2026-04-24 15:03:39
The Kyoto Aquarium in Kyoto and the Sumida Aquarium in Tokyo each have detailed relationship diagrams for their penguins. The above is for Kyoto.
The networks are framed as reality shows with weddings, divorce, and cheating, along with likes and dislikes of each penguin. Watch out for the penguin named Pon:
Kuruma and Tako live next door to each other, and Pon has been visiting each of them in turn for snuggle sessions. Both boys are obsessed with Pon, but it seems neither of them can fully satisfy her. What’s the fate of this neighborhood love triangle!?
Oh my.
I don’t know why these exist, but it’s nice that they do. The aquariums have updated the networks each year since 2024.
[Thanks, Charlotte]
Tags: Kyoto Acquarium, penguin, relationships
2026-04-24 01:35:45
Even if only military areas are targeted, civilian and commercial structures are also damaged, because the real world isn’t separated into discrete, selectable items on a map. Bloomberg analyzed satellite imagery to estimate the type of areas damaged in the strikes.
Each detection was classified into one of six categories: military, industrial, civilian, commercial, government, or unclassified. We separated government facilities from the broader civilian category because these buildings may serve dual military-civilian purposes. Rather than forcing a single label, the analysis preserves the full mix of land use types around each detection — a site classified as “military” might also be 20% residential and 10% commercial, reflecting the mixed-use reality of urban areas.
Sets of Voronoi diagrams are used to show the percentage breakdowns for each detection.
Tags: Bloomberg, damage, Iran, satellite imagery, war
2026-04-23 21:06:01
Lower fertility is typically pitched as a bad thing, but it can be good in some ways, such as more women going to college and building careers or fewer unplanned teen pregnancies. For NYT’s the Upshot, Claire Cain Miller reports on the other side of lower birth rates.
One of the biggest drivers of the delay in childbearing is widely considered to be a success story: the decline of teen pregnancy, which had been unusually high in the United States. It reached its recent peak in 1991, at 61.8 births per 1,000 girls and women ages 15 to 19, before rapidly declining to 11.7 per 1,000 in 2025. The change is attributed to more effective contraception, education about pregnancy prevention and less sex among teenagers.
Tags: Claire Cain Miller, fertility, Upshot
2026-04-23 20:05:34
Hi everyone. This is issue No. 385 of the Process, the newsletter for members where we aim for quality in our data graphics over adding to a stream of worthless information. I’m Nathan Yau. This week we highlight an overlay that obscures the useful bits and helps no one.
Become a member for access to this — plus tutorials, courses, and guides.
2026-04-22 15:42:41
Shri Khalpada of PerThirtySix explains how GPS works using a set of small interactive globes.
The answer is in some ways simpler than you’d expect, and in other ways more complex. GPS is fundamentally a translation tool: it converts time into distance. A satellite sends a signal, your phone catches it, and the delay between those two events tells the phone exactly how far away the satellite is. Everything else is about making that measurement precise enough to be useful: accounting for bad clocks, satellite geometry, and eventually, Einstein’s theories.
So geometry is useful. Imagine that.
Tags: GPS, PerThirtySix, satellites, Shri Khalpada
2026-04-22 04:43:30
OpenAI announced their generative model ChatGPT Images 2.0. One of the new features is that you can generate more than a single image in a prompt, which means you don’t have to generate images one-by-one and stitch them together on your own.
So now everyone can generate research posters like the one above with a quick prompt. Blessed day. Although, the robots are going to eventually do all the work for us anyways, so I’m not sure what the point is.
