Nostr notes by Nathan Yau (Unofficial)

Cost of greed, as unbearably tall chart Last month, the Wealth ...

2026-10-29T23:00:17Z

Cost of greed, as unbearably tall chart

Last month, the Wealth Inequality in America video by Politizane got an update after thirteen years. The gap between the richest and the normals has only grown. This interactive version uses the very tall chart from the video to show the scale of wealth for the top 0.1% of people.
Set your expectations for how long it will take to scroll from the bottom to the top. Then reset expectations as it becomes clear that it’s annoyingly tall. Keep going. Reset again. Keep going, change the scale, reset. There is an “I quit!” button for a reason.
Tags: billionaires, scale, scroll, wealth

https://flowingdata.com/2026/10/29/cost-of-greed-as-unbearably-tall-chart/

#tallchart #wealth #wealthinequality #reset #keep

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Cost of college versus the return on investement For the New York ...

2026-10-29T15:38:22Z

Cost of college versus the return on investement

For the New York Times, Arfa Momin and Ron Lieber charted median income of graduates, by college and major.
Your school can make a big difference — or matter very little — depending on the major. A graduate who studied mechanical engineering at Carnegie Mellon University earned roughly $10,000 more than a graduate from the University of Alabama. That difference is over $150,000 if those same graduates studied computer science.
You can also search for your college and major to compare.
There are correlation and causation considerations to make here, but the data from the Department of Education exists to hold schools accountable. If a school charges a high tuition, but graduates earn lower incomes, then the program is worth a closer look.
The charts in the NYT article are based on an analysis by the HEA Group, who have made their data available for download. [Thanks, Charlotte]
Tags: college, education, income, New York Times

https://flowingdata.com/2026/10/29/cost-of-college-versus-the-return-on-investement/

#yorktimes #newyork #arfamomin #ronlieber #mellonuniversity #carnegiemellon #heagroup #education

#rss #feeds #linksharing #qwibbit

✚ Visualization tools and learning resources, October 2026 ...

2026-10-29T14:57:30Z

✚ Visualization tools and learning resources, October 2026 roundup

This is No. 412 of The Process. I am Nathan Yau, the keeper of FlowingData and this newsletter. Every month, I gather tools and resources to make better charts that communicate and reveal. Here is what happened in October.
Become a member for access to this — plus tutorials, courses, and guides.

https://flowingdata.com/2026/10/29/process-412-roundup/

#rss #feeds #linksharing #qwibbit

Finding the real center actor of Hollywood For the Pudding, Owen ...

2026-10-28T15:08:22Z

Finding the real center actor of Hollywood

For the Pudding, Owen Lacey analyzed the network of Hollywood actors connected by movies they appeared together in. The goal is to find the “real” Kevin Bacon.
Lacey uses remoteness, or the average number of movies it takes for an actor to connect to all other actors in the network. Lower remoteness means a more connected actor. So to find the most connected, you find the actor with the lowest remoteness.
Kevin Bacon has a lot of acting credits, but there are many actors who are more connected.
The visual essay has a nice a structure that walks through past, present, and future with a well-made line chart.
I also appreciate the classic analysis on degrees of separation. It’s been a while. See also the six degrees of Francis Bacon, four degrees through Facebook, and the six degrees of Kevin Garnett (might be defunct).
Tags: Kevin Bacon, Owen Lacey, Pudding, separation

https://flowingdata.com/2026/10/28/finding-the-real-center-actor-of-hollywood/

#kevinbacon #hollywood #owenlacey #actor #real #pudding #francisbacon #kevingarnett #facebook

#rss #feeds #linksharing #qwibbit

Why agents take unexpected routes For the New York Times, Raj ...

2026-10-27T23:00:28Z

Why agents take unexpected routes

For the New York Times, Raj Saha and Blacki Migliozzi used mazes to demonstrate how AI models are trained and how agents complete tasks in unexpected ways. Some argue the double-edged sword:
At the same time, he said, agents can’t be safely contained if they are given the tools and access they need to be useful. “An inconvenient truth about developing frontier A.I. systems is that minimizing safety risks and maximizing legitimate utility are incompatible objectives,” Dr. Casper said. “The same agent that is good at helping biologists debug lab experiments could also be misused for constructing biohazards. In this sense, building ever more capable A.I. systems is somewhat of an inherently dangerous activity.”
Call me crazy, but if the large companies are held financially and socially liable for the models they distribute, I suspect the companies might find a way to block “rogue” behavior.
Ethics aside, the mazes in this piece are a good illustration of how the AI gets made. I paused at each one to watch the simulations play through.
Tags: New York Times, rogue, training

https://flowingdata.com/2026/10/27/why-agents-take-unexpected-routes/

#yorktimes #newyork #rajsaha #blackimigliozzi

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Localized Wikipedia to your geographic area Local Wikipedia, by ...

2026-10-27T15:11:25Z

Localized Wikipedia to your geographic area

Local Wikipedia, by Ed Jefferson, subsets regular Wikipedia to people, places, and things that are within a half hour walk from you. Just enter a location and get the localness.
Tags: Ed Jefferson, local, Wikipedia

https://flowingdata.com/2026/10/27/localized-wikipedia-to-your-geographic-area/

#localizedwikipedia #jefferson #tags

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Full 3-D scan and live body metrics for Neal’s about page You ...

2026-10-27T07:37:39Z

Full 3-D scan and live body metrics for Neal’s about page

You know the about pages on every site that provide a summary of topics covered. Maybe there is a little bit about the writer. Neal Agarwal took the about page in a more literal direction. There is an interactive 3-D scan (that you can download) and live metrics from Agarwal’s fitness watch, so you know that he took 3.9 hours of naps this week and has type B+ blood.
Tags: 3-D, body, Neal Agarwal

https://flowingdata.com/2026/10/26/full-3-d-scan-and-live-body-metrics-for-neals-about-page/

#nealagarwal #body #page #tags #maybe

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Cutting the cost of tokens On a per token basis, the cost of ...

2026-10-27T07:01:30Z

Cutting the cost of tokens

On a per token basis, the cost of using LLMs from Anthropic and OpenAI decreased a lot over just the past few months. Max Woolf lays out the fast timeline.
From the timeline above, there is a clear tit-for-tat between Anthropic and OpenAI, and it is reasonable to assume that these particular price cuts from OpenAI and Anthropic are in reaction to each other. However, no one cuts prices by 80% unless there is some externality in play. So, what gives?
Tags: Anthropic, cost, Max Woolf, OpenAI

https://flowingdata.com/2026/10/26/cutting-the-cost-of-tokens/

#cost #maxwoolf #anthropic #openai #however #tags #llms

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Primer for geospatial embeddings For Development Seed, Kiri ...

2026-10-23T20:45:10Z

Primer for geospatial embeddings

For Development Seed, Kiri Carini and Martha Morrissey explain what embeddings are and what they are used for.
An embedding represents this information as numbers grouped into dimensions of a “latent space.” We are used to describing our world with three spatial dimensions, but dimensions in latent space are mathematical rather than physical. Together, they encode patterns and relationships the model has learned from the data.
As humans living in a three-dimensional world, it’s hard to imagine a space with dozens, hundreds, or even thousands of dimensions. This makes embeddings difficult for humans to interpret directly, but computers have no problem working with these mathematical representations. In practice, an embedding is usually stored as a list of numbers.
Illustrations by Gus Becker provide a crochet metaphor to help you mentally link the steps. While in the context of geospatial data, the guide should also be helpful in understanding embeddings in general.
Tags: Development Seed, embeddings, geospatial, guide, training

https://flowingdata.com/2026/10/23/primer-for-geospatial-embeddings/

#developmentseed #kiricarini #embeddings #marthamorrissey #geospatial #gusbecker #together

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What happens to math going forward Terence Tao has become the ...

2026-10-23T12:39:09Z

What happens to math going forward

Terence Tao has become the unofficial spokesperson for the future of mathematics. Elisabeth Bumiller, for the New York Times, reports on the soured relationship between Tao and OpenAI:
OpenAI’s releases have now left him feeling used. “As recently as a year ago, I had a pretty good relationship with many employees at OpenAI,” he said in a recent phone conversation.
“A lot of people I interacted with shared a very common vision of how A.I. should be used — you know, to empower scientists.” But the rush to publish new findings, he said, shows their true purpose. They “used math for what they needed, which was to evaluate their models,” he said. “At this point, I don’t see a way to constructively engage.”
I feel for the PhD students who are four years into research and OpenAI comes along. I think the only successful path forward involves figuring out how these new tools intertwine with existing work.
Tags: math, New York Times, OpenAI, Terence Tao

https://flowingdata.com/2026/10/23/what-happens-to-math-going-forward/

#yorktimes #terencetao #newyork #openai #math #forward #elisabethbumiller

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✚ Avoiding charts by default This is No. 411 of the Process, ...

2026-10-22T21:11:15Z

✚ Avoiding charts by default

This is No. 411 of the Process, where we focus on the finer bits of visualizing data. This week, we switch the chart defaults to non-defaults.
Become a member for access to this — plus tutorials, courses, and guides.

https://flowingdata.com/2026/10/22/process-411-default-avoid/

#process #become

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When AI comes for purpose Mathematician and Cornell professor ...

2026-10-22T20:35:47Z

When AI comes for purpose

Mathematician and Cornell professor Steven Strogatz was a guest on NYT’s Daily podcast to talk about the recent developments in Mathematics. Well, it starts out that way, and then Strogatz gets into purpose and touches on deeper feelings that many of us are getting to know.
Tags: math, New York Times, purpose, Steven Strogatz

https://flowingdata.com/2026/10/22/when-ai-comes-for-purpose/

#stevenstrogatz #purpose #newyork #yorktimes #mathematics #daily #nyt #well #tags #ai

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Cost of electricity from investor-owned vs. public If your ...

2026-10-22T15:11:16Z

Cost of electricity from investor-owned vs. public

If your electricity provider is an investor-owned company, it’s likely you’re paying more than someone with a public provider. For Bloomberg Green, Michelle Ma and Nadja Popovich highlight the difference:
Estimates are based on data from the Annual Electric Power Industry Report published by the U.S. Energy Information Administration.
Tags: Bloomberg, cost, electricity

https://flowingdata.com/2026/10/22/cost-of-electricity-from-investor-owned-vs-public/

#cost #energyinformation #informationadministration #bloomberggreen #public #annualelectric #electricpower #industryreport #nadjapopovich #michelle

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Rising to higher net worth, by age Results from the Survey of ...

2026-10-21T11:40:07Z

Rising to higher net worth, by age

Results from the Survey of Consumer Finances for 2025 were recently released, which means it is time for another rendition of seeing who has a higher net worth.
Read More

https://flowingdata.com/2026/10/21/higher-net-worth/

#networth #highernet #consumerfinances #survey

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Increasing number of shots in movies Stephen Follows counted the ...

2026-10-20T09:51:43Z

Increasing number of shots in movies

Stephen Follows counted the number of shots in movies, from 1920 through 2025. The overall number of shots increased, and so has the range.
Between the 1930s and 1950s, films averaged between 550 and 580 shots. The median started to climb in the 1960s and didn’t slow until the current century. In recent years, the increase has been minimal, sitting at 1,479 for the 2010s and currently 1,559 for the first half of the 2020s.
Follows used TransNet V2 for transition detection and shot count.
Tags: movies, shots, Stephen Follows

https://flowingdata.com/2026/10/20/increasing-number-of-shots-in-movies/

#shots #movies #number #stephenfollows #tags #transnet

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Calculation volumes for AI training More big numbers coming in. ...

2026-10-19T12:55:17Z

Calculation volumes for AI training

More big numbers coming in. For NYT’s the Upshot, Aatish Bhatia demonstrates the millions of trillions (octillions!) of calculations required for training AI.
During its training, the A.I. is fed a portion of a sentence, and the knobs are adjusted using a series of math calculations to improve its guesses for the next word. This process is then repeated over trillions of words of training data.
It takes only a few additions and multiplications to adjust a single knob. But when trillions of knobs are adjusted trillions of times, the math quickly adds up.
And this is just the first step in training a language model, known as pre-training. It’s followed by additional steps of calculations that hone the A.I.’s behavior and improve its ability to code and solve math problems.
All those calculations require energy, data, and time. The big companies are taking what they can get with the first two things in efforts to reduce the third.
Tags: Aatish Bhatia, calculations, scale, training, Upshot

https://flowingdata.com/2026/10/19/calculation-volumes-for-ai-training/

#aatishbhatia #training #upshot #nyt #ai

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Warming Stripes as a screensaver This is fun, or I guess very ...

2026-10-16T12:44:01Z

Warming Stripes as a screensaver

This is fun, or I guess very serious depending on your point of view. Georgios Karamanis adapted the Show Your Stripes project, which visualizes average temperature each year as a stripe, into a screensaver that runs in macOS.
It is fascinating how a simple view of data can fit into different spaces.
Tags: climate change, Georgios Karamanis, screensaver, stripes

https://flowingdata.com/2026/10/16/warming-stripes-as-a-screensaver/

Interactive map of the Hebrew Bible Torahmap by Danyel Fisher is ...

2026-10-16T09:30:09Z

Interactive map of the Hebrew Bible

Torahmap by Danyel Fisher is an interactive visualization of the Hebrew Bible. Each column represents a book, each line represents a chapter, and each square represents a verse. Zoom and pan to see details.
I know little about the context, but I like the concept and interaction with text. People should do more with words as data.
Tags: Danyel Fisher, Tanakh, text

https://flowingdata.com/2026/10/09/interactive-map-of-the-hebrew-bible/

Decline in American social activities Data for Progress compared ...

2026-10-16T08:50:53Z

Decline in American social activities

Data for Progress compared social activities among American adults in 1995 against 2026. Hanging out with others is down a lot for many activities.
We find that Americans’ participation in various social activities has declined by double-digit margins, including attending a class or seminar (-22), entertaining people in your home (-21), attending church or a place of worship (-20), going on a picnic (-19), going to a club meeting (-19), playing cards (-19), going out to breakfast at a restaurant (-13), and doing volunteer work (-12).
A few activities have seen increased engagement: using the internet (+90), playing a home video game (+22), attending an exercise class (+14), going to a pop or rock concert (+13), and taking an airline trip for personal reasons (+5).
At least staying late at work is also down quite a bit.
They used a dumbbell chart to show the difference, but arrows that start with the 1995 value and point to the 2026 value would make for an easier comparison. If they wanted to stick with the dumbbell, I would’ve switched the shades so that present day stands out more. The current color scheme reads backwards in time.
Tags: Data for Progress, social

https://flowingdata.com/2026/10/12/decline-in-american-social-activities/

Learning is the thing Daniel Willingham, a professor at the ...

2026-10-16T08:11:59Z

Learning is the thing

Daniel Willingham, a professor at the University of Virginia, argues that students should only use AI for things they know how to do well.
This lead/associate orientation makes sense for life after graduation. Once a student is in the workforce, they will use AI to produce products: new ideas, reports, and so on. A guiding principle of “Use AI, but let me see your work” makes sense.
This is not, however, an optimal guiding principle for students. Students produce products, but the product is seldom the point. No one wants to read the papers they write, and the math problems they solve have no practical value. Teachers have them do these tasks because they provide practice in cognitive abilities that we think matter.
I remember pulling all-nighters in the computer lab in college, with only Pop-Tarts and a fear of a failing grade to keep me going. What it must be like for students and educators these days knowing that the answer is only a prompt away.
I just keep telling my young kids (while they still listen to me) that we need to know how to do things and how things work. Things will break or need to get better, and that requires people who can think for themselves.
Tags: Daniel Willingham, education, students

https://flowingdata.com/2026/10/13/learning-is-the-thing/

Searchable database of the enslaved in former British colonies ...

2026-10-16T07:29:45Z

Searchable database of the enslaved in former British colonies

The Centre for the Study of the Legacies of British Slavery published a searchable database of four million records logged between 1813 and 1840. For the Guardian, Aamna Mohdin reports:
The registers were created by the British government after the abolition of the transatlantic slave trade in 1807, and were designed to prevent illegal trading of enslaved people and to monitor the enslaved population.
Researchers say people were recorded in the registers with chilling precision. Entries include names, ages, physical descriptions and family ties, as well as births, deaths and transfers of ownership. Some distinguish whether a person was born in Africa or in the Caribbean.
Nicka Sewell-Smith, a professional genealogist and senior story producer at Ancestry, said it was not lost on her that records originally created to count enslaved people as property were now being used by their descendants to reconstruct their family histories.
Tags: database, Guardian, Legacies of British Slavery, slavery

https://flowingdata.com/2026/10/13/searchable-database-of-the-enslaved-in-former-british-colonies/

People holding up the internet In reference to the xkcd comic ...

2026-10-16T06:00:43Z

People holding up the internet

In reference to the xkcd comic that illustrates the internet as a stack of blocks propped up by a small project, sheets.works shows development history of real open source projects that our devices depend on. It is not uncommon for a single developer to maintain widely used open source software on a volunteer basis.
Tags: Internet, open-source, sheets.works

https://flowingdata.com/2026/10/14/people-holding-up-the-internet/

Richest getting richer This is really going to surprise you, but ...

2026-10-16T05:17:28Z

Richest getting richer

This is really going to surprise you, but the wealthy people in the United States became wealthier over the past three years. For the Wall Street Journal, Rachel Louise Ensign and Justin Lahart report on these changes with some charts.
The roughly 137,000 households who make up the nation’s top 0.1% had already become richer in comparison to everyone else in recent decades, thanks to higher incomes and lower tax rates. Now the stock-market boom, driven by strong corporate earnings and highflying tech stocks, is powering their wealth even further.
By comparison, the rest of the top 10% of richest Americans gained $38.2 trillion in wealth over the same period, but it was split among nearly a hundred times as many households.
This is based on fresh Federal Reserve data from the Survey of Consumer Finances.
Tags: rich, Wall Street Journal, wealth

https://flowingdata.com/2026/10/15/richest-getting-richer/

✚ Getting to know a dataset This is No. 410 of the Process. ...

2026-10-16T04:33:47Z

✚ Getting to know a dataset

This is No. 410 of the Process. I’m Nathan Yau. Getting started with a new dataset can be confusing, because there are so many entry points and possibilities. This week, I walk through my own thinking as I poke at fresh data.
Become a member for access to this — plus tutorials, courses, and guides.

https://flowingdata.com/2026/10/15/process-410-know/

Scale of proposed billionaire wealth tax in California There is a ...

2026-10-16T03:37:35Z

Scale of proposed billionaire wealth tax in California

There is a proposition on the California ballot this year to impose a one-time tax for billionaires. The result would be a 5% tax on their net worth, which includes investments. For New York Times Magazine, Nicholas Konrad illustrates the scale of this tax on 250 individuals in the context of their wealth, the taxes they typically pay, and their spending to oppose.
For us regular people, one billion dollars is difficult to imagine, so the transitions between tiny and giant circles provide a sense of how big these numbers are. By absolute counts, the tax dollars are a lot, but by percentage, the tax rate doesn’t seem like that much all things considered.
Tags: billionaires, California, New York Times, Nicholas Konrad, scale, taxes

https://flowingdata.com/2026/10/15/california-billionaire-tax/