For two minutes, a black speck on a white background was all anyone could talk about.

Colour Controversy is a simple game that shows you a shade and asks you what color it is. The fun part is that the shades are usually in between two colors, say blue and green, and you can only choose one. A running tally is kept so that you can see the “most controversial” colors.

Using a straightforward treemap, The Washington Post looks at where the $4 trillion bailout went. As you scroll, different categories highlight with accompanying text.

This is probably the old man in me, and I know the scrollytelling format works better for mobile and provides more focus, but I find myself missing the large, featured-filled interactives. Those were the days.

To visualize uncertainty in election forecasts, Matthew Kay from Northwestern University used a Plinko metaphor. The height of each board is based on the distribution of the forecast, and each ball drop is a potential outcome. The animation plays to eventually shows a full distribution.

See it in action.

(And Kay made his R code available on GitHub.)

For The New York Times, Ella Koeze looks at the various types of unemployment and how rates changed over the past six months.

The piece uses area charts, with a focus on the shape over time. With the consistent value axis and side-by-side placement, it’s kind of like a deconstructed stacked area chart, but with easier comparisons across categories.

Microsoft Excel is useful for many things, but it has its limitations (like all software), which led to an undercount of 15,841 Covid-19 positive tests recorded by Public Health England. For the Guardian, Alex Hern reports:

In this case, the Guardian understands, one lab had sent its daily test report to PHE in the form of a CSV file – the simplest possible database format, just a list of values separated by commas. That report was then loaded into Microsoft Excel, and the new tests at the bottom were added to the main database.

But while CSV files can be any size, Microsoft Excel files can only be 1,048,576 rows long – or, in older versions which PHE may have still been using, a mere 65,536. When a CSV file longer than that is opened, the bottom rows get cut off and are no longer displayed. That means that, once the lab had performed more than a million tests, it was only a matter of time before its reports failed to be read by PHE.

The gut reaction seems to dunk on Excel, but the whole infrastructure sounds off. Excel wasn’t meant to handle that many rows of data, and as a non-Excel person, I think it’s been like that forever.

Why are these records manually entered and transferred to a database? Why is the current solution to work off this single file that holds all of the data?

I bet the person (or people) tasked with entering new rows into the database aren’t tasked with thinking about the data. Who eventually noticed no new records were recorded after a week?

Such important data. So many questions.

It’s not so much an Excel problem as it is a data problem, and what looked like downward trend was actually going up.

The timeline for a new infection isn’t the same for everyone. Some never show any symptoms. Some recover quickly. Some take months to recover. So, for The New York Times, Katherine J. Wu and Jonathan Corum describe the timeline of a coronavirus infection with a set of illustrative charts instead of using exact numbers.

Just looking back at the past eight or nine months of coronavirus posts for no particular reason. Some that stood out:

• When It Comes to Covid-19, Most of Us Have Risk Exactly Backward
• How washing your hands for 20 seconds does the trick
• This 3-D Simulation Shows Why Social Distancing Is So Important
• Math behind wearing masks
• Face mask respirator and its usefulness with different beard styles

You’ve seen the line charts showing case rates over time. The focus is on trends and whether things are getting better or worse. This piece by Jan Willem Tulp focuses on the current rates with tickers and a sonification of new cases.

Ding, ding, ding. There’s a new ding for each new case as you look at the page, based on a weekly average for each country tracked by Our World in Data.

Here’s the good stuff for September 2020.

NPR estimated how many people have experienced unhealthy air this year, largely in part to the wildfires on the west coast:

An NPR analysis of U.S. Environmental Protection Agency air quality data found that nearly 50 million people in California, Oregon and Washington live in counties that experienced at least one day of “unhealthy” or worse air quality during wildfire season so far this year. That’s 1 in 7 Americans, an increase of more than 9 million people compared with 2018, the worst previous year.

Oh.

RJ Andrews, in collaboration with the David Rumsey Map Center, curated a collection of historical data visualization:

Data visualization leapt from its Enlightenment origins and into the minds of the general public in the 1760s. It cast more powerful spells throughout the following century. By 1900, modern science, technology, and social movements had all benefited from this new quantitative art. Its inventions include the timeline, bar chart, and thematic map. Together, these innovations changed how we understand the world and our place within it. Data visualization helped a new imagination emerge, wired to navigate a reality much bigger than any single person’s lived experience.

Bookmarking this for a closer look later.

The New York Times got a hold of the President’s tax records for the past two decades. They charted the reported gains and losses.

It starts with an overview stacked area chart and then scrolls through the details and peculiarities. Very peculiar.

Stefanie Posavec and Miriam Quick have a new book out called I am a book. I am a portal to the universe.

I’m different to any other book around today. I am not a book of infographics. I’m an informative, interactive experience, in which the data can be touched, felt and understood, with every measurement represented on a 1:1 scale. How long is an anteater’s tongue? How tiny is the DNA in your cells? How fast is gold mined? How loud is the sun? And how many stars have been born and exploded in the time you’ve taken to read this sentence?

Using all the elements that make a book, well, a book in a completely original way, I blend playful design and data storytelling to introduce scientific concepts to a broad, all-ages readership.

Instead of using traditional visual encodings, Posavec and Quick use the actual pages of the book — the physical weight, dimensions, and texture — to represent data. You’re invited to drop the book to test gravity, snap the cover shut to hear a measure in decibels, and to run your finger across the pages as a proxy for time and distance.

A fun one for the kids and the adults. I’m sure it’ll make its way over to the US, but it looks like you can get the UK edition in a roundabout way via Amazon. Or, if you’re in Europe, you can go direct to the source.

With recorded U.S. Covid-19 deaths passing the 200k mark, somehow the number still feels distant for many. The Washington Post, in collaboration with Lupa and the Google News Initiative, brings the tally to your neighborhood to help you relate more closely.

The story starts at your location. Based on population counts and density, you zoom out to see an approximation of how far a death radius would expand from where you are. You’re also taken to a county that would be wiped out.

Obviously we’re looking at hypotheticals here, but the interactive provides a granular sense of scale. The point is that 200,000 people dead is… a lot.

The Post’s version is based on Lupa’s original, which they made with Brazil numbers and location. Alberto Cairo provides background on the project here.

Small note for those who make these location-based interactives. Some people (me) who don’t want to share location or are outside the range of your dataset, it’s useful to provide links to well-known locations, so that they can still see the data.

Mail-in ballots can be rejected if they’re not filled out or mailed correctly. A small percentage of them always are. This year, when we’re talking millions of mail-in ballots, even a small percentage means a lot of tossed ballots. For NYT’s The Upshot, Larry Buchanan and Alicia Parlapiano show how some states modified the design of their ballots to reduce the rejections.

Look only at uncertainty and it can feel overwhelming. Look at just averages and it’s not enough information. So, smoosh them together.

Google released a search trends dataset earlier this month. Using this dataset, Adam Pearce made an explorer to compare search volume over time:

The COVID-19 Search Trends symptoms dataset shows aggregated, anonymized trends in Google searches for more than 400 health symptoms, signs, and conditions, such as cough, fever and difficulty breathing. The dataset provides a time series for each region showing the relative volume of searches for each symptom.

Even if you’re not keen on analyzing Covid-19 data, this is likely a good time series source to at least bookmark for later.