Kevin Kelly:

Because of the circle, no organism is privileged with being above another. A circle has not top. We humans are somewhere in the lineup, but where depends on how you turn the chart. This circle of life also better captures the idea that all living organisms today are equally evolved. By definition, any organism alive today (shown on the outer rim) can boast an unbroken chain of ancestors who have survived the same number of years, 4.5 billions years. The snail, fern, clam and...

Kevin Systrom, founder of Instagram, has been working on this site that gives up-to-date reads on Rt by state, giving a read on how fast the coronavirus is spreading.

These are up-to-date values for Rt, a key measure of how fast the virus is growing. It’s the average number of people who become infected by an infectious person. If Rt is above 1.0, the virus will spread quickly. When Rt is below 1.0, the virus will stop spreading.

Tabbing between the time ranges shows how infection rates are changing over the last 4 weeks.

Mike Bostock published this cool Observable notebook that generates snapshots showing road networks of centrally-planned cities. Brasilia as an example:

It uses a combo of D3 and OpenStreetMap data to generate vector tiles.

An interesting idea for looking at data. Rather than the typical negative, dour news you read daily, this site presents data demonstrating positive progress.

Examples:

• US Cancer Survival Rates are Rising
• African Countries are Squashing Malaria
• Smoking is Falling Fast in Japan
• We’ve Almost Eradicated Polio

It’s surprising that it’s not more common to pay attention to where we’re making progress. More on this theme about...

This is a great narrative story from the Wall Street Journal about the current situation in California with PG&E, the rolling blackouts, and the wildfires ravaging the state. Drone video, maps, data on fire risk and infrastructure paint a pretty grim picture of the problem. It’ll take years for PG&E to catch up to where there’s anything resembling a long-term solution to this problem.

In preparation for this year’s Geography 2050 theme (“borders in a borderless world”), this map gives a helpful sense of how relatively young most of the world’s international boundaries are. Outside of Europe, most boundaries are shades of red or blue (dating from 1800 or later).

Check out the full size version here.

Most people don’t know how earth imaging satellites work. All they know is a camera is flying overhead snapping photos. This visualization gives you an animated picture of how Planet’s satellite constellation can cover the entire globe every day for a continuously-updated view of the Earth:

In four years, Planet has flown on 18 successful launches and deployed 293 satellites successfully into low Earth orbit. With more than 150 satellites currently in orbit, Planet has the largest constellation of Earth imaging satellites in history.

Amazing that we’ve got this kind of capability with microsatellite technology....