We’ve seen maps made out of LEGO bricks before, but LEGO is about to release an official world map set. And cartographers everywhere rejoiced.

Here’s the good stuff for May.

We know what you did during lockdown is a short fiction film by Financial Times that demonstrates the challenges of using data for good at the sacrifice of privacy and the complexity of individual lives. Worth the watch.

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I immediately wanted to unplug every single internet-connected device in the house. But of course I did not.

See also the short film Sight from 2012, which imagines a world where everyone’s reality is augmented with data through digitized contact lenses.

River Runner is a fun interactive map by Sam Learner. Click anywhere in the contiguous United States to drop some rain and, based on data from the U.S. Geological Survey, the map shows you where the rain ends up and the path it takes to get there.

This uses USGS NHDPlus data and their NLDI API to visualize the path of a rain droplet from any point in the contiguous United States to its end point (usually the ocean, sometimes the Great Lakes, Canada/Mexico, or another inland water feature). It’ll find the closest river/stream flowline coordinate to a click/search and then animate along that flowline’s downstream path.

When you think about it, it’s kind of nutty that something like this is even possible. [via Waxy]

Overall, Covid-19 cases and hospitalizations are down in the United States, but much of that is from vaccinations. When you look at only those who are not vaccinated, the rates are still high in many areas of the country. Dan Keating and Leslie Shapiro for The Washington Post show the differences.

The United States vaccination rate was rolling for a while there, but it has slowed down. Sema Sgaier for NYT Opinion talks about why that is, breaking it down to four general types of people who are hesitant or don’t plan on getting vaccinated:

After conducting a national survey of U.S. adults, we grouped people into distinct profiles based on their shared beliefs and barriers to getting the vaccine. This approach, borrowed from the marketing world, is called psychobehavioral segmentation. It will allow health officials to target their strategies in ways that ignore demographic categories, like age and race. In the United States, we used this approach to identify five distinct personas: the Enthusiasts, the Watchful, the Cost-Anxious, the System Distrusters and the Covid Skeptics.

The last two groups will be harder to convince, but for the watchful and cost-anxious, I hope they look at the numbers.

The risk of side effects is very low (especially when you compare to the everyday things we do to live), your risk of infection or hospitalization goes way down when you get vaccinated, and you don’t have to pay anything.

Visualization and perception researcher Lace Padilla was on the kid-centric show Mission Unstoppale to talk about visualizing uncertainty:

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I approve of this message.

Data is always incomplete.

Susie Neilson for the San Francisco Chronicle compared the marriage of professions in San Francisco against the national average. As you might expect, there were a lot of programmers:

Perhaps unsurprisingly, the most common union between two professionals here is between a computer programmer and … another computer programmer. Our estimates show that an estimated 1% of all marriages in the region are between two software developers — specifically developers of applications and systems software. For the U.S. overall, software developer unions make up less than one-tenth of a percent of all marriages.

Back in 2017, I made similar comparisons nationally. I like this local angle. Also, maybe I should look at the most recent numbers.

In 2012, Stamen Design released watercolor map tiles based on OpenStreetMap data. It was amazing to see, especially for a time when most online maps looked about the same. Now these watercolor map tiles are part of Cooper Hewitt, the Smithsonian design museum:

“Interactive digital works by their very nature subvert traditional museum collecting practices,” said Andrea Lipps, associate curator of contemporary design at Cooper Hewitt. “Watercolor Maptiles is itself a dynamic, living web-based map that is placeless; it exists on a browser and its assets are distributed across servers. By creating a duplicate version of the Watercolor Maptiles site and hosting it on Smithsonian Institution servers and domain, Cooper Hewitt has established a new acquisition model for the museum sector.”

Amazing.

Connie Jin, who works for NPR and updates a Covid-19 dashboard, talks about in comic-form feeling numb to the large numbers and how to deal. It comes back to the individual.

Here’s a fun interactive by Duc-Quang Nguyen. Upload an image and get back a transformed visual that uses dots, lines, or ascii. Use the menu options to easily change resolution, colors, and shapes.

It’s a combination of Georgios Karamanis’s code and Elana Levin Schtulberg’s experiment of the same ilk.

The places in the United States with the highest populations weren’t always like that. There were shifts over decades. With the recent Census release for state populations, Harry Stevens and Nick Kirkpatrick for The Washington Post go all in with a series of bump charts to show the changes in state population rankings since 1920.

They point out historical markers along the way, split it up by region, and provide an explorer at the end to look at your states of interest. In the end, it all comes down to weather and air conditioning.

Still deciding what I think about those gradient connections.

Every decade the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration releases climate normals to provide a baseline to compare current weather against. NOAA just released the estimates for 1991 to 2020. As you might expect, and shown in the maps above, it’s getting hotter.

This week I’m describing my process behind a quick map. You can download the code at the end of this issue.

It was only a matter of time before someone showed dots moving across a map to show migration during the pandemic. Again, using USPS change of address data, Yan Wu and Luis Melgar for the Wall Street Journal (paywalled) showed where people moved in the country.

As shown through other views, a lot of the movement wasn’t out of the ordinary, but in some areas — mainly San Francisco and New York — the pandemic appeared to motivate people a little more to move.

The Information Graphic Visionaries book series just launched on Kickstarter. Emma Willard, Florence Nightingale, and Étienne-Jules Marey are the subjects of three books, each including high-resolution images of the creators’ works and essays that provide historical context.

Whenever I’m feeling uninspired, I like to flip through old works. It always amazes me what past visualization practitioners were able to make without a computer. Oftentimes the detail and creativity surpass what we see these days. So Visionaries should be a fine addition to the library.

Just one day in and the Kickstarter is about halfway to the goal.

The CDC said that “less than 10 percent” of coronavirus cases were from outdoor transmissions. David Leonhardt for The New York Times argues why in all likelihood that number is way too high and leads to public confusion:

If you read the academic research that the C.D.C. has cited in defense of the 10 percent benchmark, you will notice something strange. A very large share of supposed cases of outdoor transmission have occurred in a single setting: construction sites in Singapore.

In one study, 95 of 10,926 worldwide instances of transmission are classified as outdoors; all 95 are from Singapore construction sites. In another study, four of 103 instances are classified as outdoors; again, all four are from Singapore construction sites.

This obviously doesn’t make much sense. It instead appears to be a misunderstanding that resembles the childhood game of telephone, in which a message gets garbled as it passes from one person to the next.