Research by M. Pusceddu et al. shows that honeybees use social distancing when a parasite is introduced to the hive. In a parasite-free hive, activities are spread throughout the hive, whereas clusters form when parasites are detected. The Economist illustrated the difference with a grids of dot densities. Tags: bees, Economist, social distancing
It seems clear that Ethereum (and other cryptocurrencies) in its current state is bad for the environment, but it’s hard to say how bad it really is. Kyle McDonald estimated emissions and energy usage to try to understand better: “Ethereum is comparable to keeping 2-3 coal power plant running.” See McDonald’s real-time estimates here. Tags: cryptocurrency, emissions, Ethereum, Kyle McDonald
I’m opening the print shop for a few days. Get your order in, and I’ll try my best to get it to you before Christmas.
Welcome to issue #167 The Process, the newsletter for FlowingData members that looks closer at how the charts get made. I’m Nathan Yau, and we’re back from Thanksgiving. I hope you were able to take some time off. Every month I collect tools and resources to help you make better charts. This month I’m including some job listings too, as there were some that caught my eye. Here’s the good...
In a multi-faceted piece, The Washington Post described the rapidly growing cities in Africa that are projected to be the most populated cities in the world: In three projections by the University of Toronto’s Global Cities Institute, Africa accounted for at least 10 of the world’s 20 most populous cities in 2100. Even in the institute’s middle-of-the-road development scenario, cities that many Americans may seldom read about, such as Niamey,...
Through my twitter feed, I found my way to this chart, made by jamie_bio. This is produced using R code even though it looks like a slide. The underlying dataset concerns votes at the United Nations on various topics. Someone has already classified these topics. Jamie looked at voting blocs, specifically, countries whose votes agree most often or least often with the U.K. If you look at his Github, this...
Using data from Project FeederWatch, which is a community tracking project to count birds around feeders, Miller et al. estimated the pecking order among 200 species. This was in 2017. For The Washington Post, Andrew Van Dam and Alyssa Fowers worked with the researchers for an updated ranking using a more comprehensive dataset. The result is bird power rankings 2021 edition. Tags: birds, ranking, Washington Post
This chart, made by someone who is against vaccinations, shows a higher mortality rate for those who are vaccinated versus those who are not. Strange. It shows real data from the Office of National Statistics in the UK. As explained by Stuart McDonald, Simpson’s Paradox is at play: [W]ithin the 10-59 age band, the average unvaccinated person is much younger than the average vaccinated person, and therefore has a lower...
When you compare the price of things today against prices one year ago, almost everything increased in cost at a rapid rate. While out of the ordinary, it’s definitely not the first time this happened. The New York Times zoomed out to show year-over-year price change since 1960, framing the timeline in the context of age generations. Zoom into the data super close, and every blip can seem like a...
