Engaging Data

Interested in exploring data, interactive tools and visualizations that can communicate ideas and teach us about the world. Science/engineering/DIY

[Engaging Data @EngagingData]

It's back to school time (my kids started up this week). Here's a thread/list of my science/geography -related visualizations and tools that teachers/educators might be interested in sharing with students. Please share with the teachers you know.

[Brilliant Maps @BrilliantMaps]

Animated Mercator vs The Real Size of Countries

Credit: @EngagingData

Explanation: https://t.co/yoP1N6zC2J

[Simon Kuestenmacher @simongerman600]

One of my favorite data journalists is @jburnmurdoch and he is cooking once again with this piece: “In country after country the birth rate plunged after the introduction of smartphones, no matter what the previous trend was…the modern digital media environment has had profound effects on society that have led to a decline in romantic coupling”. Read here: https://t.co/F5age67LUm

[Programmer Humor @PR0GRAMMERHUM0R]

continueFromHereClaude

[Andrew White 🐦‍⬛ @andrewwhite01]

hallucinated references will land you a 1-year ban from arxiv now. wow

[Engaging Data @EngagingData]

Estimates of AI energy use per query from @_HannahRitchie
https://t.co/f1FUzlGcTx
I think I'm typically in the 0.3 - 1Wh (like an LED lightbulb on for a few minutes) **per query** range

[The Chronicle of Higher Education @chronicle]

Ken Burns attributes much of his success to the education he received at Hampshire College. Faced with the news that his struggling alma mater will soon close its doors, Burns says its closure is part of a more troubling trend.

Listen here: https://t.co/Bp7tMp9FPS

[Engaging Data @EngagingData]

@NutritionMadeS3 I switched from canola to avocado oil last year which is more expensive, but looking forward to watching the video and learning about the research. thanks!

[Anthony DiMieri @anthonydimieri]

This is beautiful

[Rep. Melanie Stansbury @Rep_Stansbury]

Imagine getting in a time machine and going back to 1776 and telling the Founding Fathers that the King would one day be reminding America about the importance of democracy and our checks and balances. That is the timeline we’re living in.

[Engaging Data @EngagingData]

Found this hilariously accurate annotation of Trump’s post about retiring Apple CEO, Tim Cook from Bluesky: https://t.co/44gjhgThbT

[Randy Olson @randal_olson]

Turns out McDonald's support chat runs on Claude. You can get your coding questions answered and your order taken for free.

Source: https://t.co/pqFxLvIk20

[Reid Wiseman @astro_reid]

Only one chance in this lifetime…

Like watching sunset at the beach from the most foreign seat in the cosmos, I couldn’t resist a cell phone video of Earthset. You can hear the shutter on the Nikon as @Astro_Christina is hammering away on 3-shot brackets and capturing those exceptional Earthset photos through the 400mm lens. @AstroVicGlover was in window 3 watching with @Astro_Jeremy next to him.

I could barely see the Moon through the docking hatch window but the iPhone was the perfect size to catch the view…this is uncropped, uncut with 8x zoom which is quite comparable to the view of the human eye. Enjoy.

[Alec Stapp @AlecStapp]

Just remembered the story about a computer scientist who had his bike stolen and tried to explain binary search to a cop

[Engaging Data @EngagingData]

@simongerman600 would be great to get a home battery at or under a few thousand dollars instead of $10-20k

[Victor Glover @AstroVicGlover]

Perspective: when we poll GO for translunar injection (TLI) and the engine(s) on the Orion Integrity service module propel us toward the moon, our actual destination is Earth. The ultimate destination of every human space flight.

[Anish Moonka @anishmoonka]

September 1997. Steve Jobs stands before Apple employees and tells them he's been up until 3am finishing an ad. He's been back at the company for eight weeks. Apple lost $1 billion that year. Three months earlier, WIRED put Apple's logo on its cover, wrapped in barbed wire, with the word "Pray."

He starts by saying what he's found since coming back. He couldn't figure out Apple's own product line. He spent weeks trying to understand which model was which and how they fit together. He talked to customers. They couldn't figure it out either. He cut 70% of the product roadmap. People whose projects were canceled were, in his words, "three feet off the ground with excitement" because, for the first time in years, someone told them where the company was going.

Then he says something about marketing that changed how every tech company thinks about advertising.

He says Nike sells a commodity. They sell shoes. But when you think of Nike, you feel something different than a shoe company. Nike never talks about their products in ads. Never tells you why their air soles are better than Reebok's. "They honor great athletes. And they honor great athletics. That's who they are." He compares it to the dairy industry spending 20 years trying to convince people milk was good for them, failing, and then running "Got Milk," which doesn't even mention the product. Focuses on its absence.

He says Apple spends a fortune on advertising. "You'd never know it."

Then he fires the ad agency. Not just fires them. Apple was running a competition with 23 agencies. He scrapped the whole thing and hired Chiat/Day, the agency he'd worked with a decade earlier on the 1984 Macintosh commercial that advertising professionals voted the best ad ever made.

The question they asked themselves: "Our customers want to know who is Apple and what is it that we stand for?"

His answer: "Apple at its core, its core value, is that we believe that people with passion can change the world for the better. And that those people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world are the ones that actually do."

Then he plays the ad. In this room. To Apple employees. For the first time.

"Here's to the crazy ones. The misfits. The rebels. The troublemakers."

He says almost none of these people had ever appeared in an advertisement before. He personally obtained Yoko Ono's permission to use John Lennon. He says the estates and living subjects agreed because of their feelings toward Apple. "I don't think there is another company on Earth that could have done this campaign."

The ad broke that Sunday during the network premiere of Toy Story on ABC. Two 60-second spots. Newspaper ads in the Wall Street Journal, New York Times, and USA Today. Billboards in major cities. Buses in five cities featuring Rosa Parks. Painted walls. The whole thing.

Apple's stock was around $0.10 split-adjusted when this meeting happened. The company is worth $3.68 trillion today. Think Different ran for five years. Every product that came after, the iMac, iPod, iPhone, iPad, was built on the identity this campaign established by a guy who'd been back at the company for eight weeks and finished the ad at three in the morning.

Video: Steve Jobs internal staff meeting at Apple, September 1997. This is the first time the Think Different campaign has been shown to employees. Jobs had been back at Apple for eight weeks. Footage leaked from an internal recording.

[Engaging Data @EngagingData]

@US_Stormwatch This is a pretty sad looking graph. ☹️

[Engaging Data @EngagingData]

my wife had the same thought last week and I told her she basically only understood jobs that were in Richard Scarry's busy town

[Susannah Black Roberts @suzania]

There’s like maybe a maximum of 8 jobs where I understand what the job is. Shopkeeper. Farmer. Teacher of some kind. Priest. Novelist. Journalist. Private detective. Chef. That’s it. What is a data engineer. I don’t know.

[Simon Kuestenmacher @simongerman600]

Ireland’s population chart remains a wild one to look at. The country has still not recovered from the Great Famine (1845-52).