Dragons are pretty big, I guess. (Please let me know if you know who made this.)

Update: See the original by Siosin (thanks, Charlotte).

Michael Correll describes two kinds of bar charts in the world. The first kind shows counts where you can apply a visual metaphor of stacking things. The more you stack, the higher the bar gets. The second kind shows aggregates, such as mean and median.

Correll argues you should only use bar charts with stackable values. Otherwise, use something else.

This approach seems too extreme to me. Use bar charts where you see fit, which may or may not be to show aggregates. But the premise, which gets lost in bar chart minutiae, I can get behind, which is that bar charts are not always better and that you’re allowed to visualize complexity.

I’m hearing murmurs that the Venn diagram is making a comeback. Six Seconds made a pair-wise matrix to show the emotions that stem from combining the emotions from the Inside Out movie.

There’s a science to getting thousands of people to wait in line without things getting out of control. The Wall Street Journal spoke to crowd expert Brett Little to explain the different types of queues and how to strategically funnel people away from the venue when an even finishes.

The process of making fentanyl might not be as complicated as one would hope. However, you might be surprised to know that illegal producers aren’t always consistent and can be sloppy, which is why tens of thousands of people die from overdoses. For Reuters, Daisy Chung, Laura Gottesdiener, and Drazen Jorgic explain the process of getting ingredients, producing the drug, and shipping to the United States.

Bad charts and maps are common, but there’s usually a better response than pointing and laughing. Not all the time, but usually.

The Data Provenance Initiative audited 14,000 web domains to see how sites currently restrict scraping for the purpose of adding to AI datasets like C4, RefinedWeb, and Dolma. Sites are putting up more barriers:

Our longitudinal analyses show that in a single year (2023-2024) there has been a rapid crescendo of data restrictions from web sources, rendering ~5%+ of all tokens in C4, or 28%+ of the most actively maintained, critical sources in C4, fully restricted from use. For Terms of Service crawling restrictions, a full 45% of C4 is now restricted. If respected or enforced, these restrictions are rapidly biasing the diversity, freshness, and scaling laws for general-purpose AI systems. We hope to illustrate the emerging crisis in data consent, foreclosing much of the open web, not only for commercial AI, but non-commercial AI and academic purposes.

Bots used to be a welcome thing to see in your web analytics, because it meant that your site was indexed by a search engine. Real people could find your site. However, bots for the purpose of generative AI take everything and those who run sites don’t get much, if anything, in return. The decline in data availability seems warranted.

Aaron Koelker printed a six-foot long map on receipt printer earlier this year. He put it in a route sheet holder for more practical usage. Seems like a good end-of-world product, if you’re into that sort of thing.

Victoria Rose Richards uses embroidery to depict aerial views and landscapes. The above was inspired by a local creek:

I was once again directly inspired by my local landscape, copying the shape of the nearby estuary for this creek. Rather than an estuary though, I wanted to depict a receded river bed with dry mud and creeping plants starting to form across the base. Completed with grass, fresh crops and sprinkles of birds.

It’s one of two pieces still available in Richards’ shop.

Reuters, with illustrations by Catherine Tai, has visual guides to all of the Olympic sports. (Trampoline is tucked into the Gymnastics category in case you’re looking.) For each sport, there’s a schedule, a leading illustration, and a set of visuals that show you important moves or terminology.

It’s very good, especially for the sports you might not be familiar with.

Speaking of the Olympics, Alberto Cairo and Simon Rogers talked about the warm-blooded aspects of covering sports that make data more meaningful.

When approaching data visualisation for the Olympics, focus on the humanity of the games by integrating socio-economic, political, and historical stories alongside sports performance. Engage readers by placing them at the centre of visualisations, allowing interactive and fun experiences that reflect the current times and issues. Use handcrafted visuals for warmth and personality, and don’t hesitate to create your own datasets or collaborate with others to overcome data access challenges.

Everyone knows these athletes are the best in the world, but it’s the more human aspects of their stories that make the performances all the more unbelievable.

A part of outdoor sports is that you must deal with the weather, which is a challenge when it’s really hot and you have to run as fast as you can for a couple of hours. Bloomberg illustrates the challenges and how athletes might cope:

The harder the human body works, the hotter it gets. Roughly 80% of the energy generated by performing muscular exercises is released as heat, according to Mike Sawka, an environmental physiologist and professor at Georgia Tech. When external temperatures are cool, it’s easy for the body to dissipate that heat through thermal radiation and sweat. But when temperatures soar, and especially when it’s humid, the body struggles to keep up.

There’s a section that shows triathlete Kristian Blummenfelt’s core temperature against his skin temperature with two line charts during a race. Coupled with the annotation, the charts work well to show the attempts at keeping his body cool and the eventual heat stroke as his body hits its limit.

Here’s the good stuff for July.

We usually hear about fracking in a negative context, but for the Washington Post, Harry Stevens illustrates how a company aims to convert geothermal heat to usable electricity with zero emissions.

The New York Times collected drone footage and built a 3-D model to reconstruct the scene of the rally. They show four lines of sight: from the location of the gunman and three countersniper teams. You get a sense of distance and obstructions, which partially explain how the gunman could’ve been missed in surveillance.

Those who run cryptocurrency companies have much to gain from policies that favor them. Follow the Crypto by Molly White tracks the spending:

Cryptocurrency companies have raised hundreds of millions of dollars to put towards buying crypto-friendly politicians and ousting those who have spoken up for stricter regulations to protect consumers in an industry that is fraught with hacks, scams, and fraud. Although parts of the industry have tried to portray this as a grassroots effort, the reality is that a very small number of crypto companies, and the billionaire executives and venture capitalists behind them, are spending millions with a singular goal: to obtain favorable crypto policy, no matter the cost.

Like political contribution dashboards before it, the site uses data from the Federal Election Commission.

Nate Silver, who left Disney and the FiveThirtyEight brand last year but took his forecast models with him, is not a fan of the new models on 538, developed by G. Elliott Morris:

I thought the 538 model seemed basically reasonable when it was first published in June, showing the race as a toss-up. But its behavior since the debate — Biden has actually gained ground in their forecast over the past few weeks even though their polling average has moved toward Trump by 2 points! — raises a lot of questions. This may be by design — Morris seems to believe it’s too early to really look at the polls at all. But If my model was behaving like this, I’d be concerned.

Moreover, some of the internal workings of the model are strange, or at least appear that way based on the information Morris has made publicly available.

Silver has his own forecast. It currently places more weight on polls, which makes possible outcomes a lot less favorable for Joe Biden.

There’s much uncertainty around the election right now, so I wouldn’t lean on any forecast numbers at this point. But I like learning the thought process behind the models.

Like many, you’ve probably wondered what HTTP response headers are also area codes in the real world, or vice versa. Doug Sillars has you covered with HTTP Area Codes. This is very important.