Hello and welcome to another edition of The Crunch!
In this week’s newsletter we have charts on how long it takes ‘corpse flowers’ to bloom, a Winter Olympics round up (read to the end for how you can get a Nordic-style scarf pattern with your country’s medal count), a great feature on the chaos of clothes sizing, and a lot of maps.
But first … our reporter put himself through a gruelling heatwave simulation to experience the climate of the future
We collaborated with Guardian Australia’s climate correspondent, Graham Readfern, and quite a few of our other colleagues, to produce this multimedia feature about how heatwaves are being supercharged by global heating, and how this can/will affect your body.
This is of obvious importance as heat stress already kills a lot of people globally, and heatwaves and heat stress are going to become even more frequent in the future.
We also made this One Big Chart showing that the now-ousted Sussan Ley had the second-shortest tenure of any Liberal party leader.
Australia has a surprisingly large collection of titan arums, AKA ‘corpse flowers’, the large, stinky bloom native to the jungles of Sumatra, Indonesia.
Josh and Petra published a wonderful feature looking at how long it takes for these plants to flower, and it includes a handy updating chart so you can get an idea of when a bloom might be coming up!
Four charts from the fortnight
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1. Why the Winter Olympics remains a rich country’s game
There’s been quite a lot of good coverage of the inequality baked into the Winter Olympics. We featured this Washington Post story a few weeks ago about inequality of access inside the US. This Reuters interactive is looking at the entire world:
“Almost 10% of teams/athletes from high-income nations won a medal [at the 2022 games], while only 6.7% of those from upper-middle-income nations did. Of all those from low- and lower-middle-income countries, only one received a medal.”
We’ve been playing around with this interactive a fair bit at Crunch HQ – the clustered bubble chart, especially, is technically impressive.We’d love to learn how to render, force and interact with that many elements with so little lag.
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2. Australia just keeps doing better at the Winter Olympics
Let’s quickly move on from the takeaway message of the previous section. Australia won more medals at the Winter Olympics than we ever have before! And Nick charted it:
This is at least partly due to there being a big increase in the number of events since 1994. But Australia has also been investing more and more effectively in winter sports.
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3. Who won the medal count?
Time for the most important part of the Olympics – hard working and talented people achieving their life’s goals vicarious nationalism through aggregate medal counts.
The New York Times have crunched the numbers a bunch of different ways:
Australia still only appears once. All the more reason to get AFL in there.
And if you’ve been following the Times’ Olympics coverage you might have seen tiny animated avatars recreating some of the tricks and movements of the athletes. Here’s an explainer on how they managed it. Brilliant to see this kind of skill and care in visual journalism.
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4. All Olympic curling stones come from this one small Scottish island
Curling has once again seen a cultural impact you might not expect from an activity involving sliding stones and sweeping ice (complimentary). We’re really pushing the definition of datavis here, but we were blown away by this illustrated story about how all curling stones come from one Scottish island, and how they work:
Not going to get over the fact that the blank stones are called “cheeses”.
Bookmarks
The intergenerational struggle to find clothes that fit more than a tiny portion of women
A tiny needle-patch tracked my blood sugar. This is what I learnt ($)
5 maps that will change the way you see the world ($)
Negative social ties as emerging risk factors for accelerated aging, inflammation, and multi morbidity
Scientists thought they understood global warming. Then the past three years happened
Off the Charts
Are you looking for a way to immortalise Australia’s medal count? Anna Behrend, Nina Krug, and Rina Wilkin at German publication Der Spiegel have created a wonderful interactive that programmatically generates a scarf knitting pattern with medal tallies for each country:
Every row is an event, and it’s chronological. If you’re confident in your German (and your knitting) they sent us this gift link so you can try it out.
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