I roasted a turkey. There were a lot of leftovers. But my mom taught me to never waste. Read More
As we’ve talked about before, it can be hard to really understand the scale of big numbers. So when we hear that over 250,000 people died because of the coronavirus, it can be hard to conceptualize that number in our head. Lauren Tierney and Tim Meko for The Washington Post provide a point of comparison by highlighting counties that have have populations under 250,000. Whole counties, or whole clusters of...
When you have a big family, it's sometimes a challenge how everyone is related. So here are some charts to help you figure it out. Read More
It’s grown easier and easier to generate fake faces with AI. For The New York Times, Kashmir Hill and Jeremy White demonstrate the tech with a slick interactive. Quickly adjust age, eye, mood, and gender. All fake. It was only a few years ago when the idea seemed novel. One year later, there were guides (and warnings) for spotting fake faces. By 2019, there was a marketplace for fake faces...
The folks at FiveThirtyEight were excited about the following dataviz they published last week two weeks ago, illustrating the progression of vote-counting by state. (link) That was indeed the unique and confusing feature of the 2020 Presidential election in the States. For those outside the U.S., what happened (by and large) was that many Americans, skewing Biden supporters, voted by mail before Election Day but their votes were sometimes counted...
Reporting for NPR, Sean McMinn and Selena Simmons-Duffins on staffing shortages: On data availability: This is the first time the federal agency has released this data, which includes limited reports going back to summer. The federal government consistently started collecting this data in July. After months of steadily trending upward, the number of hospitals reporting shortages crossed 1,000 this month and has stayed above since. The data, however, are still...
A small gathering of 10 people or fewer can seem like a low-risk activity, and at the individual level, it’s lower risk than going to a big birthday party. But when a lot of people everywhere are gathering, small or large, the collective risk goes up. For FiveThirtyEight, Maggie Koerth and Elena Mejía illustrate the reasoning. The collective part is where many seem to get tripped up. “Flattening the curve”...
For The Pudding, Michelle McGhee analyzed representation in crossword puzzles. Some crossword publications do better than others. As of December 2019, The USA Today puzzle is edited by Erik Agard, a 27-year old crossword champ who told me, “bringing some balance on the representation front is something I actively try to do.” A prominent crossword blogger called USA Today’s puzzle “the most interesting, innovative, and provocative daily crossword” out right...
The University of Oxford’s Blavatnik School of Government defined an index to track containment measures for the coronavirus. For The New York Times, Lauren Leatherby and Rich Harris plotted the index against cases and hospitalizations: When cases first peaked in the United States in the spring, there was no clear correlation between containment strategies and case counts, because most states enacted similar lockdown policies at the same time. And in...