2026-02-07 06:21:04
Olympic gold medalist Ted Ligety is on the New York Times to explain why: there are many variables that athletes cannot control while skiing really fast down a mountain in the winter.
One of my favorite parts about the Olympics is the information graphics. There haven’t been as many over the years, so it’s good to see this short-form piece with a mix of video and illustrations.
Tags: New York Times, Olympics, skiing, uncertainty
2026-02-06 20:50:15
More processing power requires more data centers, and for better or worse, they are going up across the country. Using data from a variety of sources, the National Renewable Energy Laboratory mapped data center infrastructure.
The yellow circles represent operating data centers, orange is construction, and white is proposed. The data centers are connected through transmission and fiber optic lines.
Keep this for when the bots take over and we need to cut the cords in the right places.
2026-02-06 16:13:33
Researchers published a paper in Science on the growing threat of AI swarms used for chaos in existing and new online communities. For Wired, David Gilbert reports:
“We are moving into a new phase of informational warfare on social media platforms where technological advancements have made the classic bot approach outdated,” says Jonas Kunst, a professor of communication at BI Norwegian Business School and one of the coauthors of the report.
For experts who have spent years tracking and combating disinformation campaigns, the paper presents a terrifying future.
“What if AI wasn’t just hallucinating information, but thousands of AI chatbots were working together to give the guise of grassroots support where there was none? That’s the future this paper imagines—Russian troll farms on steroids,” says Nina Jankowicz, the former Biden administration disinformation czar who is now CEO of the American Sunlight Project.
It’s difficult to imagine social media sticking around when there’s no longer a way to know what’s real. What would even be the point? Pen and paper are going to make a comeback.
Tags: disinformation, ethics, fake, Wired
2026-02-05 22:10:46
ASCII art is text-based art that uses printable characters instead of pixels. Alex Harri made an image-to-ASCII renderer for himself and explains the process of converting images to text.
I started building my ASCII renderer to prove to myself that it’s possible to utilize shape in ASCII rendering. In this post, I’ll cover the techniques and ideas I used to capture shape and build this ASCII renderer in detail.
We’ll start with the basics of image-to-ASCII conversion and see where the common issue of blurry edges comes from. After that, I’ll show you the approach I used to fix that and achieve sharp, high-quality ASCII rendering. At the end, we’ll improve on that by implementing the contrast enhancement effect I showed above.
The interactive elements in the explainer make the concepts much easier to understand. Otherwise, you’d just be looking at a bunch of matrices.
And I now have a greater appreciation for the ASCII art from my BBS-ing days. I’d dial in to someone’s computer using my 2400 bps modem and a text graphic greeted you character-by-character. The good old days.
Tags: Alex Harri, Ascii, explainer
2026-02-05 22:06:04
This week we highlight visual metaphors and connect the dots for people who don’t work with data on the regular. We use charts to have an informal chat.
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2026-02-04 19:59:36
The administration continues to add expenses for the country and insist tariff revenues will cover the cost. The Cato Institute has been keeping track, and the Washington Post has a unit chart that shows how the claims sum to impossible.
Each square represents one billion dollars of estimated tariff revenue. Squares are filled with each expense and total cost quickly escapes the bounds of available funds.
Tags: Cato Institute, revenue, tariff, Washington Post
