616: quantum of sollazzo
#616: quantum of sollazzo – 22 September 2025
The data newsletter by @puntofisso.
Hello, regular readers and welcome new ones :) This is Quantum of Sollazzo, the newsletter about all things data. I am Giuseppe Sollazzo, or @puntofisso. I've been sending this newsletter since 2012 to be a summary of all the articles with or about data that captured my attention over the previous week. The newsletter is and will always (well, for as long as I can keep going!) be free, but you're welcome to become a friend via the links below.
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Giuseppe @puntofisso.bsky.social
🛎️ Things that caught my attention
How full are the UK's reservoirs and rivers?
This article covering the recent "months of dry weather putting pressure on UK water resources" caught my attention both for its useful dataviz, and for entirely personal reasons – there's a likely hosepipe ban coming into force, which my allotment association believes will impact us too. It looks, very interestingly, at how full the water reservoirs are around the country. I'm starting to look at dry weather agriculture.
✨ Topical
What’s in Trump’s 2026 budget proposal?
USAFacts: "The fiscal year 2026 budget proposal would keep base discretionary spending level."
U.S. proved reserves fell in 2023 from 2022 record
A look at US oil reserves. The map below, using a choropleth on a logarithmic scale, is pretty good.
"U.S. proved reserves of crude oil and lease condensate totaled 46 billion barrels at year-end 2023, a 4% decline from the previous year’s record, according to our U.S. Crude Oil and Natural Gas Proved Reserves, Year-End 2023 report. U.S. proved reserves of natural gas fell to 604 trillion cubic feet, a 13% decline from their 2022 record. Both declines marked the first annual decrease in U.S. proved reserves for those fuels since 2020."
(via Peter Wood)
Deshalb kommen weniger Geflüchtete in die EU – This is why fewer refugees are coming to the EU
This article (original German here and automatic translation into English here) looks at the reason of the declining refugee numbers going to the EU. As Soph notes in her brilliant newsletter, it piques our dataviz crowd interest because of the weird – but functioning – overlaying of a chart and map.
“Not Just Measles”: Whooping Cough Cases Are Soaring as Vaccine Rates Decline
Duaa Eldeib and Patricia Callahan, ProPublica: "While much of the country is focused on the spiraling measles outbreak concentrated in the small, dusty towns of West Texas, cases of pertussis have skyrocketed by more than 1,500% nationwide since hitting a recent low in 2021 amid the COVID-19 pandemic. Deaths tied to the disease are also up, hitting 10 last year, compared with about two to four in previous years. Cases are on track to exceed that total this year."
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🛠️📖 Tools & Tutorials
SveltePlot
"A Svelte-native visualization framework based on the layered grammar of graphics principles."
SplitThing
"Upload an image and split it into a custom grid".
Simple, useful, open source. Bravo.
Rill
"Rill (and Github repo) is the fastest path from data lake to dashboard. Unlike most BI tools, Rill comes with its own embedded in-memory database. Data and compute are co-located, and queries return in milliseconds. So you can pivot, slice, and drill-down into your data instantly."
Intro to SQL
This tutorial might be elementary for many of you Quantum readers, but I'll put it here just in case.
"Data that we need to utilize and query is often stored in data sources such as databases or data warehouses. In this course, you will learn how to connect and query databases using Structured Query Language (SQL). In particular, we will focus on querying data in a commonly used data model for storing patient data called OMOP. By the end of this course, you will be prepared to construct complex queries to retrieve large data sets and automate these queries to produce automated reports and dashboards."
I’m more proud of these 128 kilobytes than anything I’ve built since
Mike Hall shows what's achievable within the constraints of 128K for the whole website (including images), extreme responsiveness, and universal compatibility.
Online text to diagram tools
"A comprehensive list of various text to diagram tools."
Build a 3D Product Configurator with Babylon.js
"Being able to see, interact, and customize using product visualizations can be valuable. This post demonstrates how to build a 3D product visualization and configuration tool using Babylon.js, a powerful, open-source 3D engine based on WebGL and WebGPU."
chili3D
Chili3D (and Github repo) is "a web-based 3D CAD application for online model design and editing".
Setting up a FAIR and reproducible project
Heidi Seibold of the Digital Research Academy: "Making your research or code project FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, Reusable) and reproducible can feel like a chore. But if you have access to the right templates and resources, it can be quite the simple and rewarding task. Let's make it easy for ourselves to do the right thing!".
AI Dataset Generator
"Generate realistic datasets for demos, learning, and dashboards. Instantly preview data, export as CSV or SQL, and explore with Metabase."
🤯 Data thinking
Has Self-Serve BI Finally Arrived Thanks to AI?
"How conversational BI and MCP deliver on two decades of Promises".
Data Science Has Become a Pseudo-Science
"However, over the past two years or so, it feels like the field has taken a sharp turn. Just yesterday, I attended a technical presentation from the analytics team. The project aimed to identify anomalies in a dataset composed of multiple time series, each containing a clear inflection point. The team’s hypothesis was that these trajectories might indicate entities engaged in some sort of fraud.
The team claimed to have solved the task using “generative AI”. They didn’t go into methodological details but presented results that, according to them, were amazing."
This post on reddit is a bit of a rant, but I agree with many of the points it raises.
📈Dataviz, Data Analysis, & Interactive
Bears will be boys
Melanie Walsh, with Russell Samora, Michelle Pera-McGhee, and Jan Diehm, published this "data analysis of animal gender in children’s books" for The Pudding.
Get the location of the ISS using DNS
My friend and inspiring geek Terence looks at what he describes "DNS esoterica" to illustrate how a DNS server can be used to share information without the need to interact with a webserver.
This fungus is so humongous that it can be mapped
"A member of a species that kills trees, this mushroom is not the first to be called the Humongous Fungus — and perhaps not the last."
Low wages across Europe
Datawrapper's Hendik Bartusch: "The mean monthly income in Germany was close to 4,000 euros, the fourth highest in Europe. That doesn’t sound like a low wage, does it?"
🤖 AI
Grok: searching X for “from:elonmusk (Israel OR Palestine OR Hamas OR Gaza)”
Simon Willison looks at the accusations of bias in Grok, and shows how he practically tested it.
"This suggests that Grok may have a weird sense of identity—if asked for its own opinions it turns to search to find previous indications of opinions expressed by itself or by its ultimate owner. I think there is a good chance this behavior is unintended!"
AI Hallucination Cases
"This database tracks legal decisions1 in cases where generative AI produced hallucinated content – typically fake citations, but also other types of arguments. It does not track the (necessarily wider) universe of all fake citations or use of AI in court filings."
(via Jeremy's Data Is Plural)
A language model built for the public good
"ETH Zurich and EPFL will release a large language model (LLM) developed on public infrastructure. Trained on the “Alps” supercomputer at the Swiss National Supercomputing Centre (CSCS), the new LLM marks a milestone in open-source AI and multilingual excellence."
It will be released under the Apache Licence, so it's fundamentally open source, and I'm curious to see how it performs.
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