Lingdong Huang’s project fishdraw seems straightforward on the surface. You go to the page and there’s a drawing of a fish. But then you keep clicking the refresh arrow and realize the fish are procedurally generated, including the name on the bottom. So good.

You’re gonna miss out on all the good stuff if you just stare at the middle.

Ranking countries by medal count change depending on how much value you place on each medal. Should you just count number of medals straight up, or should you give more weight for gold than for silver or bronze? Josh Katz for The New York Times revamped his 2018 interactive for 2020 results, which lets you assign different weights to see how the overall rankings change.

The United States took first and China second, but there are many rank combinations among the rest.

Zach Levitt and Jess Eng for The Washington Post mapped newly developed areas in the contiguous United States, between 2001 and 2019:

Between 2001 and 2019, the built-up landscape of America — buildings, roads and other structures — has expanded into previously undeveloped areas, adding more than 14,000 square miles of new development across the contiguous United States — an area over five times the size of Delaware.

My favorite part is the interactive map, which lets you see development in your area. The purple indicating newly developed areas against the grayscale provides a quick reference.

The maps are based on data from the United States Geological Survey, which you can grab here.

Most people are familiar with the file-and-folder view. Sort alphabetically, date, or file type, and scroll up and down. This works well when you know what you’re looking for, but sometimes you could use a quick overview of what a codebase looks like. Amelia Wattenberger for GitHub used packed circles.

The fun part is towards the end where you can enter any repo to see what it looks like.

With the 2020 Olympics wrapped up, The New York Times raced this year’s medal winners against previous medalists to provide context for the new records set in Tokyo. The simplified style of the animations gave me Sega Game Gear flashbacks.

NYT made similar comparisons in 2012 with videos for track and field events. The more static 2016 rendition, which focused on Usain Bolt and previous 100-meter winners, is still favorite.

Bonnie Berkowitz and Artur Galocha go with the strip plot to show the distribution of age for different Olympic events. If it’s longevity you’re looking for, go for the equestrian, sailing, shooting, and archery events. There’s still time.

[arve url=”https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nfczi2cI6Cs” loop=”no” muted=”no” /]

The Wall Street Journal tested out the TikTok algorithm with bots to see how quickly the app converged towards a user’s pre-specified interests. As viewing time of videos as the main signal, and to nobody’s surprise (I think), it only took a couple of hours for TikTok to narrow down interests.

This is how most social services work these days? The concerning part is that almost all TikTok videos are served based on the algorithm, which makes it easy to fall into terrible rabbit holes.

Set a strong base, and build whatever you want after that.

From The New York Times, the combination of video, motion graphics, and charts, packaged tightly in a scrollytelling format, clearly shows the differences.

Gerrymandering continues to be an important thread that I think many people still don’t understand, mostly because it’s called gerrymandering. The Guardian provides a visual guide to explain how creative redistricting can lead to favorable votes.

If you’re still not sure, see also the game District by Christopher Walker which walks you through what gerrymandering is and how it works.

Elian Peltier and Josh Holder for The New York Times highlight the vaccination rates increasing in Europe while the United States rate stalls:

Europe has plenty of people who distrust the shots and their governments, but vaccine resistance in the United States is more widespread and vehement, particularly among conservatives, and falls more sharply along partisan lines. The E.U. vaccination effort has slowed recently, but not like the U.S. drive, which has declined more than 80 percent.

Also of interest: NYT managed to squeeze in a bar chart race, a Marimekko chart, and a beeswarm chart all in the same article. That’s gotta be a record for them.

Aatish Bhatia and Quoctrung Bui for NYT’s The Upshot made the comparison using a circular Voronoi treemap. The fills flip between the original plan from March and the recently proposed plan, which is much smaller.

It takes me back to Amanda Cox’s consumer spending graphic from 2008, which no longer works, because Flash.

Here’s the good stuff for July.

Joshua Barbeau fed an AI chatbot with old texts from his fiancee who had died years before, so that he could talk to her again. Jason Fagone for the San Francisco Chronicle wrote about Barbeau’s experience:

As Joshua continued to experiment, he realized there was no rule preventing him from simulating real people. What would happen, he wondered, if he tried to create a chatbot version of his dead fiancee?

There was nothing strange, he thought, about wanting to reconnect with the dead: People do it all the time, in prayers and in dreams. In the last year and a half, more than 600,000 people in the U.S. and Canada have died of COVID-19, often suddenly, without closure for their loved ones, leaving a raw landscape of grief. How many survivors would gladly experiment with a technology that lets them pretend, for a moment, that their dead loved one is alive again — and able to text?

Worth the full read.

Ben Casselman and Ella Koeze for The New York Times compared time use in 2020 against time use in 2019, among different demographic groups.

As we know, the pandemic affected everyone differently. The slope charts show overall averages, so it would be an interesting next step to look at more granular variations. I suspect you’d see more pronounced shifts.

We’re all familiar with the Covid-19 line charts that show cases over time, which highlights absolute counts. There are peaks. There are some valleys. Emory Parker for STAT shifted the focus to how quickly the rate is changing, or acceleration, to emphasize which direction rates are headed.