Seeing How Much We Ate Over the Years

By Nathan Yau

The United States Department of Agriculture keeps track of food availability for over 200 items, which can be used to estimate food consumption at the national level. They have data for 1970 through 2019, so we can for example, see how much beef Americans consume per year on average and how that has changed over four decades.

So that’s what I did.

How long will chicken reign supreme? Who wins between lemon and lime? Is nonfat ice cream really ice cream? Does grapefruit ever make a comeback? Find out in the charts below.

The rankings are broken into six main food groups: proteins, vegetables, fruits, dairy, grains, and added fats.

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Giant Batteries Are Transforming the Way the U.S. Uses Electricity

They’re delivering solar power after dark in California and helping to stabilize grids in other states. And the technology is expanding rapidly.

By Brad Plumer and Nadja Popovich May 7, 2024

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How Much We Work

By Nathan Yau

In our younger years, we have school and more important things to do, but then we get older and there are bills to pay. The charts below show the shift and the sweet release of retirement.

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When Your Vision and Hearing Decline with Age

By Nathan Yau

If you want to feel like you’re getting old, visit an optometrist and have them tell you that in 6 to 12 months you won’t be able to read things up close and you’ll need bifocals.

For most of my life, I had good vision without glasses or contacts, but in my mid-30s I noticed the basketball score on television looking kind of blurry. I had astigmatism. Just a little.

My prescription didn’t change for years. Until recently. My optometrist hit me with the news that most people start to have trouble reading up close between 39 to 43 years old. I had to look into it.

The following chart shows the percentage of adults who wear glasses or contacts, by age, based on data from the National Health Interview Survey.

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Common Age Differences, Married Couples

clicar na imagem para seguir o link

Bons gráficos de alfinetes e de dispersão com outlier

By Nathan Yau
Through pop culture, it sometimes seems like it’s common for there to be a wide age difference between spouses. How common are the age gaps, really? These are the age differences through the lens of the 2022 five-year American Community Survey.

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Why Line Chart Baselines Can Start at Non-Zero

Uma boa demonstração, com gráficos dinâmicos, de como os gráficos podem ser enganadores

By Nathan Yau
There is a recurring argument that line chart baselines must start at zero, because anything else would be misleading, dishonest, and an insult to all that is good in the world. The critique is misguided.

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Full Of Themselves

Um relatório de tratamento de dados muito bem explicado

An analysis of title drops in movies

by Dominikus Baur + Alice Thudt

A title drop is when a character in a movie says the title of the movie they’re in. Here’s a large-scale analysis of 73,921 movies from the last 80 years on how often, when and maybe even why that happens.

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Switching Jobs

Bons gráficos, bastante originais…

When people move to different jobs, here’s where they go.

By Nathan Yau

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1,374 DAYS: MY LIFE WITH LONG COVID

Uma boa estória com excelentes gráficos

By Giorgia Lupi

Ms. Lupi is an information designer who has been experiencing symptoms of long Covid for over three years.

Dec. 14, 2023

Every morning, I wake up in my Brooklyn apartment, and for two seconds, I can remember the old me. The me without pain, the me with energy, the me who could do whatever she wanted.

Then I’m shoved back into my new reality. As I fully come into consciousness, I feel dizzy, faint and nauseated. Pain pulses throughout my body, and my limbs feel simultaneously as heavy as concrete and weak as jelly. It feels as if a machine were squeezing my skull, and extreme exhaustion overtakes me.

These sensations have been a daily occurrence, with few exceptions, for the past three years and nine months. In the morning my boyfriend will be the one making coffee for us. He will run all of our errands. He will cook and clean. He now does all the things I used to do, the things I can’t do anymore.

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100 visualizations from one simple dataset

Montes de visualizações para uma tabela de dados com duas linhas e 3 colunas

Can we come up with 100 visualizations from one simple dataset?

As an information design agency working with data visualization every day, we challenged ourselves to accomplish this using insightful and visually appealing visualizations.

We wanted to show the diversity and complexity of data visualization and how we can tell different stories using limited visual properties and assets.

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