2024-12-26 18:38:28
For the New York Times, Marco Hernandez visualized all the tornadoes in 2024, which amounted to more than the usual.
Not only were there more tornadoes reported, but 2024 is also on track to be one of the costliest years ever in terms of damage caused by severe storms, according to the National Center for Environmental Information. Severe weather and four tornado outbreaks from April to May in the central and southern United States alone cost $14 billion.
Oh good.
Tags: New York Times, tornado
2024-12-24 18:39:53
By just about every metric, flights are slower now than they were 30 years ago. However, the percentage of flights that arrive early is higher, based on an analysis by Ben Blatt for NYT’s Upshot.
Why do today’s flights arrive early more often, even though they’re slower? Airlines have extended their scheduled flight durations even more than the flights have lengthened in actual duration. The average scheduled duration from J.F.K. to Los Angeles has increased 23 minutes since 1995, according to an Upshot analysis of Bureau of Transportation Statistics data.
Publish a metric that involves money, and companies optimize for it somehow. In this case, the airlines lowered expectations to create a buffer.
2024-12-24 03:26:42
Christmas is coming. For some, that means snow on the ground, but as areas get less snow than in previous years, that means more regular Christmases than White Christmases in the United States. For Bloomberg, Denise Lu mapped the last time cities had at least one inch of snow fall or accumulation.
Compared to Christmases since 1970, last year’s holiday had the lowest average snow on the ground across the continental US. The chance for a white Christmas this year may be higher than last year, according to AccuWeather, but many areas will likely still not see any snow.
Bonus points for the shoveler with a Santa hat that doubles as a progress bar:
This is in contrast to the Washington Post piece from last week. WaPo used similar data from NOAA but highlighted cumulative snowfall instead of the lack of it.
2024-12-23 17:02:59
Jordan Cunliffe uses embroidery to explore and visualize data. This year, headed towards Christmas, he’s been posting one stitch per day for a Data Advent Calendar.
Tags: Advent, embroidery, Jordan Cunliffe
2024-12-21 01:41:24
This is a fun one by Dylan Moriarty for the Washington Post. Punch in your city to see the percentage of Christmas days (or Hanukkah, New Year’s Eve, or Winter Solstice) since 1940 when it snowed.
It’s nice and corny like it should be, with holiday illustrations and snow falling on the screen. There’s even a data postcard that you can download and share with all your friends and family, because they will most definitely be interested.
Maybe it’s just the movies telling me so, but there’s something special about snow falling, holiday lights, Christmas music playing in the background, and a warm drink in hand.
Tags: Christmas, snow, Washington Post, weather
2024-12-20 19:41:50
Researchers at Sony Computer Science Laboratories in Rome estimated the time it takes to walk to places for amenities such as education, healthcare, and restaurants:
Proximity-based cities have attracted much attention in recent years. The ‘15-minute city’, in particular, heralded a new vision for cities where essential services must be easily accessible. Despite its undoubted merit in stimulating discussion on new organization of cities, the 15-minute city cannot be applicable everywhere, and its very definition raises a few concerns. Here we tackle the feasibility and practicability of the 15-minute city model in many cities worldwide. We provide a worldwide quantification of how close cities are to the ideal of the 15-minute city. To this end, we measure the accessibility times to resources and services, and we reveal strong heterogeneity of accessibility within and across cities, with a pivotal role played by local population densities.
Check your city on the interactive map. The Washington Post has a version that is easier to use, but it only shows the data for a subset of cities in the United States, whereas the Sony map shows cities around the world with more granular breakdowns.
