Engaging Data

It's back to school time (my kids started up this week). Here's a thread/list of my science/geography -related visualizations and tools that teachers/educators might be interested in sharing with students. Please share with the teachers you know.

@simongerman600 would be great to get a home battery at or under a few thousand dollars instead of $10-20k

Battery costs have collapsed. Lithium-ion battery prices are down ~97–99% since 1991 (from ~$7,500 per kWh to under $200) making energy storage dramatically cheaper and unlocking EVs and renewables at scale. Add concerns about global supply chains of fossil fuels and the future looks greener. Source: ourworldindata.org/battery-price-…

Perspective: when we poll GO for translunar injection (TLI) and the engine(s) on the Orion Integrity service module propel us toward the moon, our actual destination is Earth. The ultimate destination of every human space flight.

September 1997. Steve Jobs stands before Apple employees and tells them he's been up until 3am finishing an ad. He's been back at the company for eight weeks. Apple lost $1 billion that year. Three months earlier, WIRED put Apple's logo on its cover, wrapped in barbed wire, with the word "Pray." He starts by saying what he's found since coming back. He couldn't figure out Apple's own product line. He spent weeks trying to understand which model was which and how they fit together. He talked to customers. They couldn't figure it out either. He cut 70% of the product roadmap. People whose projects were canceled were, in his words, "three feet off the ground with excitement" because, for the first time in years, someone told them where the company was going. Then he says something about marketing that changed how every tech company thinks about advertising. He says Nike sells a commodity. They sell shoes. But when you think of Nike, you feel something different than a shoe company. Nike never talks about their products in ads. Never tells you why their air soles are better than Reebok's. "They honor great athletes. And they honor great athletics. That's who they are." He compares it to the dairy industry spending 20 years trying to convince people milk was good for them, failing, and then running "Got Milk," which doesn't even mention the product. Focuses on its absence. He says Apple spends a fortune on advertising. "You'd never know it." Then he fires the ad agency. Not just fires them. Apple was running a competition with 23 agencies. He scrapped the whole thing and hired Chiat/Day, the agency he'd worked with a decade earlier on the 1984 Macintosh commercial that advertising professionals voted the best ad ever made. The question they asked themselves: "Our customers want to know who is Apple and what is it that we stand for?" His answer: "Apple at its core, its core value, is that we believe that people with passion can change the world for the better. And that those people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world are the ones that actually do." Then he plays the ad. In this room. To Apple employees. For the first time. "Here's to the crazy ones. The misfits. The rebels. The troublemakers." He says almost none of these people had ever appeared in an advertisement before. He personally obtained Yoko Ono's permission to use John Lennon. He says the estates and living subjects agreed because of their feelings toward Apple. "I don't think there is another company on Earth that could have done this campaign." The ad broke that Sunday during the network premiere of Toy Story on ABC. Two 60-second spots. Newspaper ads in the Wall Street Journal, New York Times, and USA Today. Billboards in major cities. Buses in five cities featuring Rosa Parks. Painted walls. The whole thing. Apple's stock was around $0.10 split-adjusted when this meeting happened. The company is worth $3.68 trillion today. Think Different ran for five years. Every product that came after, the iMac, iPod, iPhone, iPad, was built on the identity this campaign established by a guy who'd been back at the company for eight weeks and finished the ad at three in the morning. Video: Steve Jobs internal staff meeting at Apple, September 1997. This is the first time the Think Different campaign has been shown to employees. Jobs had been back at Apple for eight weeks. Footage leaked from an internal recording.

@US_Stormwatch This is a pretty sad looking graph. ☹️

my wife had the same thought last week and I told her she basically only understood jobs that were in Richard Scarry's busy town

Ireland’s population chart remains a wild one to look at. The country has still not recovered from the Great Famine (1845-52).

@CameronCorduroy I had a $600,000 over 5 years NSF Physics grant terminated last year because our grant mentioned "polarization" which was included in the banned terms list. We were discussing the polarization of light. We never got the grant reinstated.

@US_Stormwatch wow, that's incredible and not in a good way. Not looking great for any future snow either, I assume.

The Sierra Nevada and Southern Cascades in California just saw their fastest snowpack melt from late Feb to early March in recorded history. Tahoe City Cross station lost 63 inches of snow depth in 13 days. Fallen Leaf Lake (South Lake Tahoe) went from 119% of normal snowpack on Feb 20 to 0% today. The entire snowpack there is gone.

Luc Mehl spent months waiting for the right moment to study and play with candle ice. The Anchorage based ice rescue instructor visited the lake repeatedly to track how solid ice weakens into dangerous candle ice. 📹 lucmehl/IG

FRODO: I wish it need not have happened in my time GANDALF: so do all who live to see such times. but the Dow is over 50,000!

California has had almost a month of no precipitation. Hoping the upcoming storms in next week can help build some snowpack.

@ByIanJames @Weather_West @seangreene89 @datagraphics Here is my interactive version for California: engaging-data.com/california-sno…

Record warmth across much of the West this winter has left the Sierra Nevada and the Rocky Mountains with very little snow. “That is the classic global warming mountain snowpack signature.” @Weather_West Graphics by @seangreene89 @datagraphics latimes.com/environment/st…

Tesla didn't remove the Robotaxi 'safety monitor' – it just moved them to a trailing car electrek.co/2026/01/22/tes… by @fredlambert

Breaking News: The EPA will stop considering lives saved when setting pollution limits and instead calculate only the cost to businesses. nyti.ms/45RcBNE

Jan 2, the day after the abundant rains, there was a lot of "moisture magic" in Anza-Borrego Desert (Photo: Sicco Rood).

A back-to-work cartoon for @newscientist

Humans have emitted 2750 gigatons of CO2 since the industrial revolution from burning fossil fuels and land use change. To put this in perspective, this is more than the (dry) mass of all living things on earth and everything humans have ever built combined:

not surprising from this administration but still profoundly terrible