments such as ‘we will not use X data for Y purpose.’ And yet, this is exactly what regulators expect us to do, increasing our risk of mistakes and misrepresentation,” the document read. (Motherboard retyped the document from scratch to protect a source.)

In other words, even Facebook’s own engineers admit that they are struggling to make sense and keep track of where user data goes once it’s inside Facebook’s systems, according to the document. This problem inside Facebook is known as “data lineage.”

Hm.