Noise and health

The New York Times explores how noise impacts health:

Anyone who lives in a noisy environment, like the neighborhoods near this Brooklyn highway, may feel they have adapted to the cacophony. But data shows the opposite: Prior noise exposure primes the body to overreact, amplifying the negative effects.

I’m going to use this for the new reason my kids need quiet time.

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Fake sugars in your food

For The Washington Post, Anahad O’Connor, Aaron Steckelberg, and Laura Reiley visually describe the use of artificial sweeteners in so-called healthy foods. Like with their piece on coffee versus tea, anthropomorphized food items take you through, which I very much enjoy.

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Countries with the longest healthy retirements

Bloomberg compared retirement years in the context of life expectancy and healthy life expectancy. The latter represents how long the average person stays healthy, which is shorter than the former.

The data are clear on one thing though: it’s pensioners in Western Europe who enjoy the longest, healthy retirement periods. The Americas, by contrast, have some of the shortest.

In the above, the yellow dots represent retirement age, the green dots represent healthy life expectancy, and the purple dots represent regular life expectancy. Starting at the top and going clockwise, countries are ordered by the difference between healthy life expectancy and retirement age.

I like circles, but I think I would’ve gone with a more list-like layout here. The patterns and reference points get lost in all the dots and spokes.

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Spotting spurious correlations in health news

When it comes to diet and health, you might see one day that a certain food decreases life expectancy. Then on another day, a different study suggests that food increases life expectancy. It’s hard to know which to believe. David Epstein provides some guidance:

If you’ve watched a lot of NFL games, you’ve probably heard a commentator at some point trot out a stat like: “The Chicago Bears are undefeated in division games following a bye week when they wear their alternate jerseys.”

It is possible that the combination of extra rest and unusual attire gets the Bears amped for division rivals, thus improving their performance — just as it is possible that using the sauna precisely 9-12 times per month at a particular temperature protects against dementia (at first). It is far more likely, however, that given a large database of games and conditions, there will be loads of correlations that occur just by chance; the more you slice and dice the data, the more you’ll find.

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Code (data) as therapy

For Wired, Craig Mod writes about how he uses code as a way to find order during less coherent times:

Break the problem into pieces. Put them into a to-do app (I use and love Things). This is how a creative universe is made. Each day, I’d brush aside the general collapse of society that seemed to be happening outside of the frame of my life, and dive into search work, picking off a to-do. Covid was large; my to-do list was reasonable.

The real joy of this project wasn’t just in getting the search working but the refinement, the polish, the edge bits. Getting lost for hours in a world of my own construction. Even though I couldn’t control the looming pandemic, I could control this tiny cluster of bits.

A couple of years ago, I spoke about how FlowingData is a personal journal in disguise. I find myself turning to data and charts, because those things feel familiar and can be a source of comfort.

So while reading Mod’s essay, it was easy to substitute in data and nod my head in agreement.

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Health conditions and income

A large proportion of those who died from Covid-19 had pre-existing medical conditions. The percentage of those who have pre-existing medical conditions changes a lot by income group. Based on estimates from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, we can see by how much. For New York Times Opinion, Yaryna Serkez charted the difference for the largest cities in the United States.

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History of the health meter in video games

The health meter in video games wasn’t always so commonplace. It took time, iterations, and various incarnations before it converged to what we know now. Ahoy describes the history:

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Bruises

Musician Kaki King’s daughter suffers from a condition (Idiopathic Thrombocytopenic Purpura) where her body attacks her own platelets, which leads to spontaneous bruising and burst blood vessels. In coping with the stress as a parent who can only do so much for her suffering child, King collaborated with information designer Giorgia Lupi.

The result: a mix of personal data collection, reflection, music, and data art entitled Bruises — The Data We Don’t See.

Watch the full piece below:

Love Lupi’s continuous path towards less sterile data.

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Gyroscope to automatically track your health data

I’m surprised I’m just now hearing about Gyroscope. It’s an app that automatically tracks your health data and then generates reports, both digitally and in print format. An “OS for the human body” it says.

Might give it a go.

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National drug overdose epidemic

Drug overdose epidemic

Nadja Popovich for the Guardian delves into America’s drug overdose epidemic, starting with an animated map that shows changes from 1999 to 2014.

On initial look, the map looks like your standard county map, but there’s a small wrinkle in the design that makes the geographic spread over time much easier to see. The switch in the top right corner, to toggle between 1999 and 2014, looks like any other. But instead of just a quick flip between 1999 and 2014, the map shifts with annual data, so you can see a smooth transition instead of an abrupt contrast.

Other options, like small multiples or a scroll bar might have worked as an overview, but this route brings focus and eliminates much of the guesswork.

Very nice.

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