620: quantum of sollazzo
#620: quantum of sollazzo – 19 August 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.
The most clicked link last week was Kontinentalist's analysis of the heat protection afforded by trees in major Asian cities.
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'till next week,
Giuseppe @puntofisso.bsky.social
✨ Topical
Dicing an Onion the Mathematically Optimal Way
Andrew Aquino for The Pudding: "This is a project about onions and math.
Why? Because tens of millions of people are curious about how to properly dice an onion"
Israel-Gaza journalist death spike
Axios uses data from NGO Committee to Protect Journalist to visualize reported journalist deaths in the Middle Eastern conflict
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🛠️📖 Tools & Tutorials
Bluefish
The missing diagramming framework, based on work by the MIT Visualization Group.
"Bluefish is a diagramming framework for the web. It relaxes the UI component model popularized by React. The main primitive of Bluefish is the relation. Just as components are the building blocks of user interfaces, relations are the building blocks of diagrams. Unlike components, relations can share children with other relations, and they don't need to fully specify their childrens' layouts."
Making Sense of Text with Decision Trees
"In this article, you will learn:
Build a decision tree classifier for spam email detection that analyzes text data.
Incorporate text data modeling techniques like TF-IDF and embeddings for training your decision tree.
Evaluate and compare classification results against other text classifiers, like Naive Bayes, using Scikit-learn."
Getting Good Results from Claude Code
"I’ve been experimenting with LLM programming agents over the past few months. Claude Code has become my favorite."
Building a web search engine from scratch in two months with 3 billion neural embeddings
"In this post, I go over the 2-month journey end-to-end, starting from no infra, bootstrapped data, or any experience around building a web search engine."
Another article about centering in CSS
A few different takes on centering.
Developing a modern data workflow for regularly updated data
An oldish (2019) academic paper with good ideas.
Improve your social skills
Ok, this is not data, but I thought it might be useful to many of us...
📈Dataviz, Data Analysis, & Interactive
Multi-Year Itch
FlowingData: "The seven-year itch, popularized by the 1955 film of the same name, suggests that married couples and those in long-term relationships grow tired of each other at the seven-year mark. ... Maybe there is a way to see this through data."
I challenge you to find areas in Mallorca with less than '15 airbnbs'!
"How? Remember the legendary Minesweeper 👾 ? We re-imagined it with real geo-referenced data: every cell is a 2 km² grid on the island, with information about the number of short-term rentals.
And I know, this is probably a small portion of all the touristic rentals of the island, but if it sparks some awareness, it's a start!"
Brilliant use of data, playable here.
Vaccination Coverage and Exemptions among Kindergartners
"View national and state-level school vaccination coverage and exemption estimates using interactive maps, trend lines, bar charts and data tables. Data collection methodology differs by state."
Interactive visualization by the US CDC on vaccine appetite (and lack thereof) – interesting ability to query online!
Historical GDP per capita levels
"This website provides an interactive tool to explore the augmented dataset of historical GDP per capita levels" as introduced*" in an academic paper by its authors.
(via La Cultura del Dato)
What is the US poverty rate?
USAFacts: "About 11.1% of the population as of 2023. The poverty rate is the percentage of people whose household income falls below the poverty threshold set by the government. It measures the percentage of people in households that don’t earn enough to pay for basic needs like food, housing, and healthcare. In 2023, 36.8 million people lived in poverty."
🤖 AI
11 famous AI disasters
"AI coding tool wipes out production database and lies about it" and other half-hilarious half-dramatic stories.
PhD-level intelligence or the graduate student from hell
"AI companies love to tout that their models are approaching—or have reached—PhD-level intelligence. This is blatant nonsensical marketing geared towards an audience that deeply misunderstands what a PhD is and what it takes to get one. Hearing it makes me cringe. PhD-level intelligence is not a thing."
In most cases, PhD-level intelligence is based on having very deep and narrow experience, something that you don't necessarily require to solve a vast number of problems. This article articulates it well.
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