Shri Khalpada of PerThirtySix explains how GPS works using a set of small interactive globes.

The answer is in some ways simpler than you’d expect, and in other ways more complex. GPS is fundamentally a translation tool: it converts time into distance. A satellite sends a signal, your phone catches it, and the delay between those two events tells the phone exactly how far away the satellite is. Everything else is about making that measurement precise enough to be useful: accounting for bad clocks, satellite geometry, and eventually, Einstein’s theories.

So geometry is useful. Imagine that.

OpenAI announced their generative model ChatGPT Images 2.0. One of the new features is that you can generate more than a single image in a prompt, which means you don’t have to generate images one-by-one and stitch them together on your own.

So now everyone can generate research posters like the one above with a quick prompt. Blessed day. Although, the robots are going to eventually do all the work for us anyways, so I’m not sure what the point is.

Mortality varies widely by geography and demographic group. It has also changed over time with improvements in medicine or availability of resources. Our World in Data shows the differences with a treemap. Use the dropdown menus to select groups and a slider to shift time.

For low-income countries:

[N]on-communicable diseases account for 43% of deaths; that’s a much smaller share than in the world as a whole (75%). That’s not because death rates of these diseases are lower in poorer countries; adjusting for age, they’re actually higher than they are in rich countries.

The difference is that death rates from infections, injuries, and child and maternal mortality are far higher. One in three die from infectious diseases such as HIV/AIDS, malaria, meningitis, and tuberculosis.

Maybe the hardest number in this dataset to sit with is that one in ten deaths is a newborn or a mother leaving children behind.

The administration wants to build a 250-foot tall arch in Washington. That’s a pretty big arch. To show how big that is, Marco Hernandez and Anushka Patil, for the New York Times, used illustrations of the proposal against existing arches and structures.

Using inference with what you ask, how you write, and your phrasing, a complete profile is built from just a few sentences. For the Straits Times, Amanda Shendruk and Youjin Shen use a concrete example to demonstrate.

I like the build-up in this piece. It starts with a chat, and then highlights line-by-line and word-by-word to build a complete user profile that most people never think about.

Back in my day, companies used to collect data about you in more obvious ways, such as suggesting you fill out profiles or tracking clicks across various sites. They’d convince college kids to share links on their AIM away message. Later, people would be convinced that voice assistants like Alexa and Siri were eavesdropping to serve hyper-targeted ads.

Well no more. These days, a chatbot will do.

The Strait of Hormuz might be “completely open” for ships to pass through, depending on the source and the timing. Hard to say from anecdotes. But at least we can see what’s been going on through data. For the New York Times, Josh Holder, Adina Renner, and Blacki Migliozzi mapped routes before the war started and after and charted events over the past month.

Japanese officials and researchers have been carefully documenting when cherry blossoms bloom in Kyoto for the past 1,200 years. Yasuyuki Aono was the current record keeper, but he passed away recently with no one to take his place. For the Guardian, Chris Baraniuk reports on the search for a new keeper:

“You can very much see that he planned to continue,” said Tuna Acisu, a data scientist at Our World in Data, an online platform that publishes a chart based on Aono’s cherry tree data. “That made me a little bit emotional.”

Now, following a search launched by Acisu last week – sparked by fears that no one would be able to continue the 1,200-year cherry blossom record – a researcher in Japan has stepped forward and offered to make formal observations of the mountain cherry’s spring flowerings.

“He is consulting the same sources as Prof Aono to get us this year’s cherry blossom peak bloom and said he will confirm the date in the coming days,” Acisu said. The researcher in question asked to remain anonymous until the arrangement is finalised.

The data has become a marker for climate change, as the blooms come earlier and earlier. It’s good to see the centuries-old dataset continue.

Millions of people protested in Hong Kong against China’s Communist Party back in 2019. China imposed a national security law soon after. Reuters highlights the arrests of several hundred people and how their lives are several years later.

Chan Kim Kam, 38, was one of the first people arrested in Hong Kong under the revamped sedition law, part of a second package of national security laws enacted in 2024 known as Article 23 . She and several others were accused of publishing posts with “seditious intent” related to the 1989 Tiananmen crackdown.

Although she hasn’t been charged, Chan, in an interview with Reuters, said she has lost several jobs due to the fallout of her arrest and now has to report to a police station weekly. “Is it really necessary to kill off a person’s survival space in Hong Kong?” she asked rhetorically. “It’s a kind of suppression targeting people with certain political backgrounds.”

A set of illustrated Post-it notes shows each person arrested, and the theme is constant throughout the article. Colors indicate the type of law invoked to warrant an arrest.

The transitions between anecdote and chart type is very good here and links reality to the statistically abstract.

To make India’s census documents more accessible to the public in the 1970s, the government worked on the Portrait of Population for the 1971 Census. Aman Bhargava and Vivek Matthew, for Diagram Chasing, explain the history of the publication and provide an archive of 700 hand-drawn charts from the publication.

Half a century later, what makes these documents worth looking at is the tremendous and earnest effort being made to render this data interesting and engaging. This was before data visualization became cheaper to produce digitally, which means every chart, every pictogram, and every illustrated comparison was an expensive decision in terms of time and effort, especially within the already stretched departments of the government. One can imagine the writers, artists, and designers (because that is what they were, even if the bureaucracy had not used those words) who produced these documents thinking about what would land with a reader holding this pamphlet.

Bring back efforts like this for all countries.

This week we put more information in the background to improve the signal in the foreground.

For most of history, maps of the Moon were based only on the near side, because that’s all we could see from Earth. Danny Robb of Inverting Vision gives a visual history lesson on how we eventually saw the rest.

We wouldn’t be able to get a better look at the far side of the Moon until we invented a way to send cameras there. At the dawn of the Space Age, rockets gave us the ability to do just that. In 1959, Soviet engineers created a series of robotic probes, and launched them toward the Moon. One of these managed a lunar flyby, and was named Luna 3. Engineers equipped Luna 3 with a film camera, capable of developing the exposed film, scanning the images, and transmitting them back to Earth by radio.

Over four years, Barbara Iweins cataloged every object she owns — all 12,795 of them — with a photo.

Longing for more stability in my life, I felt the urge to really lock myself into my new place. I decided then and there to push the limits of my inertia and neuroticism by getting up close and personal with my belongings and analyze all of them in detail.

From then on, for four years, room by room, drawer by drawer, I photographed, indexed and classified my entire house. Absolutely everything: from my daughters torn sock to my sons Lego, but also my vibrator, my anxiolytics… absolutely everything.

William S. Cleveland, one of the most respected statistical visualization researchers of all-time, passed on March 27, 2026 at 83 years old. From his obituary:

A pioneering statistician, Bill helped reshape how scientists analyze and visualize data, and was among the first to articulate the intellectual foundations of what is now called data science. Over a career spanning academia and Bell Laboratories, he championed the idea that statistics should center on learning from real data rather than on mathematical theory alone. His work on graphical methods transformed data visualization into a rigorous scientific discipline, and his books, The Elements of Graphing Data and Visualizing Data, became foundational texts for generations of researchers.

At Bell Labs, Bill worked alongside John Tukey and John Chambers. He contributed to a culture focused on hands-on data analysis and innovation in computing. In 2001, he outlined a vision for expanding statistics into “data science.” This vision integrated computation, subject-matter knowledge, and analytic thinking and has since become central to modern scientific practice.

Bill was a deeply respected scholar, colleague, and mentor, and his contributions to the field and to the institutions he served will be long remembered. His impact extended far beyond his research accomplishments. His insight, vision, and generosity influenced many, and his legacy will endure in the people and ideas he inspired.

If you work with charts, you’ve come across Cleveland’s research in one form or another. His studies on graphical perception influenced a generation of visualization researchers, which trickled down to the design of tools that data workers use every day.

For Al Jazeera, Mohamed A. Hussein and Mohammed Haddad provide a map of how Iran strategically observes and blocks the Strait of Hormuz from its islands and coastlines.

The first strategic island along the Strait of Hormuz is Larak Island.

While it is only about 49sq km (19sq miles), its position makes it a centrepiece of Iran’s maritime strategy and allows it to act as a natural observation deck and gatekeeper for maritime movement.

Since the start of the current war, Iran has rerouted selected vessels through a narrow corridor north of the island, inside its territorial waters.

This passage, monitored and controlled by Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), acts as a “safe corridor” for approved ships, allowing transit under Iranian supervision.

You’ve likely seen the top-down maps of the strait by now that show a quick overview of the geography. In this piece, the zoom into specific geography features gives a better sense of scale and details of Iran’s defenses.

Trump spends a lot of time at his own hotels and golf clubs. Philip Bump has been keeping track since the first term. During this second term so far, Trump spent 170 days in office on his own properties, or 38%, and 80% of weekend days. That seems like a lot given the state of things.

The National Park Service and the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis publishes data on national parks annually, but it’s not always straightforward to access. Kyle Frost brought the data into one place so that it’s easier to view and download.

Decades of national park visitation and outdoor recreation economic data are buried in government spreadsheets. I built this to make it actually usable, whether you work in outdoor rec or just want to know how many people went to Yellowstone last year.

It looks like Great Smoky Mountains National Park is the most visited national park, by a lot.

Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace was published 30 years ago. To commemorate, Christian Swinehart made Infinite Digest, an illustrated companion to the book:

Now, 30 years after its initial publication, I’m revisiting Infinite Jest and exploring those old intuitions about its structure by visualizing them. Part reader’s guide and part analytical tool, this collection of interactive graphics is my attempt to give readers a unifying view of the book’s whirlwind of characters, narratives, and interlinked references.

The work is based on static graphics that Swinehart illustrated in 2021. They explore timelines, the endnotes, and character connections. So far, there is an interactive version for plot lines and footnote distribution. He also made the data available to download.

This week we look for ways to diverge towards the unexpected.

It’s that time of year again when we hear about how the plants are growing across the country. For the Washington Post, Ben Noll, John Muyskens, and Naema Ahmed have the maps for leaves and flowers.

Meteorological spring started March 1. The astronomical season started March 20. But there’s a third option: The season as decreed by the plants. They don’t follow any calendar and instead leaf out when it’s warm enough.

The first emergence of leaves can be estimated by temperatures since the start of the year. A certain amount of warmth needs to accumulate before leaves appear. This warmth is typically measured through a metric called growing degree days.