Hello and welcome to another edition of The Crunch.
In this week’s newsletter we are going hard on maps. We have a map based on a Billy Joel song, a Lego US election map and much more. For the non-map nerds (how many can there be?) there are also visuals on microplastics in the oceans, how mpox spreads and mutates, electric cars, and a beautifully illustrated scrolly.
But first … a great big infrastructure map
Millions of Australians in the fastest growing areas of our cities have poor access to schools, healthcare, third spaces or other basic infrastructure.
As families are increasingly pushed out to the city fringes in search of affordable housing, it can take years for (often privately provided) infrastructure to catch up. Check out our map and dive into the rest of the data here.
Four charts from the fortnight
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1. The sitting/standing divide
Before your eyes glaze over, this isn’t about standing desks.
Our former colleague Alvin Chang has created yet another beautiful interactive at the Pudding, this time exploring the divide between “sitters” (those doing mostly office jobs such as coding or legal work) and standers (restaurant servers or construction workers, etc).
It’s a great interactive to play around with. And from a technical perspective, the transitions are lovely. There’s a video version you can check out too. And Alvin has written a behind-the-scenes post to explain his thinking.
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2. The how, where and why of mpox
A trigger warning that some of the beautiful illustrations in this Reuters story are a bit confronting. But this is a great visual primer on a disease that the WHO has declared a public health emergency of international concern.
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3. Trillions and trillions of particles
When we talk about big global problems like the plastics crisis, it can feel a bit abstract. This Straits Times interactive takes you on a journey from the synthetic microfibres released in your washing machine to one of the great garbage patches in the ocean.
It can take between 20 and 200 years for these plastics to break down and they can be ingested by sea life, enter the food chain or release toxins as they break down. Read and see more here.
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4. Where it makes sense to go electric
It’s common to hear that electric cars are cheaper to run than their internal combustion cousins. But how cheap or environmentally friendly they are actually varies quite a bit, depending on the price and emissions intensity of energy.
The Economist has developed a ranking of 122 countries. Norway, where 98% of electricity comes from renewable sources, does well on both measures. Australia is somewhere in the middle. You can read and explore more here.
Spotlight on … so many amazing maps
We’re coming to the end of this year’s #30DayMapChallenge, where cartography nerds create new maps every day in response to a prompt. There really are too many amazing maps, shared on too many platforms, to pick favourites.
But here are a few that caught our eye on Bluesky:
A 3D printing of John Snow’s famous cholera map
How different map projections change the size and shape of Greenland
A Lego cartogram of the US presidential election results
A digital elevation recreation of a 1726 map of Formosa (now Taiwan)
More than 64,000 observations of lizards and snakes in Australia (over just one year)
A typographical map of the European Union
A beautiful hand-drawn map based on a Billy Joel song
There are so many more to choose from. We recommend checking out the #30DayMapChallenge hashtag on your social media platform of choice.
Off the Charts
“Scrollytelling” can be an overused device in interactive graphics these days. They can be unwieldy and often make it harder to get your head around the data. But this beautifully illustrated interactive by Badiucao is an example of just how powerful they can be.
We don’t want to write too much because you really do need to read and see this story to appreciate it. The page describes Badiucao as “an Australian, a Chinese dissident and an Age cartoonist”, and this is his story.
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