Interactive timeline of notable people throughout history

This is a fun project by Jan Willem Tulp. Based on data from a cross-verified database of notable people, Tulp scrolls through history to show when these people enter and leave the world based on their age. Start in 3500 BC and scroll from there.

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Visualizing the statistical connections behind ChatGPT

To gain a better understanding of how ChatGPT works under the hood, Santiago Ortiz repeatedly passed the prompt “Intelligence is” to the chatbot. Then he visualized the statistical paths to get to a response using a 3-D network. If you squint, the network kind of looks like a computer’s brain.

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Conway’s Game of Life with a third dimension

Alec Singh added another dimension to Conway’s Game of Life for a pretty, mesmerizing animation. The z-axis is used to show positions over time.

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When Your Vision and Hearing Decline with Age

If you want to feel like you’re getting old, visit an optometrist and have them tell you that in 6 to 12 months you won’t be able to read things up close and you’ll need bifocals. Here’s when your senses will decline.

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✚ Misleading or Not? A Chart About How Couples Meet

If a chart is seen by enough people, someone will call it misleading. Many will agree that it is misleading, and therefore, the chart is terrible and the maker is up to no good. This is the law of the land. There are no exceptions.

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Happiness ratings, by country and age

The World Happiness Report, published each year since 2012, just dropped for 2024. They focused on age and happiness this year. Overall, the United States ranked in the range from 17 to 29 among all countries, but was worse for young people. Finland was definitively at the top.

The visualizations are clinical, which is kind of sad given the topic of the report. Someone should collate the data and have some fun with it.

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Birding and data visualization

Jer Thorp has combined birding and data visualization into a unique course called Binoculars to Binomials:

I dreamt up Binoculars to Binomials as a hybrid site of learning. It’s for coders who are interested in cultivating an observational practice, and for birders who want to dive into the rich pool of data that comes out of their hobby.

More broadly, it’s for anyone who’s interested in the overlap between nature, data and creativity.

Sounds good to me.

One of the best ways to learn how to visualize data is to apply it to a specific field. You figure out the mechanics and the context behind the data, which makes visualization meaningful and useful. In this case, you get your hands in all parts of the process.

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National identity stereotypes through generative AI

For Rest of World, Victoria Turk breaks down bias in generative AI in the context of national identity.

Bias in AI image generators is a tough problem to fix. After all, the uniformity in their output is largely down to the fundamental way in which these tools work. The AI systems look for patterns in the data on which they’re trained, often discarding outliers in favor of producing a result that stays closer to dominant trends. They’re designed to mimic what has come before, not create diversity.

“These models are purely associative machines,” Pruthi said. He gave the example of a football: An AI system may learn to associate footballs with a green field, and so produce images of footballs on grass.

Between this convergence to stereotypes and the forced diversity from Google’s Gemini, has anyone tried coupling models with demographic data to find a place in between?

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Flipbook Experiment, like the Telephone game but visual

This looks fun. The Pudding is running an experiment that functions like a visual version of Telephone. In Telephone, the first person whispers a message to their neighbor and the message is passed along until you end with a message that is completely different. Instead of a message, you have a sketch that each new person traces.

I traced something around frame 200 and the sketch looked like a scribble already. I’m curious where this ends.

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Visual guide to airfoils

Bartosz Ciechanowski is at it again with an in-depth explainer that makes heavy use of slider-driven interactive graphics. This time he simulated the patterns of air flowing over and around the wings of an airplane, also known as airfoil.

The length of each article starts to feel kind of long at times, but there’s something to these simple sliders that are useful in keeping you engaged and helping to understand the physics.

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