Another recent flip: Based on estimates from Ember, monthly solar-generated electricity reached an all-time high in May and coal reached an all-time low in April. It looks like it won’t be long until both solar and wind consistently beat coal.

Tags: coal, difference, Ember, solar

Speaking of when data flips, last night in game four of the 2026 NBA Finals, the New York Knicks were down by as much as 29 points to the San Antonio Spurs. According to Mike Beuoy of Inpredictable, there was a less than 5% chance of the Knicks winning by the middle of the second quarter. With nine minutes left, the Knicks had a less than 1% chance.

Then began the biggest collapse in NBA Finals history by the San Antonio Spurs.

Tags: basketball, Inpredictable, probability, wins

This is issue No. 392 of the Process, where we make charts that pull focus, because letting the data speak is for chumps. I’m Nathan Yau. This week, we focus on when there is a sudden change or flip in the data that you want to highlight.

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The New York Times counted Elon Musk’s promises on X/Twitter and Tesla earnings calls since 2011. Over the years, there have been more declarations, but the number of achievements per year changed little in the past five years. Instead, the rate of non-achievements appears to be rising.

Tags: Elon Musk, goals, New York Times

It’s going to be hot in North America as the World Cup 2026 starts this week. But the level of heat will vary over time and city, which means teams will experience varying levels of heat depending on when and where they play. Bloomberg crossed the forecast with playing schedule to estimate the heat stress for each team.

Tunisia, France, and Ghana will play in the hottest temperatures. Uzbekistan, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and Spain will play in the coolest temperatures, including the sweet air-conditioned stadiums in Atlanta and Houston.

I’m saving this for later. I wonder if this affects performance in the end.

Tags: Bloomberg, soccer, temperature, World Cup

Companies use seismic airguns in the Gulf of Mexico to find oil and gas deposits. The airguns deliver air blasts in the water, and the time it takes for an echo to return can be used to estimate metrics on the seabed.

For the New York Times, Katherine Chui and Catrin Einhorn demonstrate, with visualization and audio, how the waves from the airguns interfere with whale communication.

The Gulf of Mexico, which the Trump administration calls the Gulf of America, is one of the noisiest bodies of water in the United States. Air gun blasts are the loudest element there, according to research by scientists who monitor underwater acoustics. Shipping traffic is another major contributor.

The noise could affect the ability of Rice’s whales to find food and mates, scientists say. The chronic stress of living in a loud environment could be detrimental to their health.

The maps, graphics, and sounds combine well to emphasize the problem.

Tags: New York Times, ocean, sound, whale

For Bloomberg, Laura Millan, Kyle Kim, and Armand Emamdjomeh mapped the projected extent of melting glaciers in the Alps. The risk of avalanches and rock slides has risen, which could lead to buried towns that reside below.

In the above, the outer border represents the 2010 extent of selected glaciers. The solid blue is the extent that researchers have projected by 2100.

I think the color scheme confused me at first, because I thought I was looking at land mass with ice on top. I wonder if a second shade to indicate the melted portions would be helpful, or maybe a flipped focus to only show the melt would highlight how much is disappearing.

Tags: Bloomberg, glaciers, global warming, melting

Traffic has been rising extra quickly these past couple of years. Unfortunately (or fortunately, depending on your point of view) it’s mostly from automated AI bots scraping all they can get. From Matthew Prince, the CEO of Cloudflare:

Welp, that happened faster than I predicted. Thought it would be end of 2027, then early 2027, but agentic traffic growing so fast that bots have now passed human traffic online for the first time in the Internet’s history.

It was only nine months ago when bots accounted for 30% of web traffic. Ninety percent next year?

Tags: bot, Cloudflare, Internet, scraping

LLM speed is commonly expressed as tokens per second, which is kind of meaningless for the uninitiated. Mike Veerman made a more intuitive view for what various speeds look like.

More tokens per second means faster generation, which you can clearly see through the output appearing in the box. Select between code, text, thinking, and agent models.

I’m pretty sure the tool was made with an LLM (probably Claude based on the look and feel). The obvious next step is to go full meta to show a site that is generating itself based on the selected speed.

Tags: Large Language Model, speed, token

For Bloomberg, Demetrios Pogkas, Jennah Haque, and Kiel Porter show the projected scale of SpaceX’s initial public offering later this month against the current top 100 listings globally.

Rising bubbles are the correct metaphor here. The vertical position represents offer size, the horizontal represents time, and the size of the circles represent market capitalization after the offering. SpaceX floats far above.

Tags: Bloomberg, investments, IPO, SpaceX

... et les négociants suisses jouent des coudes.

La justice soupçonne de corruption le patron du département de la sûreté de Genève Aéroport. Ce département a ouvert les vannes de la sous-traitance au début du millénaire, et les problèmes ont suivi.

Et le nombre de passagers ne croît plus comme avant (voir tableau ci-dessus)! Heureusement, cette semaine, les spotters du canton ont pu se consoler avec l'arrivée de nombreux appareils inédits et d'une nouvelle compagnie à Cointrin, Kenya Airways.

De la concurrence frontalière au rejet toujours plus massif des emballages, les défis s’accumulent pour Migros Genève. Sur l'arc lémanique, la situation est d'autant plus critique qu'en une décennie, Migros Genève et Migros Vaud ont supprimé 1187 postes de travail. Le patron de Migros Genève explique sa stratégie.

Nos articles sur l'affaire Obiang sont ici.

OC Sport, qui commercialise le marathon de Genève, a misé sur un marché en plein essor. L’entreprise ne fait pas l’unanimité.

The custom chore diagram titled Political Influence [brightpointinc.com] highlights the monetary contributions made by the top Political Action Committees (PAC) for the 2012 congressional election cycle, for the House of Representatives and the Senate.

The hierarchical browser 2013 Federal Budget [brightpointinc.com] reveals the major flows of spending in the US government, at the federal, state, and local level, such as the relationship of spending between education and defense.

The circular flow chart United States Trade Deficit [brightpointinc.com] shows the US Trade Deficit over the last 11 years by month. The United States sells goods to the countries at a the top, while vice versa, the countries at the bottom sell goods to the US. The dollar amount in the middle represents the cumulative deficit over this period of time.

Divided into mammals, reptiles, amphibians and birds, the interactive bar graph allows users to browse horizontally through the vast amount of species by order and family, and vertically by genus.

Species in risk are highlighted in red, so that dense clusters denote related families (e.g. bears, parrots, turtles) that are specially threatened over the next 100 years.

GitHub is a web-based repository service which offers the distributed revision control and source code management (SCM) functionality of Git, enjoying more than 3 million users.

Accordingly, by representing the distribution and frequency of programming languages, one can observe the continuous quest for better ways to solve problems, to facilitate collaboration between people and to reuse the effort of others.

Programming languages are ranked by various parameters, ranging from the number of active repositories to new pushes, forks or issues. The data can be filtered over discrete moments in time, while evolutions can be explored by a collection of timelines.

The mural seems to consist of different parts. A reflective line graph, reminiscent of a sound wave, represents the number Pi (3.14159...) by way of colors that are coded by the sequence of the prime numbers found in Pi (2,3,5,7), as well as height.

Additionally, a golden spiral was drawn based on the Fibonacci Sequence, as an exploration of the relationship between the golden ratio and Pi. The number Pi was represented in a color-coded graph within the golden spiral. In this, the numbers are seen as color blocks that vary in size proportionately within the shrinking space of the spiral, representing the 'shape' of Pi.

"By focusing on the single, transcendental concept of Pi across courses, the mathematics department plans to not only deepen student understanding of shape and irrational number, but more importantly, connect these foundational mental schema for students while dealing with the concrete issues of neighborhood beautification and how proportion can inform aesthetic which can in turn improve quality of life."

A few more similar urban / public visualization projects can be found at Balk's project page, e.g. showing weather patterns, emotion histograms or sound waves.

Via @mariuswatz .

Next to its expressive aesthetic, the interactive features allow users to highlight individual nodes and its direct connections to others, as well as filter between the kind of possible relationships, such as "hate", "strained", "good" or "love".

Reminds me a bit of Mapping the Relationships between the Artists who Invented Abstraction.

The timeline visualization goes beyond the classical pin representation, which tend to overlap and are relatively hard to read. Instead, the data is shown as 'map-timelines', a combination of maps with a timeline that convey location histories as sequences of maps: the bigger the map, the longer the stay. This way, the temporal sequence is clear, as the trip starts with the map on the left and continues towards the right.

A place slider allows the adjusting of the map granularity, reaching from street-level to country-level.

Read the academic research here [PDF], or watch a explanatory video below.

Movies are shown as unique nodes, while their influences are depicted as directed edges. The color gradients from blue to red that originate in the1980s denote the era of postmodern cinema, the era in which movies tend to adapt and combine references from other movies.

Although the visualizations look rather minimalistic at first sight, their interactive features are quite sophisticated and the resulting insights are naturally interesting. Therefore, do not miss out the explanatory movie below.

Via @albertocairo .

The visualization exists of 25 smartly organized pixel plots that are displayed as ordered small multiples. Ranging from Al-Qa'ida and the Taliban to less known organizations like Boko Haram, the plots reveal which ones are more deadly, are more recently active, or have been historically more active. In addition, all data can be filtered over time.

The data is based on the Global Terrorism Database (GTD), the most comprehensive and open-source collection of terrorism data available.

Described as an "atmospheric puzzle action game with a mindset of its own", it's visual style has been completely based on the world of infographics. In essence, the concept of infographics seem to work as a gameplay environment not just because of its pretty aesthetics, but also because of its natural interaction with (visual) data.

Consequently, in Metrico, each action is quantified and explicitly shown, such as the number of times an avatar needs to jump up and down or shoots a projectile. Metrico's goal is thus similar to most infographics: enticing users to make sense of a complex system.

Via Wired. Watch the gameplay trailer below.

The interactive circos graph is meant to demonstrate the complexity of breast cancer causation, in terms of educating the general public as well as possibly stimulating new scientific research in this direction. Users can explore the different influencing factors by domain, predicted correlation strength as well as the quality of the data evidence behind.

See also:
- Health InfoScape: Illustrating the Relationships between Disease Conditions
- Visualizing the Major Health Issues Facing Americans Today

On the topic of sleep, Jawbone also just released an interesting graph revealing how the recent Napa earthquake affected the sleep of local residents [jawbone.com]. Indeed, the distance to the epicenter seems to correlate to the number of people who awoke, and the time it took for them to get back to sleep.

As the visualizations are based on a vast dataset released by Jawbone, the makers of a digitized wristband that tracks motion and sleep behavior, the data is not necessarily representative for the whole general population.

This year, the report focuses on communication data, as it aspires to uncover patterns and insights within a large collection of tracked conversations, SMS, telephone calls, email, Facebook messages and even physical mail.

See also the annual reports of:
- 2012
- 2010 and 2011
- 2010 (about his father's life)
- 2009
- 2008
- 2007
- 2006
- 2005

The migration data is based on Census data, which was used to compare the state of residence versus the state of birth of a representative sample of Census forms. The visualization technique resembles that of organically shaped, stacked area graphs, also coined as stream graphs or ThemeRiver.

See also:
- Ebb and Flow of Movies
- last.fm lastgraph
- 2008 Movie Box Revenue
- What People in Tokyo are Doing on a Tuesday
- Memetracker: Tracking News Phrases over the Web
- DailyRadar TrendMap: Interactive Stacked Line Graph of Popular Trends
- Twitter Activity during the 2012 European Football Tournament

The 5522 Twitter messages are categorized and ordered in 4 different books. Every user is part of each book but dependent on the categorization her position within the book changes.

Accordingly, the book "My Message is..." contains the content of each message, ordered by its language. The size and order of the tweet is derived from the number of followers (recipients).

The book "My Color is..." shows each user's Twitter account color, ordered by the timezone the tweet was send in.

The book "My Description is..." shows how each user describes himself on his profile, of which the size and order is derived from the Klout score.

Finally, the book "My Name is..." lists the avatar that each user chose to represent him or herself, ordered by the number of tweets the user sent.

The animation commences around 600 bc and ends in 2012, and tracks the life of people like Leonardo da Vinci or Jett Travolta -- son of the actor John Travolta. It presents each person's birth place as a blue dot and their death as a red dot. Developed by Mauro Martino, research manager of the Cognitive Visualization Lab in IBM's Watson Group, the animated map is based on data retrieved from the Google-owned knowledge base, Freebase, a community-curated database of well-known people, places, and things.

More scientific information can be found in the Science paper "A network framework of cultural history", which was spearheaded by Maximilian Schich and his team.

Watch the movie below.