Topical

The "gooool" of the 2026 World Cup does not belong to Erling Haaland, Lionel Messi, Kylian Mbappe or Harry Kane

Telemundo's announcers are famous for shouting very long "goooooals", and The Athletic decided to analyse the data across the 307 goals scored at the 2026 Football World Cup.
(via Lisa Riemers)

FIFA World Cup 2026 · Data Portraits

"A generative data-portrait of the tournament, where each match is rebuilt from its real numbers into a single moving image — readable at a glance, honest to the last touch."

Mapping environmental pressure across England: Natural England's IMED, now on Local Insight

Natural England has launched the Index of Multiple Environmental Deprivation (IMED), a comprehensive assessment of environmental pressures facing communities across England, converted by Local Insight from gridded data into Lower Super Output Areas (LSOAs).

Tools & Tutorials

Rebuilding FIFA Standings Layout with CSS Subgrid

"A look at how to rebuild the FIFA standings layout by using CSS grid, subgrid, and more."

Chord diagrams in R with ggchord2

ggchord2 is a ggplot2 extension package for creating chord diagrams in R.

Your JS Date Is Lying to You

JavaScript's Date object appears to contain hidden pitfalls that have corrupted date logic in production applications for thirty years. Written in ten days in 1995 and modeled on Java's deprecated date class, Date suffers from unreliable parsing, mutable state, timezone confusion, and fragile arithmetic. Unsurprisingly.

If You Think You Can Do Real-World Text-to-SQ

"*Any text-to-SQL benchmark should address the difficulties of real-world data stores. *"

The 10 Levels of Building a Data Grid

A year-long journey optimising a data grid for a database GUI supporting MongoDB, PostgreSQL, and other databases. What seemed like a simple table implementation became a complex performance challenge requiring ten progressive optimisation levels, with interesting thoughts about SVG and DOM rendering.

Data Thinking

Disputation on the Power and Efficacy of Human Cartographic Expertise

An essay, structured as seventy-four questions in the style of Martin Luther's disputation (don't ask me why), examines whether academic cartography has confused the intellectual substance of mapmaking with the machinery historically required to perform it.
(via Steven Feldman)

Dataviz, Data Analysis, & Interactive

Campaign for Better Transport's Bus Provision Standard Map

"Connectivity isn't just about having a stop nearby; it's about whether that stop actually connects you to places." This map tries to measure that connection.
(via Alex Wrottlesley)

Where is the population centre of 'the north' of the UK?

Alasdair Rae explores the population-weighted center of northern UK by dividing the country's population roughly in half along a diagonal line approximating the traditional north-south boundary of England.
Also, watch this space.

How Hollywood Stopped Making Movies in Hollywood

Daniel Parris (Stat Significant) examines the migration of film production away from Los Angeles.

Sunshine Atlas

This website shows sunshine data for 3,833 destinations in 235 countries & territories. The author reached out to also highlight this comparison between "Europe and the contiguous US by annual sunshine hours". Data released under CC BY.

We > Ultrarich

This quirky, interactive webpage helps users visualise the extreme scale of billionaire and trillionaire wealth by comparing it to typical personal wealth.

AI

I burned all my tokens researching how to save tokens - Quesma Blog

The author set out to research AI "tokenomics" (understanding monitoring systems, governance, and optimization tools for AI spending). Their initial approach using Claude's /deep-research tool burned through their entire Claude Max 5x subscription limit in 30 minutes, launching 111 agents but producing no results before hitting the limit.

The LLM Critics Are Right. I Use LLMs Anyway.

Jeremy Theocharis: "I almost agree with all of the LLM critics, yet I still use LLMs a lot. I know this sounds like I am delusional, and I also feel like that sometimes because of this dissonance, but I don’t think I am alone with it."

OpenAI accidentally hacked Hugging Face — should we have seen it coming?

OpenAI reported that GPT-5.6 Sol and an unreleased internal model autonomously hacked Hugging Face while attempting to cheat on a cybersecurity benchmark. This is a report by EpochAI. But on this topic also read Simon Willison's pretty good write-up.

The Current State of Agentic AI

An article summarising the evolution of agentic AI architecture by mid-2026.

Are AI labs pelicanmaxxing?

Simon Willison launched a famous informal benchmark for LLMs: "Generate an SVG of a pelican riding a bicycle." This article investigates whether AI labs are training their models specifically on it. TL;DR: there is no evidence of "pelicanmaxxing".

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