2026-02-27 16:31:21
Isotype, or International System of Typographic Picture Education, is a picture language used to communicate concepts and ideas. The method is often paired with or used as visualization. RJ Andrews cataloged examples from his historical collection of works, which you can browse by chart type and feature.
Tags: Isotype, RJ Andrews
2026-02-27 01:38:52
The folks who made Dark Sky, my once go-to weather app that was inevitably acquired by Apple, are back with a new weather app: Acme Weather. Instead of oversimplifying a forecast only to show what is most likely, you also get other possible ways the day can go.
Understanding this uncertainty is crucial for planning your day. Most weather apps will give you their single best guess, leaving you to wonder how sure they actually are, and what else might happen instead. Will it actually start raining at 9am, or might it end up pushed off until noon? Will there be rain or snow? How sure are you? You can’t plan your day if you don’t know how much you can trust the forecast, or know what other possibilities might arise. Rather than pretending we will always be right, Acme Weather embraces the idea that our forecast will sometimes be wrong.
Embracing uncertainty. Just like the Nicolas Cage title character in the movie The Weather Man. It’s not just wind.
They also have fun things in the works like rainbow alerts and beautiful sunsets. I might have to switch.
Tags: forecast, uncertainty, weather
2026-02-26 22:06:59
Every month, I collect visualization and data tools and resources to work with and learn from. Here is what happened in February.
Become a member for access to this — plus tutorials, courses, and guides.
2026-02-26 19:11:09
Mechanical Pencil is a project by Bryan Macomber that illustrates the mechanical bits in everyday objects. The process:
I take the product apart. CAD it up. Illustrate each view. Then animate and lay it out for the web. That sounds quick, but it does take me quite a bit of time to create each one.
The leading object is, naturally, a mechanical pencil. Did you know that the plastic part that holds the lead in place is called a chuck? Other items so far include a Pez dispenser, a pen, and a lighter.
The interactive illustrations are satisfying to open, close, click, and release. I want more.
Tags: Bryan Macomber, engineering, illustration, mechanical
2026-02-25 17:43:12
The challenges continue for women who want clothes that fit properly. For the Pudding, Amanda Sakuma, with Jan Diehm, explains the variation in women’s size and shape, the inconsistencies in sizing across stores, and how the overlap between these two creates sizing chaos.
This piece does a good job of showing and explaining distributions, which is a tough concept to grasp for non-data folks. The illustrations of women instead of just dots on the beeswarm help keep you focused on the variation.
2026-02-24 20:59:59
LLMs are based on data and text collected from the internets, so as you might expect, when you query for opinions about places in a chatbot, you get output that reflects the inputs. For the Washington Post, Geoffrey A. Fowler and Kevin Schaul chart and map the opinions for cities and states in ChatGPT output.
This is based on the work of researchers at the University of Oxford and the University of Kentucky. Apparently you can’t ask what region is the best or worst straight up, but you can put one region against another and ask which is better or worse. The researchers ran various tests for various qualities and calculated the percentages.
The project reminds me of when people were putzing around with Google suggestions to find stereotypes for states in the U.S. and countries. These were funny at the time, because you knew the suggestions were based on what people search for. With chatbots, the sourcing and output format makes opinion look a lot like facts, which will lead to much confusion.
Tags: bias, ChatGPT, geography, Washington Post
