Are we alone in the universe? Is there life on other planets? Or has the Fermi Paradox kicked in? Tune this interactive Drake Equation calculator to reveal the current chances of intelligent alien life in the universe. And play with the lesser-known Seager Equation to calculate the chances of inhabited planets in our galactic neighbourhood. CREDITS: David McCandless,
A few years ago, Stephanie Yee and Tony Chu explained the introductory facets of machine learning. The piece stood out because it was such a good use of the scrollytelling format. Yee and Chu just published a follow-up that goes into more detail about bias, intentional or not. It’s equally worth your time. (Seems to work best in Chrome.) Tags: machine learning, scrollytelling
I feel like I was supposed to know what blockchain is a while ago, but I’ve only had a hand-wavy explanation on hand. And it wasn’t a very good one. Reuters provides a clear and concise visual explanation of how blockchain works. Now I can explain it to friends and family whenever there’s a Bitcoin spike or dip, or I can at least point them to this explainer. Tags: blockchain,...
Oh. So that’s why I was always placed in right field that one year. Little League Analytics pic.twitter.com/THf5FyqRF7 — PetrosAndMoneyShow (@PetrosAndMoney) June 14, 2018 Tags: baseball, humor
Benjamin Schmidt, an assistant professor of history at Northeastern University, explored the space between words and drew the paths to get from one word to another. The above, for example, is the path between Seinfeld and Breaking Bad. Using Google News as the corpus, the steps: Take any two words. I used “duck” and “soup” for my testing. Find a word that is, in cosine distance, between the two words:...
Diet, exercise and other choices play a huge role in cancer risk. We worked with The World Cancer Research Fund to chart the latest science. » explore the interactive data-visualization
This is quite the scatterplot from Claire Cain Miller and Kevin Quealy for The Upshot. The vertical axis represents by how much girls or boys are better in standardized tests; the horizontal axis represents wealth; each bubble represents a school district; and yellow represents English test scores, and blue represents math test scores. The result: a non-trend up top and a widening gap at the bottom. Tags: gender, math, school,...
The following map accompanied an article in the Economist about China's drive to create a "digital silkroad," roughly defined as making a Silicon Valley. The two variables plotted are the wealth of each province (measured by GDP per capita) and the level of Internet penetration. The designer made the following choices: GDP per capita is presented with less precision than Internet penetration. The former is grouped into five large categories...
In a spin on the view of ancient Earth and the shift of the continents, Ian Webster made a globe where you can enter a location and see what was in that spot millions of years ago. Not all addresses were working for me at the time, so you might want to try a major city if it’s doing the same for you. [via kottke] Tags: Earth, tectonic plates
