Constraints usually seem like a bad thing. Less freedom. You can’t do exactly what you want to do. You’re limited. But sometimes constraints can lead you towards unexpected paths.

The math behind wearing a mask can seem unintuitive at times. Minute Physics and Aatish Bhatia break it down in this illustrated video to show why wearing masks works:

The premise is that there’s a two-way effect with breathing in and breathing out. There are some assumptions here, but there’s an interactive component that lets you adjust the variables. They’ve also made the code available.

For The Pudding, Ilia Blinderman rounds out his three-part series on creating visual, data-driven essays. This last part in on the fuzziest task of telling stories:

Storytelling, however, is much more abstract — it’s not merely a technical matter of creating an image of a map, or designing the right chart; rather, it refers to the broader universe of considerations that impact nearly every decision you make in the way you frame and present a project. The focus is much less on the technical “how,” like in the first two installments of these guides, but on the “why” of designing the narrative. It certainly doesn’t help that technical tools are inherently more concrete: they’re ways of solving specific problems (e.g., “how do I show the locations where people are concentrated on a map?” or “how do get this visual element to move through this specific path?”), while storytelling is much more of a nebulous concept. Thus, in this guide, I’ll be focusing on the relevant questions and considerations that we, at The Pudding, tend to consider when creating data-driven projects.

Picking colors for your charts can be tricky, especially when you’re starting a palette from scratch. For Datawrapper, Lisa Charlotte Rost has been writing guides on color as it pertains to political parties, gender, and more recently, colorblindness. Rost put the pieces together for a single, more comprehensive guide on the subject.

Be sure to check out Rost’s other guides on making better charts. She has a knack for explaining visualization methods in a practical and concrete way.

As we have seen, small shifts in voting behavior of various demographic groups can swing an election. The Washington Post provides an interactive that lets you shift these groups by both turnout and vote margin to see what might happen (based on a simplified model).

You gotta walk before you crawl. Wait a minute.

From Reddit user wequiock_falls, “What I’m about to learn about after my kid says, ‘Wanna know somefing?’ Data collected over the course of 7 days.”

Sounds about right.

For NYT’s The Upshot, Tim Wallace and Krishna Karra looked at how the red-blue electoral map relates to the green and gray color spectrum in satellite imagery:

The pattern we observe here is consistent with the urban-rural divide we’re accustomed to seeing on traditional maps of election results. What spans the divide — the suburbs represented by transition colors — can be crucial to winning elections. It’s part of why President Trump, seeking to appeal to swing voters, has portrayed the suburbs as under siege and menaced by crime. But the suburbs are neither politically nor geographically monolithic. They are where Democratic and Republican voters meet and overlap, in a variety of ways.

The breakdown and process are impressive. Be sure to check out the full rundown. Wallace also provides more details about how this came together on the Twitter.

The election is full of what-ifs, and the result changes depending on which direction they take. Josh Holder and Alexander Burns for The New York Times use a pair of circular Voronoi diagrams and draggable bubbles so that you can test the what-ifs.

Contrast this with NYT’s 2012 graphic showing all possible paths. While the 2012 graphic shows you the big picture, the 2020 interactive places more weight on individual outcomes.

Each state is handling mail-in voting in a certain way with varying timelines and rules. FiveThirtyEight provides a straightforward state-by-state guide so you can see what your state is doing.

I like the color-coded grid map doubling as quick navigation. You get the overview and a jump to the state of interest.

Jeff Leek and Roger Peng started their course Advanced Data Science at Johns Hopkins University. It’s meant for JHU students, but you can learn from the weekly course material for free:

The class is not designed to teach a set of statistical methods or packages – there are a ton of awesome classes, books, and tutorials about those things out there! Rather the goal is to help you to organize your thinking around how to combine the things you have learned about statistics, data manipulation, and visualization into complete data analyses that answer important questions about the world around you.

So you know the methods and tools (or how to learn them on your own), but you want to learn more about putting it all together.

Nice. I could probably use a refresher.

You can get the weekly updates here.

The New York Times provides a state-by-state chart timeline for voting by mail:

But 16 states allow voters to apply for mail ballots so close to Election Day that their votes could be at risk of being too late if they are sent and returned through the Postal Service. Officials in these places recommend applying for and sending in ballots early, or dropping them off at local election offices or in secure drop boxes if available.

In Minnesota, voters can request a ballot the day before the election, too late to be mailed to them on time. But if voters request their ballots early and postmark them by Election Day, they should arrive in enough time to be counted. Montana has the same deadline for requesting a ballot but does not accept those returned after the election.

The takeaway is that you should vote early to make sure it counts. I’m just going to do it right when the ballot arrives.

For NYT Opinion, Aaron E. Carroll on doing small things that sum to something bigger:

Too many view protective measures as all or nothing: Either we do everything, or we might as well do none. That’s wrong. Instead, we need to see that all our behavior adds up.

Each decision we make to reduce risk helps. Each time we wear a mask, we’re throwing some safety on the pile. Each time we socialize outside instead of inside, we’re throwing some safety on the pile. Each time we stay six feet away instead of sitting closer together, we’re throwing some safety on the pile. Each time we wash our hands, eat apart and don’t spend time in large gatherings of people, we’re adding to the pile.

A lot of what we do and the choices we make are based on past personal experience. It’s a challenge to look at a dataset that seems beyond us as an individual. So if you’re trying to galvanize a population with numbers, look for all of the ways you could help the individual relate.

The New York Times provides a breakdown of minutes spoken at the Republican National Convention. The bubbles, sized by minute count, start as an overview of everyone who spoke, and then cluster into specific groups as you scroll.

Bloomberg looks at how retail struggles might kill the middle-of-the-road malls before this pandemic is done:

Although many bankrupt retailers continue operating while restructuring under Chapter 11, they’re planning to shut down droves of lower-performing stores. Justice recently shuttered its location in Crystal Mall after its parent company, Ascena Retail Group Inc., filed for bankruptcy on July 23. The mall also houses a Men’s Wearhouse, whose parent, Tailored Brands Inc., filed for bankruptcy on Aug. 2. It wants to close up to 500 stores, accounting for a third of its locations. Vitamin retailer GNC, which filed for bankruptcy on June 23, wants to close at least 800 to 1,200 stores. They both operate in Crystal Mall.

I like these triangles to show scale. There’s also a variable width bar chart in the piece. It’s so back.

“Two.js is deeply inspired by flat motion graphics. As a result, two.js aims to make the creation and animation of flat shapes easier and more concise.” It also renders in webgl, canvas2d, and svg, with not much change in your code. Two.js is definitely going on my list of things to try.

Here’s the good stuff for August 2020.