The 2020 Summer Olympics are here, so ’tis the season for experimental visual explainers. The Washington Post uses a combination of illustration, video, and augmented reality to show off three new Olympic sports: skateboarding, surfing, and sport climbing. The skateboarding piece with Heimana Reynolds uses a left-right hover to move back and forth through a time-lapse. It lets you see each part of the trick, which can be a challenge...
Weather Strip is a new weather app by visualization researcher Robin Stewart. It shows the week’s forecast as a time series chart, aiming to show you details at a glance. The temperature shows as a line chart, and a stacked area chart that represents weather conditions serves as background. You’d think it’d hit all the right notes for me, but I’m more of a bare minimum type when it comes...
Welcome to issue #149 of The Process, the newsletter for FlowingData members about how the charts get made. I’m Nathan Yau, and this week I’m thinking about how to learn as much as I can about new visualization things, but also get actual work done. Become a member for access to this — plus tutorials, courses, and guides.
With the Olympics starting on Friday, The New York Times started their coverage of events and athletes to watch. Their visual explainers are always very good in that the topic is entertaining and the results feel like a creative break, which a lot of us could probably use right about now. Check out what NYT has so far for climbing, gymnastics, hurdles, and swimming. Tags: New York Times, Olympics, Tokyo
Covid-19 cases in the United States were down, but they’re moving up again, mostly among the unvaccinated. Dan Keating and Leslie Shapiro for The Washington Post break down the comparisons by state. A difference chart for each state shows the overall rate compared against an adjusted rate for the unvaccinated population. As you might expect, the rate for the latter is always higher. There are three more points of reference....
Sebastian Raschka made 170 videos on deep learning, and you can watch all of the lessons now: I just sat down this morning and organized all deep learning related videos I recorded in 2021. I am sure this will be a useful reference for my future self, but I am also hoping it might be useful for one or the other person out there. It’s split into 19 lessons over...
The Financial Times published the following chart that shows the rollout of vaccines in the U.K. (I can't find the online link to the article. The article is titled "AstraZeneca and Oxford face setbacks and success as battle enters next phase", May 29/30 2021.) This chart form is known as a "streamgraph", and it is a stacked area chart in disguise. The same trick can be applied to a column...
NYT’s The Upshot analyzed spin rate on pitches before and after enforcing a ban on sticky substances that provide more grip on the ball. The rule has been in place for decades but wasn’t enforced. However, there’s been more strikeouts than usual, which makes for less exciting sports, which means less people watch, and therefore, the league makes less money. So, bye sticky stuff. Tags: baseball, pitching, Upshot
K-pop seems to be inescapable these days, which really confuses me. Marian Liu, Youjin Shin, and Shelly Tan for The Washington Post explored the rise in popularity and what makes the songs and artists so popular. Tags: K-pop, Washington Post
James O’Donoghue made this straightforward animation that shows how long it takes for a ball to drop one kilometer on different planets: It might be surprising to see large planets have a pull comparable to smaller ones at the surface, for example Uranus pulls the ball down slower than at Earth! Why? Because the low average density of Uranus puts the surface far away from the majority of the mass....
