Serena Williams’ career rankings

Serena Williams announced her retirement from professional tennis. As is required for any milestone by a great athlete, a step chart from The New York Times shows her world ranking over time.

I like the focus on the higher rankings, which is fitting for the occasion, and dotted lines that indicate the smaller chunks of time Williams ranked below 20.

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Weighted Olympic medal counts

To decide who’s doing best at the Olympics you have to define what “best” means. Do you go by total medal count? Do you give more weight to gold medals over silver and bronze? Josh Katz, for NYT’s The Upshot, has been updating an interactive that ranks countries based on how you answer.

Each heatmap represents a country. The horizontal axis represents how much more a silver is worth over a bronze, and the vertical axis is how much a gold is worth over a silver. So the bottom left corner is all medals equal. Color represents possible ranking. The list of countries on the right updates as you move the cursor over spots.

Katz has been updating for each Olympics since PyeongChang 2018. It’s my favorite medal count tracker. I like the original best, which spaced countries in the list when there were ties.

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Bird power rankings

Using data from Project FeederWatch, which is a community tracking project to count birds around feeders, Miller et al. estimated the pecking order among 200 species. This was in 2017. For The Washington Post, Andrew Van Dam and Alyssa Fowers worked with the researchers for an updated ranking using a more comprehensive dataset. The result is bird power rankings 2021 edition.

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Music timeline plays through decades of top songs

Billboard top songs over the years

The Year that Music Died from Polygraph is an animated timeline that shows the Billboard top 5 songs since 1956, all the while playing the top song during a given week.

The visualization itself is fairly straightforward, but I like how everything shifts so smoothly. Artist thumbnails move up and down matching their position on the music chart, the number one songs play without sounding jerky, and a counter on the right keeps track of total weeks at number one per artist. [via Waxy]

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Moving to the “worst” place in America

In 1999, the Department of Agriculture published a Natural Amenities Scale that took into account “six measures of climate, topography, and water area” to help identify desirable places to live for most people.

More recently, Christopher Ingraham for the Washington Post took a quick look at the data, and declared Red Lake County the “worst” place to live in America. That’s when it got interesting. Life in a metro area started to wear.

Life along the I-95 corridor was starting to lose its charm too. I commute in to D.C. most days. A one-way trip, involving car, train, metro and a walk takes about 90 minutes on a good day. I count myself among that woebegone 2.62 percent of workers who spend 15 hours or more each week stuck in traffic, shivering on subway platforms, and otherwise squandering a huge chunk of their waking hours on one of their most-hated activities.

Now Ingraham is packing his bags with his family and moving to Red Lake County.

You see, that’s the thing about data. It only captures so much of what happens in real life. The key is to figure out how well the data represents something and then make conclusions. Otherwise you’ll never know when the “worst” is actually the best.

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Top high school plays and musicals, by decade

Top plays rank over time

Based on annual high school play and musical rankings from the magazine Dramatics, which date back to 1938, NPR charted the most popular plays by decade. For a variety of reasons — cast size, family-friendliness, and licensing — the oldies still reign.

There are two views. In one, the top six plays/musicals are shown each decade and colored by when they were first produced. Mouse over a play, and it's highlighted in the other decades if it's at the top.

The second, more interesting view shows rankings over time. Select a play from a dropdown and see the ups and downs among the top ten, as shown above.

A part of me wants to see and do more with that second view. You could show more rankings at one time instead of just the top ten. You should show all the plays at once. You could add an interaction to mouse over plays in any column to get the full ribbon across. You could then provide a search bar instead of dropdown menu for all the plays over the decades.

But for the article's audience and in the context of the story? This version works much better. Because more isn't always best.

See it.

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Halloween costume rankings

Costume rankings partial

Accompanying their segment on Halloween stores stocking costumes, NPR ranks bestsellers for the past four years, based on data from the National Retail Foundation. Note that these are rankings for adult costumes, so it's safe to assume that all of these costume names are preceded by "sexy." (Kidding.)

I'm surprised there aren't more topical costumes towards the top. For example, the segment touches on Walter White costumes flying off the shelves last year, but I'm guessing the data probably only covers the pre-packaged stuff. Also guessing a similar reason for why Superman and Batman aren't counted as generic superhero, or Dracula as vampire.

See the full graphic on NPR.

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Subpar Captain America

Animation Domination High-Def has a Captain America video of things that America is not so good at, relative to other countries. And they even cited their data source, the CIA World Factbook. How about that.