Why the galaxy pictures from the Webb telescope are pretty cool

The first public picture from the James Webb telescope is kind of cool and all, but you can’t fully appreciate it unless you know what those glowing blobs represent and how they came to be. For Washington Post Opinion, Sergio Peçanha provides context for why NASA’s recent accomplishment is so awesome:

Everything about the Webb telescope is mind-boggling. Ponder this: Humans sent a telescope the size of a tennis court into space and parked it four times farther away than the moon.

There it orbits the sun along with us, just so we can get some pictures.

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Commuting calculator

Sergio Peçanha and Yan Wu for The Washington Post made a calculator that shows how much time you spend commuting in a year and what you could do with that time instead. The input, interaction, and calculations are straightforward. Just use the slider to specify your roundtrip commute time, and the numbers update.

The easiest thing to do would be to just provide the total hours. You commute for an hour per day? That’s 250 hours in a year. That seems like a lot of time, but on its own it’s an abstract calculation. The interactive takes the natural next step with what you could do with that time, which makes the calculation more tangible.

I do the same thing when describing money saved. A few dollars here and there doesn’t seem like much, but extrapolate that to Jack in the Box tacos, and you’re getting somewhere.

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How long before there is gender equality in the U.S. House and Senate

For The Washington Post, Sergio Peçanha asks, “What will it take to achieve gender equality in American politics?

It will take some more time and a lot more effort to reach equal representation. I asked my colleague David Byler, a statistics expert, to estimate how long it would take for women to reach equal numbers in Congress at the current pace. His estimate: about 60 years.

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Cow representation in the Senate

For the Absurd America section of The Washington Post, Sergio Peçanha asks the question that’s on everyone’s mind: Are cows better represented in the Senate than people?

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