Take it with a grain of salt
Or two thirds of a piece of beach sand, three pieces of pollen, ten bits of phlegm or 100 coronavirii. It's Visual Capitalist's guide to The Relative Size of Particles - a close up view of how these things all compare.
Finally
Zoom in, enhance
Deep fake video ads may be scaring the American electorate (but then what doesn't), but researchers at Microsoft has put image-fiddling AI to a more homely use. They've published a paper all about restoring old photos with algorithms that eliminate tears and give colours an appropriate boost. Rea...
Bring back the 8-track
One story doing the rounds this week has been the news that sales of vinyl records have outperformed CDs for the first time since the 1980s. I was quite surprised to hear it being being covered on the local radio news here in SA. Surprised for a few reasons because a) this isn't a new story, b) i...
Can you skin a dog with a knife made of frozen poo?
Apparently you cannot, as team of winners at this year's Ig Nobel prizes for research have proved beyond doubt. Also making the list is the paper that suggests many etymologists are afraid of spiders, and that poor people snog more than the rich. Check out the full list here. We repeated the expe...
The drinking habits of the South African
Two-thirds of South Africans won't have missed booze during the long dry months of prohibition. So says fact-checking site Africa Check which backed up health minister Zweli Mkhezi's claim that only 31% of locals drink this week. The minority of those who do partake in a dram or two more than mak...
In it for the long haul
It's an innocuous looking graph posted to Reddit's Data is Beautiful boards about airport tarmac to most, but to others (like us) it raises a curious question: why does Uppington (pop 74,000) in the Northern Cape have one of the longest runways in the world? For non-locals, Uppington is best desc...
Crystalising history to repeat itself
It might sound like one of the more repeatable plotlines from Dr Who, but we couldn't let this one go by without comment. Scientists from a multinational team based in the UK, US and Finland have used supercooled helium to observe - for the first time - the interaction between one of nature's wei...
Hooked on the sweet stuff
After the great vitamin C science debacle, in which the citric compound found its way - erroneously - in to the hive mind as a cure for the common cold, you might be sceptical about the latest claim from researchers studying ways to dodge the sniffles. But metastudy from the University of Oxford ...
Truth just about as strange as Orwellian fiction
When an 18-year-old Jessica Johnson won the Orwell Youth Prize last year for her story about a "Band system" for students, meant to promote on merit but in reality offering opportunities only to the rich and down-marking the poor, she didn't know that she would be the victim of such a system just...
As old as the hills
I was raised to believe Neolithic man regularly hefted boulders the size of buses halfway across the UK, because the five tonne "blue stones" of Stonehenge were mined from a quarry some 250km away. So I'm a little disappointed to find out that this week, scientists have pinpointed where the large...
Still beating the Drum
South Africa's Drum magazine has changed a lot since it was launched 70 years ago, and now it's undergoing its next transformation from celeb gossip mag to online-only publication. Journalism.co.za has a celebration of the early history of the magazine, when it was a ground-breaking, deep thinkin...
The return of the interrobang, and other pearls of wisdom from the Temporary AP Stylebookâ½
The Twitter hack that threw the internets into disarray this week provided the opportunity for the Temporary AP Stylebook (@TempAPStyle) to emerge, and blast out a new era of style while the real AP Stylebook's verified account status was disabled. And there were some pearlers,,, https://twitter....
A brief history of data science
Richard Farnworth takes us through a short, definitely incomplete, but very entertaining history of data viz. His description of William Playfair is particularly good: [Playfair] ... ran a currency counterfeiting operation to collapse the French currency and took part in the storming of the Basti...
Watch three white sharks swim thousands of miles around Australia
Want to see a quick visualisation of GPS data from three tagged white sharks as they journey thousands of miles around the coasts of Australia and Tasmania? Of course you do. You're welcome. https://twitter.com/422South/status/1281235634217246720
Why not try a 3D stacked scatter pie column?
Why not indeed? Fortunately, a quick image search suggests that this monstrosity, thrown up in a Twitter thread by @hugobrowne, originates in an April Fools joke from before even Naked Data was born. Stare at it too long and you'll either have a psychotic episode or - worse - it'll start to make ...
RS Archer, the beleaguered British Brexiteers and their idiot son
A Twitter stream about a British family who bought a house in France, planned to retire there, and then voted for Brexit, went absolutely viral. Whether it's true or not is up for debate, but allegedly the account of RS Archer was shut down due to attacks from angry Brexiteers. Since the original...
The world’s breathing lung
Here's a quick hit of happiness for you: Alex Orenstein (or @oren_sa as he's known on the Twitters) knocked up this gorgeous timelapse of a year of vegetation growth in Africa. https://twitter.com/oren_sa/status/1274500538944675847
Miniaturised quantum entanglement on a cubesat in space
It's either the title of a next James Bond film or a remarkable piece of physics designed by a group of scientists from Singapore, the UK and Australia. Good news - it's the latter. This paper in Optica describes the process of throwing a tiny 2.5kg cubesat out of the International Space Station,...
Pike County on how to improve your Corona numbers
Turn your county's bad news into good news with this simple little trick: invert the Y-axis, and your Corona-cases magically drop instead of increase. https://twitter.com/sydneyboles/status/1270411871674384384 Pike County as since turned its graph the right way around, but not before some excelle...
Psychocharts
Lies, damned lies and dataviz - Alberto Cairo has another round-up of charts that lie covering some prime examples of data manipulation State-side. From the technically correct but logarithmically-challenged jobs recovery featured on CNBC, to a guest appearance by cherry-picker-in-chief DJ Trump....