#633: quantum of sollazzo – 25 November 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.

Quantum #632 had an open rate of 51.86% and a click rate of 15.04%.

The most clicked link was LearnCryptic

I was on a podcast last week. You can listen to it on Spotify and Apple Podcasts or even cringe at my face on video on YouTube.

As the hosts Ben Alexander and Amardeep Sirha of Amarti introduce it, "Giuseppe joins us to talk about:
The importance of knowing your data
Why data Governance is not your enemy
Patient-centred care and public accountability
And much, much more!"

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!

The Quantum of Sollazzo grove now has 35 trees. It helps managing this newsletter's carbon footprint. Check it out at Trees for Life.

'till next week,
Giuseppe @puntofisso.bsky.social

🛎️ Things that caught my attention

I was part of the judging panel for the GEO100 awards. Last week, we announced the "power list" of UK geospatial experts. Take a look at the full list.

The Economist's Alex Hern reveals what we hiring managers have noticed for the past few months: AI-driven job applications are... longer. In Government, we're being quite strict with word counts, which only limits the issue, however.

Have you created some visual/data-driven project in 2025, did it for fun/learning and without compensation? You should be joining The Pudding Cup for a chance to win $1,500!

Finally, this chart by Private Eye is brilliant.
(via Ian Watt)

✨ Topical

What are the best and worst airports and airlines for on-time performance?

USAFacts: "Nearly 25% of domestic flights in the second quarter of 2025 did not arrive on-time — the tardiest performance since 2014."
Washington, DC's airport had a whopping 33% of flights being delayed.

Epstein Files Search

Organised and searchable here. Also, take a look at the discussion on HackerNews.

Could you do better than Reeves as chancellor? Play our interactive budget game

"Could you keep the markets calm and your MPs happy as you pull the economic levers to deliver a budget?", asks The Guardian visual team with this interactive game.

Brain food, delivered daily

Every day we analyze thousands of articles and send you only the best, tailored to your interests. Loved by 505,869 curious minds. Subscribe.

🛠️📖 Tools & Tutorials

How I Use Every Claude Code Feature

Shrivu Shankar: "A brain dump of all the ways I've been using Claude Code."
I should write my own at some point.

Six Things I Bet You Didn't Know You Could Do With Chrome's Devtools, Part 1

In this post we’ll cover:
Time functions with console.time() and console.timeEnd()
Watch any DOM element for changes
Monitor any function in the browser’s context.

Free Online Image Converter

"Convert images between formats, locally in your browser, no uploads 100% secure and private."

Building a Simple Search Engine That Actually Works

"The concept is simple: tokenize everything, store it, then match tokens when searching."

Python is not a great language for data science. Part 1: The experience

Controversial ;-)

A Visual Introduction to Dimensionality Reduction with Isomap

"In this article, I'll be exploring Isomap, a classic non-linear dimensionality reduction technique that seeks to create a low dimensional embedding of data that preserves its local similarity structure. Isomap builds upon the manifold hypothesis, forming a graph that captures the local structure of data,and projecting points in a way that preserves this structure. This is a pattern that is central to many modern dimensionality reduction techniques like t-SNE and UMAP."

📈Dataviz, Data Analysis, & Interactive

Exploring the Writers Behind The X-Files

"A visual exploration of authorship across The X-Files, Millennium, Harsh Realm, and The Lone Gunmen."
There's also a "how I built it" writeup.

N-Body simulator

"The three-body problem is one of the most famous challenges in classical physics and celestial mechanics. It asks: given the initial positions, masses, and velocities of three bodies in space, can we predict their future motion under mutual gravitational attraction?"
This beautiful interactive simulator simulates its generalised setting.

Team Roundabout vs Team Intersection

"Traffic lights force you to stop and wait. Meanwhile your engine is running, you're stressed about getting to work on time, and how you're going to get your kid from soccer practice on time.
Roundabouts, on the other hand, only force you to slow down."
Which team are you?
(via Peter Wood)

A database of every mound-charging we've found in Major League Baseball

"You may have seen that I've launched a new documentary series, THE HISTORY OF CHARGING THE MOUND.
Behind each and every one of my documentary series is a mountain of research documents, notes, and links that never see the light of day. This time around, I've decided not only to make my primary research doc open to everybody, but to do so while I'm still working on the project."
Here it is: Google spreadsheet: THE HISTORY OF CHARGING THE MOUND.
From this Patreon post.
Confession: I had no idea what mound-charging was before reading this article...

How loud are cities?

Datawrapper's David Kokkelink looked at data from the UN Environment Programme's Frontier Report, which "compiled measurements of daytime traffic noise in dozens of cities".

Jobs in Johannesburg

From The Outlier (you'll need to subscribe to see it – but it's worth it and free). I love the way they've clearly "broken" the chart to highlight the missing data.

Papiers

A new way to engage with and visualize arXiv papers.

In pursuit of democracy

Alving Chang, for The Pudding looks at mentions of the word "democracy" in US Congressional records. The technique used is truly brilliant.

🤖 AI

Jevons or Bust

"The cheaper they get, the more we use? A quick look at some AI token data".

AGI fantasy is a blocker to actual engineering

A hot take on how AI can actually be very useful if only we stop thinking of it as being a step into some form of general intelligence.

AI World Clocks

Basically, AI clocks are bad, because the training data is sh**. I find that this is the best example to illustrate the "garbage in, garbage out" problem of AI (which is obviously related to this).

“We’re in an LLM bubble,” Hugging Face CEO says—but not an AI one

"“I think we’re in an LLM bubble, and I think the LLM bubble might be bursting next year,” he said at an Axios event this week, as quoted in a TechCrunch article. “But ‘LLM’ is just a subset of AI when it comes to applying AI to biology, chemistry, image, audio, [and] video. I think we’re at the beginning of it, and we’ll see much more in the next few years.”"

Can AI write accessibility specs?

"TLDR: I built a little RAG AI prompt that pulls together accessibility best practices for whatever component I’m advising teams on."

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