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
2026-02-24 16:48:30
People are usually not great at remembering exact colors. Dialed is a fun memory game to test that theory. You get five seconds to memorize a color and then adjust hue, saturation, and lightness to match. Each attempt gets a score.
I wonder if FlowingData readers, who often have to match shades in a chart with color legends, will naturally do better. I only scored 39, which I’ll take as reinforcement that direct labeling is better than legends and not that I have a terrible memory.
2026-02-23 20:35:58
Using an analysis from Focaldata, the Guardian used the angled arrow approach to map countries that shifted towards China’s voting patterns between 2024 and 2025.
By measuring how closely each country’s voting record correlates with those of the US or China, researchers have been able to map how the geopolitical centre of gravity is further away from Washington and closer to Beijing than at any other point this century.
The total number of countries strongly aligned with the US has crashed under Trump, in contrast to China, which has maintained its allies.
It turns out countries are less enthusiastic about the current U.S. administration’s global approach. This is very shocking.
Tags: China, Guardian, United Nations
2026-02-23 16:12:24
Focaldata calculated United Nations voting patterns by country, relative to the United States and China. The more a country voted the same as the United States votes, the more to the left it appears (as a dot). If voting was more similar to how China votes, the country appears more to the right. Watch the changes from 1992 to 2025.
Tags: China, Focaldata, politics, United Nations, United States, world
2026-02-21 02:24:33
The U.S. Supreme Court ruled the administration’s “emergency” tariffs to be illegal. This stacked area chart from Lazaro Gamio and Keith Collins for the New York Times shows the effects of the ruling. I suspect this chart is going to see a lot of flux over the next few weeks.
Tags: law, New York Times, Supreme Court, tariff
2026-02-20 19:04:53
For Bloomberg, Krishna Karra and Stephen Wicary map blackouts in Cuba due to the U.S. administration’s block on fuel shipments.
Available electricity has plummeted since the start of the year. And it’s disproportionately affected rural areas and provincial hubs, according to a Bloomberg News analysis of satellite imagery. The level of light emitted at night in major eastern cities like Santiago de Cuba and Holguin has dropped as much as 50% compared to the historical average.
This analysis and others before it (see also the New Orleans power outage during Hurricane Ida and fading lights in Ukraine from war-damaged infrastructure) are made possible by NASA’s Black Marble, which tracks nightlight around the world and makes the data publicly available.
Tags: Bloomberg, Cuba, electricity, light, satellite imagery
