With the announcement of free Covid-19 tests through the United States Postal Service, it’s interesting to watch to the analytics for U.S. government websites. USPS has more visitors right now than all the other government pages combined.

An underwater volcano erupted about 40 miles off the coast of the main island of Tonga. Using infrared data from the GOES satellite operated by NOAA, Mathew Barlow animated the ripple from the the source to around the world.

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— Dr. Mathew Barlow (@MathewABarlow) January 16, 2022

The filtered view, which shows band 13 data from the satellite’s sensors, typically to view cloud cover, is really something.

When I think swamp noise, I imagine a blob of sound that’s some mix of water and wildlife, but that’s because I don’t know anything. Mitchell Whitelaw, in collaboration with ecologist Skye Wassens, used recordings of Nap Nap Swamp in New South Wales, Australia to show you a breakdown of what the individual sounds are.

You hear the sounds of running water, wind, and different animals with various patterns. This is all framed over time and a subtle visualization to show water levels. The sound profile at the swamp changes as the water rises. Nice, calming work.

Using old Census records and documents, Julie Zauzmer Weil, Adrian Blanco and Leo Dominguez for The Washington Post tallied the congressmen who enslaved people over time. There were more than 1,700 enslavers over Congress’s first 130 years.

The grid (or tile) map above shows the timeline for each state, showing the percentage of officials who were enslavers from 1789 to 1923. Periods before states gained statehood status are faded out.

The discussions this week felt familiar. Probably because we’ve seen this many times, since the beginning of charts themselves.

Schema Design, Google Trends, and Axios collaborated on The New Normal, looking at how searches for certain products has changed since the pandemic started. Keywords were taken from Google’s product taxonomy, and search volumes are from Google Shopping.

From there, the keywords, compared to search from 2019, were categorized as a new normal, unusual, or about the same as before. They categorized the words manually instead of defining a metric, which surprised me. It seems like it would’ve been useful for sorting beyond alphabetical. Still interesting to poke at though.

Using data from NOAA, Krishna Karra and Tim Wallace for The New York Times mapped all-time temperature records set in 2021. Red indicates an all-time high, and blue indicates an all-time low. Circle size represents the degree difference from the previous record.

The internet was once this fun place where people had goofy debates about how to pronounce “gif” (with a hard g), the color of a dress (blue and black), and whether or not a hot dog is a sandwich (no). That place is no more, leaving unsettled debates just floating around out there.

Luckily, Neal Agarwal compiled the hot debates in one place to settle the scores once and for all.

Congressional redistricting and gerrymandering are important topics, because they can directly change election results. However, gerrymandering is called gerrymandering, so it’s too easy to get lost in the details. Well, fret no more. Dylan Moriarty and Joe Fox for The Washington Post made a miniature golf game to teach what’s currently at stake.

It’s a ten-hole course where each putting green is in the shape of a district. The shapes grow more complex as you progress, and the game keeps score for you, so that you can compare your score to par or how other readers performed. It has sound, pretty watercolors, and it’s fun to play.

In the process, the Post tricks you into learning. Win-win.

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We’ve learned more about the universe since Charles and Ray Eames produced Powers of Ten in 1977, so the BBC made an homage to the film, updating with what we know now. Spoiler alert: the universe is still big.

The Powers of Ten by Charles and Ray Eames from 1977 shows the size of the universe by starting at human scale and then zooming out further and further. Then it comes back down to Earth and zooms in closer and closer.

I’ve linked to this iconic film a few times but just wanted to put up an actual post here for reference. You should definitely check it out if you haven’t seen it before.

This spiralized chart by Gus Wezerek and Sara Chodosh for NYT Opinion has sparked discussions on what it means to communicate data. A lot of people don’t like it. I’m gathering my thoughts, but I think it’s fine for two main reasons: (1) it’s a lead-in to an opinion piece and (2) it’s not trying to replace the straight-up linear views that we’ve grown uncomfortably familiar with over two-plus years.

Surf is a data-based game by Andy Bergmann that lets you move across a thirty-seven-year time series from NOAA. The data forms the waves, and you’re a dog on a surf board jumping over sharks.

It’s kind of like a stripped down version of Alto’s Adventure but with data. Fun.

It’s time to bask in the joys of knowing nothing again.

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I’m not sure there’s any way to really understand the scale of the largest black holes in the universe, but Kurzgesagt gives it a good try.

One of my favorites of the year, Sam Learner’s River Runner shows you a terrain map that lets you place a drop of rain anywhere in the contiguous United States. You’re then taken on a river tour that shows where the drop ends up. Learner just expanded the project to let you drop water anywhere in the world.

The Washington Post and ProPublica analyzed Facebook group posts that disputed election results:

To determine the extent of posts attacking Biden’s victory, The Post and ProPublica obtained a unique dataset of 100,000 groups and their posts, along with metadata and images, compiled by CounterAction, a firm that studies online disinformation. The Post and ProPublica used machine learning to narrow that list to 27,000 public groups that showed clear markers of focusing on U.S. politics. Out of the more than 18 million posts in those groups between Election Day and Jan. 6, the analysis searched for words and phrases to identify attacks on the election’s integrity.

The more than 650,000 posts attacking the election — and the 10,000-a-day average — is almost certainly an undercount. The ProPublica-Washington Post analysis examined posts in only a portion of all public groups, and did not include comments, posts in private groups or posts on individuals’ profiles. Only Facebook has access to all the data to calculate the true total — and it hasn’t done so publicly.

Read more about the methodology behind the analysis.

May Louise Kelly for NPR spoke briefly with biostatistics professor Natalie Dean on the omicron surge and what we can take away from the data:

Yeah, I mean, the public health impact is made up a lot of different things, and we’re most acutely interested in severe disease and death. But, of course, infections have impacts and we think about the disruption – you know, all the people who are going to need to miss work, including health care professionals and, you know, frontline workers. So the numbers have meaning, but it is a different public health impact when someone is mildly ill or doesn’t even have symptoms than when someone is severely ill.

The numbers are up but they don’t mean the same thing from when the numbers were up last time.

Sarah Kliff and Aatish Bhatia for NYT’s The Upshot look at the uncertainty of prenatal tests for rare conditions. For some tests, the results are more often wrong than they are right, which causes issues when expecting parents don’t know that.

Along with square pie charts, the piece goes into more detail with unit charts to explain what the percentages mean from a counts point of view. So if a reader doesn’t quite know what a false positive is before reading, they will have a better idea after.