A Data Visualization Newsletter

After five crazy weeks in the NFL, it’s become hard to predict which teams are playoff-bound. Fortunately, The New York Time just released their tried-and-true playoff odds calculator to help. Choose your team, predict the outcome of their remaining games, and see whether they’re expected to make the cut.

Using a place-name analysis done by MIT, The Washington post mapped more than 6,000 references to Christopher Columbus across the United States. In addition to at least 40 monuments that have already been removed, this includes roads, churches, schools, municipal buildings, and natural features, and helps us to understand his legacy in a historical context.

Case numbers, death tolls, and vaccination rates. In the 600+ days since the onset of COVID-19, we’ve seen charts that detail all the numbers. But what about the human stories behind those statistics? Researchers at the University of Edinburgh and UCLAB Potsdam recently launched this retrospective visualization exploring just that, while answering the question of how we remember the pandemic.

While the fight against climate change has mostly focused on lowering CO2 emissions, many experts are now suggesting that reducing methane may be more effective in the short term. Methane locks in far more heat in the short term compared to carbon dioxide, and has been leaking just as relentlessly. Bloomberg outlines why methane is so dangerous, where it comes from, and the surprisingly simple path to drastically reduce its emissions.