Here’s the good stuff for October.

Risk of coronavirus infection changes depending on the amount of contagious particles you breathe in. El Pais illustrated the differences when you take certain measures, namely wearing masks, ventilation, and decreased exposure time.

The suggestions are based on statistical models, so there is more uncertainty than I think the explanations provide, but the sequence of illustrations provides a clear picture of what we can do — if you must do things indoors.

In Waves of Interest, a collaboration between the Google News Initiative and Truth & Beauty, see the defining search trends of 2020. See trends over time. See trends over geography. See trends over past election seasons.

See also how the work came together.

The way we make electricity in America is changing. For The New York Times, Nadja Popovich and Brad Plumer used ribbon charts, which I think are a NYT staple now, to show the shift between 2001 to 2019.

The width of each ribbon represents percentage of power produced by a source, and the vertical order shows highest percentage to lowest over time. Each state gets a chart and an explanation.

Wind power in Iowa, shown above, is up at 42 percent. Impressive.

Dots on a map can feel like, well, just a bunch of dots. Dylan Moriarty zoomed in on the dot of his hometown, making the dot feel more real:

The map concept at the top of this piece has been kicking in my head for a long while. Came from a dream: Meandering in a museum space, from far, far away you see a map introducing a new exhibit on New York City. Walking closer, the standard .NEW YORK CITY dot became more detailed until you’d get to up close and discovered that each inch had a drawing detailing that block’s history. A historical illustration with the energy and detail of a Where’s Waldo page. No doubt inspired by the wonderful 1981 illustrated map of Chicago gangs.

This is very good.

As you might expect, early voting volume is high across the country. In many states, one week until election day, the early voting count is already more than half of the total 2016 counts. For The New York Times, Denise Lu and Karen Yourish provide the breakdown with cumulative charts by state.

See also how long it might take to count all the votes.

And you can download the count data from the United States Election Project.

The New York Times analyzed campaign finance data from April to October, mapping and charting their results by different segments:

The findings paint a portrait of two candidates who are, in many ways, financing their campaigns from two different Americas.

It is not just that much of Mr. Biden’s strongest support comes overwhelmingly from the two coasts, which it does. Or that Mr. Trump’s financial base is in Texas, which it is. It is that across the country, down to the ZIP code level, some of the same cleavages that are driving the 2020 election — along class and education lines — are also fundamentally reshaping how the two parties pay for their campaigns.

From Kaz Miyamol, these Venn diagrams present very important information about Halloween.

Muir Way updates vintage relief maps with a third dimension. Pretty. The above is a geologic map of the United States, based on a 1932 print.

Scott Reinhard made similar maps last year, but Muir Way leaned a little more into it with more geographic areas and prints to buy.

Look around. Take it in.

This is some advanced mapping and scrollytelling from the Washington Post. The piece examines climate change in the context of the fires in the western United States.

Starting in the beginning of August, the piece takes you through the timeline of events as your scroll. Maps of temperature, wind, lightning, and fire serve as the backdrop. Berry Creek, California, a mountain town that burned to the ground, provides an anchor to show how large climate shifts can affect the individual.

Well done.

While we’re on the topic of election scenarios, Kerry Rodden provides a radial decision tree to show possible outcomes. Select paths or specify state wins to see what might happen.

It’s based on the New York Times piece by Mike Bostock and Shan Carter from 2012(!).

With each model update, FiveThirtyEight runs 40,000 simulations, or what-ifs, to calculate the odds for who will win the election. Their new interactive lets you experiment with all of the what-ifs to see how the odds shift when a candidate wins a state.

It answers the question, “If ______ wins in ______ and in ______, etc., what are the chances of him winning the whole thing?”

So if Trump wins a very red state or Biden wins a very blue state, the overall odds don’t change that much. But if a very red goes blue, or a very blue goes red, then the odds swing dramatically.

There’s a good lesson on conditional probability somewhere in there.

If you can make maps in your software and customize the aesthetics, you can make map art. Esteban Moro outlined how he made a personalized map in R:

For my map art, I wanted to create something more personal: a combination of those beautiful street maps with personal mobility. That is, the city and how we navigate it. In this tutorial, you’ll learn how to create those street maps for your city and your mobility. We will use data from Open Street Maps (OSM) and, of course, R. We will also use personal mobility data, which you can input manually. Still, we will learn too how to get it from Google Maps Timeline (if you have your location activated). Part of the material here is based on the tutorial by Christian Burkhart.

For FiveThirtyEight, Nate Silver provides tips to stay less stressed staring into the darkness known at election forecasts:

This is perhaps the single piece of advice we give most often at FiveThirtyEight, but it’s especially important in the final couple weeks of a campaign. After a lull this weekend, there are likely to be a lot of polls the rest of the way out. On any given day, it will be possible to take the two or three best polls for Biden and tell a story of his holding or expanding his lead, or the two or three best polls for Trump and make a claim that the race is tightening.

Resist buying too much into those narratives.

Good luck.

In their second issue, Parametric Press focuses on climate change with a set of interactive data essays:

The articles explore the gamut of our climate’s past, present, and future, exploring not only what has happened (and is happening) but also what should happen, and what we as citizens should do to realize that future. In this issue you will find a personalized history of Earth’s CO2 record, a close look at disturbances in the floodplains in the Mekong Delta, an analysis of how YouTube and other digital streaming services impact the environment, along with critiques on potential carbon sequestration methods and an exploration of the corporations that are most responsible for getting us to where we are today.

[arve url=”https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XmYNISBjL_Q” loop=”no” muted=”no” /]

Virtual reality puts you in a digital world that can feel like a real world when it’s done right. Research from Benjamin Lee, et al. explored some of the possibilities in work they’re calling data visceralation.

As a proof of concept, shown in the video above, the researchers recreated popular works for virtual reality. Watch Olympic runners sprint past you or look up at the comparison of the world’s tallest buildings.

The goal is essentially to make the abstract shapes or data points feel more real. Looks promising.

By the way, this work is going to be presented at VIS 2020, which will be virtual and free to attend this year. If you’re interested in poking your head in, but don’t know where to start, Robert Kosara wrote an outsider’s guide to the conference to point you in the right direction.

It’s been smoky this season. Based on research from Michael Goss et al., Al Shaw and Elizabeth Weil for ProPublica look at the current fire situation in California and what that might mean for the future and the rest of the country.

In wildfires, as with flooding and heat, climate change doesn’t create novel problems; it exacerbates existing problems and compounds risks. So there is no precise way to measure how much of all this increased wildfire activity is due to climate change. An educated guess is about half, experts say. Its role, however, is growing fast. Within 20 years, climate change promises to be the dominant factor driving larger and more frequent megafires — not only in California, but across the country.

Using estimates from a report by the Well Being Trust and the Robert Graham Center, Periscopic shows projected deaths of despair in Lifelines.

Lights, each representing a life, float above the water, and as you adjust levels of mental health care, employment, and social connection, the lives either sink to the bottom or stay above the water. How do we keep as many as we can above water?