626: quantum of sollazzo
#626: quantum of sollazzo – 30 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.
The most clicked links last week were Dataguessr and Chartle – you lot never disappoint in your geekery.
As I start setting this issue up, I'm on the 6:24 AM train from Newcastle to Edinburgh. Yes, it's early. But I'm heading to Open Data Camp UK and I'm happy. I co-founded this event in 2014 alongside Mark Braggins and James Cattell, and over the years it has developed into a brilliant community event with a tight-knit campmakers team. One of the best experiences of my data and personal life.
AMA – Ask Me Anything! Submit a question via this anonymous Google form. I'll select a few every 4-5 weeks and answer them on here :-) Don't be shy!
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'till next week,
Giuseppe @puntofisso.bsky.social
🛎️ Things that caught my attention
A few weeks ago, in Quantum #623, I covered an interesting chart by Datawrapper's CEO David Kokkelink that looked at commute times in Germany. I thought: I'm pretty sure we can find similar data by the Department for Transport for England and Wales. And so I made the map below. [Here's also a brief write-up)(https://puntofisso.net/blog/posts/commute-time-stats/).
While I must caveat that the data is slightly different from the German version, and therefore the conclusions are slightly different, we can say that a similar pattern emerges: it would appear that in England and Wales, too, commutes within urban areas are the shortest.
Internet Society Pulse
Healthy competition among Internet Service Providers can increase consumer choice, reduce prices, and foster innovation, efficiency, and Internet quality. Unfortunately, nearly 80% of countries have poor or very poor market competition. Learn more.
✨ Topical
More kids are getting vaccine exemptions. Here’s where.
USAFacts: "Nonmedical vaccine exemption rates in kindergarteners have increased since 2014, while medical exemptions remained stable."
Inside the confusing world of women’s clothing sizes
The Strait Times: "Why does shopping for clothes feel like a guessing game? We looked at the numbers to find out."
🛠️📖 Tools & Tutorials
timesketch
"Timesketch is an open-source tool for collaborative forensic timeline analysis. Using sketches you and your collaborators can easily organize your timelines and analyze them all at the same time. Add meaning to your raw data with rich annotations, comments, tags and stars."
repo2txt
"Web-based tool converts GitHub repository contents into a single formatted text file."
The tool itself is here, but you can also get the source code on GitHub under MIT License.
Why Local-First Apps Haven’t Become Popular?
SQLite Cloud creator Marco Bambini: "Offline-first apps promise instant loading and privacy, but in practice, very few apps get offline support because getting sync right is surprisingly hard."
CSS Boilerplate
"A default CSS structure for projects of any size."
Kigen Color Generator
A useful colour generator by Figma plugin Kigen.
How a String Library Beat OpenCV at Image Processing by 4x
Loads of interesting (and surprising) ideas in this article: "To my great surprise, one of the biggest current users of my StringZilla library in the Python ecosystem is one of the world’s most widely used Image Augmentation libraries - Albumentations with over 100 million downloads on PyPI, growing by 5 million every month. Last year, Albumentations swapped parts of OpenCV - the world’s most widely used image processing library with 32 million monthly downloads in Python - for my strings library 🤯 The reason for that surprising move? The quality of Look-Up Tables (LUTs) implementation in StringZilla."
Solving LinkedIn Queens using MiniZinc
Thanks to my friend Paolo for making me aware of LinkedIn games, that had completely escaped me :) "... this post describes how to use MiniZinc [ Quantum #625 ] to solve the problem in what I think is a more readable and natural expression of the model than either SAT or SMT."
It's a good starter if you want to learn MiniZinc, too.
(via Paolo Filipe Bertoldi)
Chrome DevTools (MCP) for your AI agent
Chrome Team: "We're launching today a public preview for the new Chrome DevTools Model Context Protocol (MCP) server, bringing the power of Chrome DevTools to AI coding assistants."
Asciiflow
A web tool to create ASCII art.
Those of you who are my age or older, might remember creating COBOL screens...
📈Dataviz, Data Analysis, & Interactive
Low Earth Orbit Visualization
I find it mind-boggling that data for this visualization exists. Awesome.
The Meat Universe, first course 🥩
Leo Benedictus looks at US-consumed meats, and makes an intriguing discovery about beavers.
Russia’s new daytime attacks put millions of lives on hold
As co-author Soph Warnes tells on LinkedIn: "A couple of weeks ago, our reporter Ivana got in touch with an idea about visualising the timing of air raid sirens in Kyiv, and how Russian tactics have seemingly changed - there are now more during daytime hours than there were previously, and this coincides with the start of the school year."
She decided to use the format below, which I think captures the story in an immediately visual way.
Respiratory Syncytial Virus (RSV)
Illustrator Miriam Quick: "I recently worked on the graphics for this Scientific American piece on respiratory syncytial virus (RSV) by Liz Szabo, alongside the brilliant Jen Christiansen. The article highlights the real impact of RSV. Often thought of as a childhood illness, it’s far more than that. Globally, RSV causes more than 3.6 million hospitalisations in children under five each year, leading to around 100,000 deaths. But older adults are also at risk: RSV can trigger severe respiratory disease and is linked to heart problems as well."
Your Life in Weeks x Climate Stripes
"See how UK temperatures will change [throughout your lifetime](https://bakeoff.eddowding.com/".
When does this shape become a circle?
A simple yet superb experiment in visual perception.
(via Chris Weston)
Shoes on, shoes off
I have to say I have imported this tradition to my family back in Italy, after learning it in the UK from German friends!
(via Guy Lipman)
Charting my charts
Datawrapper's support officer Shaylee Safie makes a lot of charts.
Bird Migration Explorer
"This is your guide to the heroic annual journeys made by over 450 bird species, and the challenges they face along the way."
Sinerider
A maths-based game.
v
🤖 AI
Tricking recruiter AI with prompts in LinkedIn profile
Cameron Mattis, a software engineer, apparently tricked a recruiter AI to send him a flan recipe by adding instruction prompt in his LinkedIn profile. Some commenters question the truthfulness of this, but I think it's pretty credible.
(via Durand D'Souza)
AI isn't replacing radiologists
"Radiology combines digital images, clear benchmarks, and repeatable tasks. But demand for human radiologists is at an all-time high."
Works in Progress is becoming one of my favourite readings.
Also: "Radiology is a field optimized for human replacement, where digital inputs, pattern recognition tasks, and clear benchmarks predominate."
OpenAI admits AI hallucinations are mathematically inevitable, not just engineering flaws
"In a landmark study, OpenAI researchers reveal that large language models will always produce plausible but false outputs, even with perfect data, due to fundamental statistical and computational limits."
"Like students facing hard exam questions, large language models sometimes guess when uncertain, producing plausible yet incorrect statements instead of admitting uncertainty" – well, it's very human-like, then...
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