2025-12-12 02:12:02
Neal Agarwal published another gift to the internet with Size of Life. It shows the scale of living things, starting with DNA, to hemoglobin, and keeps going up.
The scientific illustrations are hand-drawn (without AI) by Julius Csotonyi. Sound & FX by Aleix Ramon and cello music by Iratxe Ibaibarriaga calm the mind and encourage a slow observation of things, but also grow in complexity and weight with the scale. It kind of feels like a meditation exercise.
See also: shrinking to an atom, the speed of light, and of course the classic Powers of Ten.
Tags: Julius Csotonyi, living, Neal Agarwal, scale
2025-12-11 22:56:19
There are seven states that legalized gambling on your phone. So you can play slots all the live long day while you watch television and walk your dog. For NYT’s the Upshot, Ben Blatt shows the billions in tax revenue this provides states, which makes revenue from sports betting apps look like pocket change.
I guess good for the states?
This seems terrible for people gambling away their income on slot games. These games favor the house in the long run, so the longer you play the closer you get to certainty that you will lose everything. That doesn’t bode well for those who play all the time.
2025-12-11 22:06:36
Hi everyone. This is the Process, the newsletter for FlowingData members on data and charts beyond defaults. This week, we look at the making of a treemap on income, following a decade of other charts. All paths lead somewhere.
Become a member for access to this — plus tutorials, courses, and guides.
2025-12-10 18:09:38
Michael Friendly, known for piecing together the history of visualization, chatted with Cabinet of Infographic Curiosities. I liked this tidbit on Charles-Joseph Minard:
Minard would likely be unknown today, if Marey had not so aptly said his flow map of Napoleon’s March on Moscow “defied the pen of the historian by its brutal eloquence.” Funkhouser picked this up, and then Tufte anointed it as “the greatest graphic ever drawn”. But in his time, Minard was just an engineer working for the École Nationale des Ponts et Chaussees (School of Bridges and Roads) in Paris. The corpus of his work lay buried in the archives of the ENPC. Today, Paris celebrates its intellectual and artistic heroes with place names, like Rue Descartes, Place Monge, …but there is nothing named for Minard. Not even his burial place was known until Antoine discovered this in Montparnasse Cemetery, and Les Chevaliers met for lunch and a celebration at his grave, where a small plaque was installed.
Tags: Cabinet of Infographic Curiosities, history, Michael Friendly
2025-12-10 02:59:06
When Zillow removed climate risk scores from property listings, many assumed the company acted out of political pressure. The main issue though was that the risk models behind the scores were not reliable enough. For Bloomberg, Eric Roston reports:
“You have to know something about the individual structure — its foundation, the presence of a basement, first-floor height,” says Howard Botts, chief scientist of Cotality.
Each assumption that a model makes, implicitly or explicitly, adds another layer: land slope, a building’s use, how many stories it has.
“‘Climate risk’ is much more than just the physical hazard,” agrees Adam Pollack. “The relationship of hazard and the built environment — and damage — is the actual risk.”
Most climate models are abstract and high level out of necessity. Assessing risk at the individual level is tricky, especially when there are so many variables to consider. Plus, in the case of individual homes, the value of each is especially relevant to both buyers and sellers. You can’t just give a sweeping aggregate.
2025-12-09 19:44:52
As hurricanes and wildfires grow more common in some areas, home values go down and insurance premiums go up. Claire Brown and Mira Rojanasakul report for the New York Times:
Since 2018, a financial shock in the home insurance market has meant that homes in the ZIP codes most exposed to hurricanes and wildfires would sell for an average of $43,900 less than they would otherwise, the research found. They include coastal towns in Louisiana and low-lying areas in Florida.
The Midwest seems to be hit hard by insurance premiums as well. I did not know hail was such an issue.
In parts of the hail-prone Midwestern states, insurance now eats up more than a fifth of the average homeowner’s total housing payments, which include mortgage costs and property taxes. In Orleans Parish, La., that number is nearly 30 percent.
Tags: climate change, home, insurance, New York Times
