To everyone’s surprise, that people definitely did not see coming, fake satellite images are sprinkling over social media to disperse fiction. For Financial Times, Dan Clark and Chris Campbell report on the misinformation that has become trivial to generate.

One might argue that scammers have been able to do this with Photoshop for a long time, but now it’s so easy to fake believable images. When something is easy to do, more people do it. That’s the law of lazy.

By Nadieh Bremer with Emily Barone, this is a charming piece on the birds people search for through Google. It’s a six-parter on the wide variety of birds, bird taxonomy, sharing, sightings by birders as they relate to searches, popularity by state, and patterns over time.

It’s all wrapped up in a bird theme with nests, eggs, and feathers, which makes the data all the more enjoyable.

Reuters Graphics has a feed of maps and charts for updates on Iran. They’ve covered evacuations, activities from neighboring countries, marine and air traffic, and views from above. Three clocks show the current time in Tehran, Tel Aviv, and Washington, D.C.

In 2017, researchers asked study participants via MTurk to list three happy moments they had in the past 24 hours. The researchers released the data as HappyDB, which provides 100,000 happy moments along with demographics. For the Pudding, Alvin Chang made an abstract map that places the moments based on less agency to more agency on the x-axis and immediate to long-term on the y-axis.

A Gemini LLM was used to classify the data into continents, countries, and states, based on type of happiness. You can zoom in to the individuals to read the moments and you can filter by location, age, sex, parental status, and marital status.

Having worked with this data a bit, I wonder if this map looks different if the ultrarich answered. Or maybe a yacht with five people on it just travels through the waterways.

ProPublica has been collecting thousands of disclosure documents, and they made a searchable database with the processed information.

Most political appointees and senior officials in the executive branch are required by law to file public financial disclosure reports. These are documents that detail their financial holdings, positions they hold outside government, their spouse’s holdings, their liabilities and their recent financial transactions (such as buying or selling stock) during a defined reporting period.

You can currently see the assets for the president and his 1,573 appointees, along with their roles outside government and compensation.

This week is about animating data to better show insights and to keep randos engaged on the internets.

The New York Times mapped the traffic difference at the Strait of Hormuz, before and after the attacks on Iran.

Every day, around 80 oil and gas tankers typically pass through the Strait of Hormuz, the narrow waterway off Iran’s southern coast that carries a fifth of the world’s oil and a significant amount of natural gas.

On Monday, just two oil and gas tankers appear to have crossed the strait, according to a New York Times analysis of shipping activity from Kpler, an industry data firm. On Tuesday, one tanker passed through.

This uses the same data as the Zeit map, except the NYT comparison with moving dots looks more like an ant farm.

Normally there is a steady flow of ships through the strait, but when Israel and the United States attacked Iran, many ships docked and traffic stalled on February 28. For Die Zeit, Gregor Aisch and Zacharias Zacharakis report on the stoppage with an animated map.

The data comes from Kpler Marine Traffic, which shows ship locations in real-time around the world.

With hundreds of thousands of Ukrainian drone flights every month, countries have had to dramatically shift their strategies. Financial Times illustrates how things are different.

Kyiv claims Moscow suffered 35,000 losses in December alone. Volodymyr Zelenskyy, Ukraine’s president, said there was now a “clear price” for every kilometre of extra land seized on the Donetsk front: 156 Russian soldiers.

The pressure of aerial surveillance has also lengthened rotations. Infantry, as well as drone, anti-tank and mortar operators, remain in position for extended periods, because relief movements are so dangerous.

There are countless stories of troops spending months dug in at forward posts.

In celebration of the lunar new year, many people release a lantern into the night sky on the last day of festivities. Taiwan Data Stories made a fun interactive that lets you customize and release your own lantern.

One of the festival’s most iconic traditions is the release of sky lanterns (天燈), especially in Pingxi (平溪) in New Taipei City. As evening falls, thousands of glowing lanterns drift into the night sky, each inscribed with handwritten wishes for the year ahead. In the Year of the Horse, many lanterns feature the character 「馬」, reflecting the horse’s cultural associations with vitality, speed, endurance, and forward momentum.

I hope next year they turn this into a community interactive that shows everyone’s lanterns and hopes floating around.

A decade and a half ago, there used to be a site called 43 Things where people listed their goals in life. I made a now defunct interactive that showed goals floating by as people entered new items. It was calming to watch so much hope move across the screen.

For Businessweek, Cecilia D’Anastasio, Olivia Solon, and Leon Yin analyzed the unusual luck of streamers while gambling on Stake. The rapper Drake and streamer Adin Ross in particular seemed to have relatively high win rates, which isn’t that weird on its own, but is a lot more weird when compared to other streamers.

There were a lot of words in this article that I did not know initially. I am now more in tune with modern times. Thank you, Businessweek.

Really, I’m just here for the data, beeswarm chart made of stars, and the spinning callout to read more. Find the authors’ methodology here.

Imagine points for each piece on a chessboard. They move to x-y positions and then upwards for each move. Santiago Ortiz used this scheme to visualize famous chess matches. The above represents the second game between Garry Kasparov versus Deep Blue in 1997.

Isotype, or International System of Typographic Picture Education, is a picture language used to communicate concepts and ideas. The method is often paired with or used as visualization. RJ Andrews cataloged examples from his historical collection of works, which you can browse by chart type and feature.

The folks who made Dark Sky, my once go-to weather app that was inevitably acquired by Apple, are back with a new weather app: Acme Weather. Instead of oversimplifying a forecast only to show what is most likely, you also get other possible ways the day can go.

Understanding this uncertainty is crucial for planning your day. Most weather apps will give you their single best guess, leaving you to wonder how sure they actually are, and what else might happen instead. Will it actually start raining at 9am, or might it end up pushed off until noon? Will there be rain or snow? How sure are you? You can’t plan your day if you don’t know how much you can trust the forecast, or know what other possibilities might arise. Rather than pretending we will always be right, Acme Weather embraces the idea that our forecast will sometimes be wrong.

Embracing uncertainty. Just like the Nicolas Cage title character in the movie The Weather Man. It’s not just wind.

They also have fun things in the works like rainbow alerts and beautiful sunsets. I might have to switch.

Here is what happened in February.

Mechanical Pencil is a project by Bryan Macomber that illustrates the mechanical bits in everyday objects. The process:

I take the product apart. CAD it up. Illustrate each view. Then animate and lay it out for the web. That sounds quick, but it does take me quite a bit of time to create each one.

The leading object is, naturally, a mechanical pencil. Did you know that the plastic part that holds the lead in place is called a chuck? Other items so far include a Pez dispenser, a pen, and a lighter.

The interactive illustrations are satisfying to open, close, click, and release. I want more.

The challenges continue for women who want clothes that fit properly. For the Pudding, Amanda Sakuma, with Jan Diehm, explains the variation in women’s size and shape, the inconsistencies in sizing across stores, and how the overlap between these two creates sizing chaos.

This piece does a good job of showing and explaining distributions, which is a tough concept to grasp for non-data folks. The illustrations of women instead of just dots on the beeswarm help keep you focused on the variation.

LLMs are based on data and text collected from the internets, so as you might expect, when you query for opinions about places in a chatbot, you get output that reflects the inputs. For the Washington Post, Geoffrey A. Fowler and Kevin Schaul chart and map the opinions for cities and states in ChatGPT output.

This is based on the work of researchers at the University of Oxford and the University of Kentucky. Apparently you can’t ask what region is the best or worst straight up, but you can put one region against another and ask which is better or worse. The researchers ran various tests for various qualities and calculated the percentages.

The project reminds me of when people were putzing around with Google suggestions to find stereotypes for states in the U.S. and countries. These were funny at the time, because you knew the suggestions were based on what people search for. With chatbots, the sourcing and output format makes opinion look a lot like facts, which will lead to much confusion.

People are usually not great at remembering exact colors. Dialed is a fun memory game to test that theory. You get five seconds to memorize a color and then adjust hue, saturation, and lightness to match. Each attempt gets a score.

I wonder if FlowingData readers, who often have to match shades in a chart with color legends, will naturally do better. I only scored 39, which I’ll take as reinforcement that direct labeling is better than legends and not that I have a terrible memory.