Carrier pigeon vs. internet upload speeds

In some rural areas, upload speeds are crawlingly slow, which can make it difficult to send things on the internet. In some cases, a carrier pigeon might even be faster. For The Washington Post, Janice Kai Chen did the math so you know which one to use:

Racing pigeons clock an average of 40 miles per hour and typically race up to 400 miles, roughly from D.C. to Boston, according to the American Racing Pigeon Union. With the boost of a tailwind, pigeons have been recorded going as fast as 110 mph and as far as 1,000 miles.

At certain data volumes and distances, the pigeon is a quicker option for large swaths of rural America, where internet speeds can lag far behind the national average.

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Racing amateurs against Tour de France cyclists

It takes strength and dedication to race in the Tour de France. It’s just that when you see the leading cyclist alone on a steep climb, they kind of look the same as some random person riding up a hill. For NYT’s The Upshot, K.K. Rebecca Lai and Ben Blatt provide a point of comparison.

Data from Strava was used to show how a caterpillar-like group of amateurs rode against a professional. As you might have guessed, the professional climbs much faster. Just a tad.

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Pitch speed distribution, a decrease with age

Pitch speed starts to decrease with a baseball player’s age at some point. This makes sense. That’s why athletes retire. The Statcast pitch distributions show when this happens for individual players, categorized by pitch type. I like the transparent distributions for past seasons as a mode of comparison. [via @statpumpkin]

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Real-time speed of light from Earth to Mars

Hurry up, light. We’re gonna be late:

By James O’Donoghue, the animation shows the speed of light in real-time. The distance between Earth, the moon, and Mars is to scale, but the locations are scaled up so that you can see them.

See also the animations for Earth to the moon and of light orbiting Earth.

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