In case you’re not so good with the words, but feel the social pressure to play Wordle bearing down on you, Jonathan Olson made an optimized solver:

The game Wordle has a lot of speculation online about what is the “best” first word. If we are exploring optimal strategies to solve the original game in the least number of guesses, most of it is wrong.

For humans, almost all of these words are great! However for optimal strategies, we need to examine all of the guesses, not just the first word. It turns out, it’s possible to solve 99% of all puzzles in only 4 guesses or with an average of ~3.42 guesses per win, but not with most of the “best” words found online.

I don’t play because I am a not-so-good-with-words person, but also there can only be one true Wordle.

Manas Sharma and Simon Scarr used satellite imagery to show the scale of the Tonga eruption, which spurted a 24-mile cloud that grew to 400 miles in diameter in an hour. Notice the little Manhattan in the bottom left corner in the image above.

However, instead of leaving it at that, Sharma and Scarr animated the eruption over familiar geographic areas to better see how big it was. The cloud was big enough to cover whole countries.

In efforts to reduce further spread of the virus, the US is set to distribute millions of free N95 masks across the country. Aaron Steckelberg and Bonnie Berkowitz for The Washington Post illustrated how the masks work.

Early in the pandemic, N95 masks were hard to get. My wife, who is a healthcare worker, described how she and her colleagues would have to reuse N95 masks and store them in paper bags hanging on the wall. It’s good to see so many N95s on their way to households now.

In an automated job climate that analyzes resumes and inspects social profiles, it can be a challenge to find the job that’s right for you. Luckily, Jess Peter for The Pudding put together a satirical set of tools to combat the recruiting bots. Generate a fake resume with a specified level of experience, define a profile pic for your socials, and then use that fake image of your face for the video interview.

I wonder if someone has ever done this in real life. This had to have happened at least once, right?

Thinking about the differences between boring charts and not so boring charts.

Our World in Data continues their important work on providing and showing up-to-date Covid data. Most recently, they updated death rates in Switzerland by vaccination plus booster status. The rates for the unvaccinated are expectedly much higher, but also the rates for those with a booster are multiples lower than those fully vaccinated with no booster.

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.

pic.twitter.com/bYTm3p78lz

— 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.

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.