Nathan Yau

Rising to top net worth, by age and elevator flowingdata.com/2026/10/21/h...

Good luck to all the sysadmins today.

Have a new story out in NYT today about the mind-boggling amount of math calculations that it takes to train AI. Here's a paywall free link:

MIT professors bedazzle cameras to protest expanding surveillance network Tenured faculty are using rhinestones and googly eyes to demonstrate against 500-plus new cameras and plans to potentially implement AI capabilities....

Watch for confirmation bias, or you might accidentally show that Costco, colleges, and sports arenas cause cancer www.breakthroughjournal.org/p/things-tha...

Beautiful work right here:

This is the funniest thing I've seen today, possibly ever

ICYMI: @propublica.org has a Chrome and Firefox plugin that allows you to grab your data from FanDuel and DraftKings. If you use it, you can upload your data to us to help us to continue investigating how these sites induce people to keep betting. projects.propublica.org/sports-betti...

We know there's some cryptocurrency racket with the president and his family, but this game offers a good explanation of the details thinairrealmoney.com

My latest cartoon for @newscientist.com

Clever use of a connected scatterplot to show rise in hot days over times for counties in the US www.nytimes.com/interactive/... Looks like heat lines radiating off a surface.

Kids drawings as a proxy for cultural trends walzr.com/kids-trends/ Sorry, Baby Yoda.

Update: the dialect map quiz thing going around is a cheap knockoff of the good one, which is here: www.nytimes.com/interactive/...

Come and join the New York Times Graphics Team for 12 weeks. Applications for the Graphics Intensive program are open, more details here: www.nytco.com/careers/earl...

Estimating the number of heat-related deaths, which have likely been way undercounted, based on modeling by NPR and Boston University www.npr.org/2026/08/31/n...

Is Axios cooked? Hire these folks.

Who is not in the labor force and why: > flowingdata.com/2026/08/25/w... Young men and women are moving in a different direction than their older counterparts.

Darth Vader provides the best update for Flock sentiment www.youtube.com/watch?v=7xOU...

The U.S. is $40 trillion in the hole. How we ended up here: > www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/int... I like this genre of chart as backdrop and illustrations in front to reinforce and highlight.

NEW: Flock has said for years its cameras don’t identify or track people. We obtained the code for its police AI and rebuilt parts of it. The tool can find witnesses, surface associates, search people by race or physical description, and flag vehicles by how they move. W/ @dell.bsky.social

IKEA complexity index uses a simple formula of steps in the assembly multiplied by number of parts: > ikea.greg.technology Get yourself a PAX Corner Wardrobe for $1,755 and the manual split into 16 parts for ten and a half hours of assembly time come free.

Happy eclipse-ing European friends. Reuters has a nice visual guide for the rare occasion www.reuters.com/graphics/SOL...

Traveling salesman problem in disguise as a lawnmower game to see how efficiently you can cut grass > pudding.cool/2026/06/mow/ The game is fun. The analysis of gameplay and decision-making is better.

Datatype, a variable font that turns text to charts > franktisellano.github.io/datatype/ Maybe useful for small charts inline with text and tables?

Hand-drawn, retro video game guides, like a map for Ninja Gaiden > www.handdrawngameguides.com Fills every single checkbox from childhood.

All "unnecessary" data explorations are now necessary, I declare.

Less natural gas, more expensive fertilizer. So higher cost food > www.reuters.com/graphics/IRA... The parallax effect as you scroll and the treemap reveal at the end are tops.

A geography game, so you can see how bad you are at pinning locations around the world > maptap.gg I am not very good at this game.

what

NEW: The century-old device choking the AI push Transformers are fundamental to the flow of electricity and are essential to powering our modern lives. But the largest and most powerful transformers are facing bottlenecks, driving up prices and putting the relentless race for AI expansion at risk.

Plan your visit to US national parks with data: www.bloomberg.com/graphics/ame... I'm into the bulls-eye-looking charts that show visitor volume, temperature, and precipitation in a one-year span. Red border is where it's at.

Looking for the most "ethical" NBA championships pudding.cool/2026/06/ethi... Always fond of the traditional pile-o-heads method to visualize missed games and player importance.

Really cool to see my little charts in @flowingdata.com's newsletter! Here's our full story: projects.propublica.org/why-carbon-c...

Play the violins. The AI-inflated salaries of many San Francisco workers are not enough because other AI workers are also making high salaries. www.nytimes.com/2026/06/29/t...

The Burning Money candle shows how much money you've burned as it melts down to the nub. Love it when visual metaphors are taken literally. driesdepoorter.be/product/burn...

Really cool that Google as an earthquake alert system based on accelerometer data from Android phones and good to see data used for something other than feeding bots www.nytimes.com/interactive/...

The sixth installment of "How The Heck" is live! This one is all about synths. perthirtysix.com/how-the-heck...

Both totally unnecessary and extremely funny that the Guardian has an interactive graphic for you to change the color of the US flag's blue to the color of the Reflecting Pool from 8 to 19 June and counting

Careful planning is Washington’s whole thing: symbolic sightlines; monuments that speak to one another; columns, rooflines and axes aligned just so. The whole city is supposed to be a work of civic art. Trump’s projects test this 235-year-old idea: www.nytimes.com/interactive/...

Ahead of SpaceX’s planned initial public offering this month, The New York Times analyzed statements that Elon Musk has made about his businesses on social media or during investor calls over the last 15 years. Here’s what we found.

All name-based visualization is welcome in this timeline.

Prediction markets are a lot like regular gambling in that you're more likely to lose your money. But prediction markets have little regulation and it seems easier for insiders to interfere. Probably no biggie. Nice zoom out on the heatmapped distribution of gains and losses on this one.

We've just launched the Atlas of Global Development, an online publication presenting interactive stories and data visualizations (95 of them!) on key global trends In this thread I give some background and highlight some parts of the Atlas that I find noteworthy data360.worldbank.org/en/atlas/ 1/n

Researchers estimate that a third of new sites use AI-generated text: > ai-on-the-internet.github.io That's one year ago. Not great, but I wonder what percentage of those new sites have any traffic and if the chatbots and AI-generated sites are just eating themselves.