Everyone’s a beginner at some point.

While we’re on the topic of scale, The New York Times plotted weekly deaths below and above normal since 2015. Check out that Covid-19 pandemic mountain.

NYT has been updating this chart, but I hadn’t looked at it in a while. Just, wow.

The United States passed the half million mark for confirmed Covid-19 deaths. It’s difficult to imagine 500,000 of anything, let alone deaths in a year, so Reuters used a modified beeswarm chart to show the timeline of events and the individual deaths. Each dot represents a death, and a scaled down version of the chart appears in the top left corner to show where you are in the timeline.

It’s not possible to reflect the true meaning of such a scale through a screen, but the mini-obituaries on the left-hand side help. I had to pause a few times.

I’m happy to announce a new course on mapping geographic data in R, using the ggplot2 package. The course is by data journalist and visualization consultant Maarten Lambrechts, and it’s available immediately to FlowingData members.

If you’re not a member yet, now is a great time to join. You get instant access to this course, plus four others and over a hundred in-depth visualization tutorials.

For those who’ve read FlowingData for a while probably know that I’m not much of ggplot2 user. It’s not that I don’t like it. I just never worked it into my workflow, and what I’m using now hasn’t stalled my work yet.

But when it comes to visualizing data, I’m a firm believer in learning a wide array of tools. A flexible toolset lets you visualize data in the way that you want. The tool shouldn’t be the limiting factor.

Hence, this course.

I worked through the course myself, and I’ll tell you first-hand that it’s fun, practical, and will get you up to speed quick. There’s real data, concrete examples, and you’ll be making beautiful maps with your own data in no time.

Check it out now.

A common depiction of an iceberg is one that has a short head peeking out of the water and a deep spike underneath. However, as Megan Thompson-Munson pointed out, that’s not how icebergs actually float. Because physics.

Inspired by Thompson-Munson’s comment, Joshua Tauberer made Iceberger, which is a fun interactive that lets you draw an iceberg of your own and the shape floats accordingly.

For several years, Xavi Bou has been using long-exposure photography to capture stills of bird flight patterns. The project, Ornitographies, produced gloriously abstract images. There’s also a video (above) piece under the same premise.

Jessica McKenzie, reporting for Audubon:

More recently, Bou has expanded the project to video, including one called Murmurations that shows a flock of starlings evading a hawk. “What happens is, if in this moment a hawk appears to attack them, it’s when they do this dance,” he says. “The hawk is like carving this ephemeral sculpture that’s in the air.” As with the still images, Bou knit multiple series of photographs together to create an animation. He estimates that every day of filming requires two weeks of post-production work; for Murmurations, he also enlisted the help of a film editor. The final product, which was filmed in southern Catalonia, was then set to ethereal music.

The video deserves the full-screen treatment.

See also the swallows of essex by Dennis Hlynsky.

As vaccinations roll out, we work towards herd immunity, there are various challenges to consider along the way. Thomas Wilburn and Richard Harris, reporting for NPR, used simulations to imagine three scenarios: a more infectious variant of the coronavirus, high initial immunity, and low initial immunity.

Since it’s a simulation it of course doesn’t consider every real-life detail of immunity and viral spread, but the animations and the hexagon grids provide a good overhead view.

The two approaches answer two different questions.

When we visualize data to communicate to others, we must consider what others see through their eyes. Sim Daltonism by Michel Fortin is a free app for the Mac that lets you see how those with various types of color blindness perceive what’s on your computer screen.

It’s simple to use. Just drag a window over any part of your screen to see the differences.

Based on data from the Global Forecast System, The New York Times mapped the lowest temperatures across the country between February 14 and 16.

The blue-orange color scale diverges at freezing, which creates a striking image of a very cold country. The dotted lines and temperature labels make the patterns especially obvious.

As someone who lives in an orange area, I was shocked by all of the blue. Stay safe.

Thomas Lin Pedersen announced the ragg package, which makes font usage in R more straightforward:

I’m extremely pleased to present the culmination of several years of work spanning the systemfonts, textshaping, and ragg packages. These releases complete our efforts to create a high-quality, performant raster graphics device that works the same way on every operating system.

This blog post presents our improvements to ragg’s font rendering so that it now “just works” regardless of what you throw at it. This includes:

1. Support for non-Latin scripts including Right-to-Left (RtL) scripts
2. Support for OpenType features such as ligatures, glyph substitutions, etc.
3. Support for color fonts
4. Support for font fallback

All of the above comes in addition to the fact that ragg is able to use all of your installed fonts.

If you’ve tried to make publication-level graphics completely in R, you’re probably familiar with the challenge of using non-default fonts. The correct steps depend on your system and the words you want to add. It’s one of the reasons I bring R output into Adobe Illustrator, so now there’s one less extra step. Nice.

Lauren Leatherby and Amy Schoenfeld Walker reporting for The New York Times:

“Every state is improving,” said Claire Hannan, the executive director of the Association of Immunization Managers. “We still don’t have enough to vaccinate everyone over 75, so it doesn’t necessarily feel different for people who are trying to find the vaccine, but we are in a much better place now.”

Good.

Find the most current CDC vaccination data here. You can also find weekly distribution counts by state for the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines.

PowerOutage.US keeps a running tally of outages across the United States, and it’s looking bad for Texas. Millions of people in the state are without power, with temperatures in the teens. Scary.

This is fun. Lisa Charlotte Rost made a data visualization crossword puzzle. Print the PDF and win all eternal glory of your household.

Visualization rules and best practices are generalized solutions to generalized problems. Better visualization requires a more specific view.

You probably knew that coronavirus deaths have been in the several thousands per day for a few months now. But Lazaro Gamio, for The New York Times, framed the cumulative rates in an even more striking way with a straightforward stacked bar chart. Half of U.S. coronavirus deaths were after November 1.

Vaccines provide light at the end of the tunnel, but when we finally get to the end depends on the speed at which we vaccinate. The Washington Post considers Joe Biden’s pledge for 100 million shots in his first 100 days in the context of herd immunity and calendar days.

I appreciate the time spent explaining the intersection of these two lines.

There’s something about hearing music live no matter how many times you’ve heard a song record in the studio. Maybe the acoustics are different. Maybe the musicians play a favorite song differently. Maybe the musicians feed off a big crowd’s energy.

For The Pudding, Kat Wilson and Kevin Litman-Navarro quantified these differences between studio and live versions. The result is the Live Music Jukebox, which lets you pick an artist and see which songs differed the most.

I was just lamenting over returned concert tickets from 2020. I guess this’ll have to do for now.

For NYT Opinion, Charlie Warzel and Stuart A. Thompson returned to the topic of location data logged by our mobile phones. This time though, they turned their attention to the United States Capitol on January 6, 2021:

The data we were given showed what some in the tech industry might call a God-view vantage of that dark day. It included about 100,000 location pings for thousands of smartphones, revealing around 130 devices inside the Capitol exactly when Trump supporters were storming the building. Times Opinion is only publishing the names of people who gave their permission to be quoted in this article.

As the animation plays out, you can clearly see the dots cluster around the rally area and then make their way to the Capitol building.

This surveillance stuff through consumer data (which companies can buy) seems way too easy.