Blog

Guides on making data worth reading.

Practical, opinionated writing on chart selection, data storytelling and turning messy datasets into premium visuals.

Analysis

The board that keeps changing its mind

Three half-years of wet-lease demand as a terminal board: a record 34,841 half, an 87% fall and a 780% climb in the same period — and why the chart refuses to call that a transfer.

Analysis · 5 min read
Analysis

Thirty-seven years of fear, one ridge a year

Every VIX close since 1990 as a density ridge per year. 2017 never once closed above 30; 2009 spent 44% of its days above it; the record is 82.7 on 16 March 2020.

Analysis · 6 min read
Analysis

Every Bitcoin cycle has paid a third of the last

Four halvings, each from its own day zero: ×84, ×26, ×7.9, and so far ×1.9 — and why indexing to a shared day zero beats a calendar.

Analysis · 5 min read
Analysis

What Europe takes home, and what the state takes first

Greece keeps 83% of gross, Romania 59%. Plus three ways Eurostat's 2024 break in series will hand you a confidently wrong headline.

Analysis · 7 min read
Analysis

One company is over half of everything alive in orbit

6,130 of the 11,403 tonnes of working satellite mass, and 11,091 of 16,774 objects — and the solver setting that decides whether a Voronoi treemap is honest.

Analysis · 6 min read
Analysis

Fifty runways are the nearest tarmac for half the world

A spherical Voronoi over 2,280 runways: fifty are nearest for 48.7% of the planet, and Easter Island's strip covers 4,624 times the ground Heathrow does.

Analysis · 6 min read
Analysis

An overtake is a crossing, not two rows on a leaderboard

Qantas mainline down 87% while QantasLink is up 780% — one group moving both ways at once, and when an alluvial beats a ranked bar.

Analysis · 5 min read
Analysis

The ACMI top ten: who really flies the wet-lease market

The ten biggest wet-lease customers by flights operated, and what a ranked leaderboard shows that a flow diagram cannot.

Analysis · 6 min read
Analysis

American babies are born on a business schedule

Every day of 2014 by US births as a calendar heatmap — the 37% weekend gap, the holiday troughs, and the Friday-the-13th dip.

Analysis · 6 min read
Analysis

Can an economy grow while cutting carbon?

Seven economies' paths through GDP and CO₂ per person, 1990–2022 — the four that bent the curve down, and the production-vs-consumption catch.

Analysis · 6 min read
Analysis

Half of humanity lives in seven countries

8.16 billion people as a treemap — the seven that pass half, Asia at 58.9%, and the comma-in-a-name bug that briefly lost Taiwan.

Analysis · 6 min read
Analysis

China makes a third of the world's electricity — mostly from coal

Ember 2024 as a marimekko: width = share of world output, height = fuel mix. China 32.6% (57.8% coal), a fossil/low-carbon waterline, and the world still 34.1% coal.

Analysis · 6 min read
Analysis

The longest-working countries produce the least per hour

40 economies on one diagonal, r = −0.72 — Colombia's 2,252 hours at $21/h, Germany's 1,339 at $94/h, and why Ireland's $154 carries an asterisk.

Analysis · 6 min read
Analysis

Where Europe's public money actually goes

€8.85 trillion nested from 10 functions into 69 lines — three jobs take two-thirds of it, and pensions alone are more than a fifth of every euro.

Analysis · 6 min read
Analysis

One country mines three-quarters of the world's cobalt

USGS 2024: DR Congo's 220,000 t is 75.9% of world output — and the reserves view re-ranks the world, vaulting Australia from seventh to second.

Analysis · 5 min read
Analysis

€2.9 billion, mapped: where Europe funds its AI

Every Horizon Europe AI grant pinned to its city and played over five years — Paris's €127M lead, the 21.6% top-ten concentration, and why only 18.1% reaches SMEs.

Analysis · 6 min read
Analysis

The decade Netflix built, one tile at a time

8,793 catalog additions tiled in arrival order and played on a scrubber — the empty years, the 2016 explosion, peak shelf in 2019, and the bend nobody talks about.

Analysis · 5 min read
Analysis

The dataset with 13-year-old retirees

Audit first, chart second: 247 impossible workers, a wrong-signed anxiety–depression correlation, perfectly flat platforms — and the design study we built anyway, labeled.

Analysis · 6 min read
Analysis

581,705 layoffs, drawn as one wave

All 1,745 tech layoff announcements since 2020 as one wave — the 2020 surge, the 2021 quiet, the January 2023 crest, and the era's biggest single cut landing in 2025.

Analysis · 6 min read
Analysis

Why a new A321neo keeps getting more valuable

Current market value ≠ list price. What the A321neo's ~17% climb from 2017 to 2025 — through a pandemic — says about narrowbody demand.

Analysis · 6 min read
Analysis

A decade of 787 deliveries, with a canyon in the middle

881 Dreamliners over ten years — cut from 156 a year to just 14 by a two-year production crisis, while the market quietly chose its variant.

Analysis · 6 min read
Analysis

Where 800 Airbus deliveries actually landed in 2025

China and the US took a third of everything; India took more than the next two countries combined — and one budget carrier out-received entire continents.

Analysis · 5 min read
Analysis

Half of everything Airbus built in 2025 was an A321

Five assembly sites, six families, 785 aircraft — one ribbon carries 49% of the flow, and a single German plant builds six in ten of them.

Analysis · 5 min read
Analysis

The fleet race: how United took the crown in five years

The podium fully inverted between 2021 and 2026 — plus Aeroflot's shrinking fleet, FedEx's freighter drawdown and IndiGo's 50% surge.

Analysis · 6 min read
Analysis

One ACMI operator's year, drawn as a web of 23 airlines

Avion Express flew 51,377 cycles for other airlines in 2025 — and two partners accounted for 89% of them. The wet-lease business, made visible.

Analysis · 5 min read
Analysis

Two lessors, side by side: scale versus committed growth

DAE's 602-aircraft estate against Macquarie AirFinance's focused book with 39% growth already on order. The order book is the strategy.

Analysis · 5 min read
Analysis

Aviation's quiet giant: who actually does the world's maintenance

13,106 heavy maintenance visits over 18 months, ranked. HAECO leads — and six of the top ten providers operate from Asia.

Analysis · 5 min read
Analysis

Reading United's fleet plan like a balance sheet

1,064 aircraft flying, 638 on firm order, 190 on option — the MAX and A321neo waves, a first-ever A350 order, and the 757/767 sunset.

Analysis · 6 min read
Analysis

Europe's housing market doesn't exist — 27 of them do

From one shared 2015 baseline, Hungary climbed to 387 while Finland slipped to 97 — below where it started. 14 of 27 markets have doubled, and the spread keeps widening.

Analysis · 6 min read
Analysis

Europe's longest lives — and the years lost

Spain leads at 86.5 years, seven ahead of Bulgaria. But 2020–21 fell unevenly: Bulgaria gave up 3.7 years, Norway none — and the six still below their 2019 level are all Western.

Analysis · 5 min read
Guide

How to Choose the Right Chart for Your Data

A practical framework for picking the chart type that actually makes your point — and the common mistakes that bury it.

Guide · 8 min read

More coming — data-cleaning guides, chart-type deep dives, and how to make a dataset go viral on LinkedIn.