Source: U.S. Census Bureau, 2024 American Community Survey (ACS), via USAFacts. Rates represent the number of people aged 15 and older who reported getting married or divorced within the previous 12 months, expressed per 1,000 people in that population. Data is for 2024, by state of residence

• Every manned and unmanned Project Mercury flights, 1959 to 1963
• Source: NASA Project Mercury - https://www.nasa.gov/project-mercury/
• Tools: SVG and JS
• Size: 1440x8700
• Horizontal axis: Time in flight (Log scale)
• Larger circle: Manned missions
• Interactive version for better viewing: https://sand7888.github.io/project-mercury/

More detailed interactive version

I saw this post from months ago about acid rain. Everyone who answered in the comments pretty much told the same story and the data seems to back them up.

Sulfur dioxide helps cause acid rain. When sulfur dioxide (SO₂) and sulfate aerosols in the air dissolve into cloud droplets and precipitates onto the soil, you get what's called wet sulfate deposition. Wet sulfate deposition (a primary indicator of acid rain) is the transfer of sulfate from the atmosphere to Earth's surface through rain, snow, or fog.

Power plants covered by EPA’s programs dramatically reduced their emissions while maintaining nearly the same electricity output. Pollution controls and a shift toward lower-emitting fuels helped drive the change.

In the last ~20 years, wet sulfur deposition decreased by 73%. While the acid rain issue is seeing progress, ecosystems are still recovering.

EPA’s explanation

Record breaking meaning the then-largest capacity rating

23 countries have a bigger national debt than GDP.

Just 16 years ago (2010), only 5 countries had a +100% debt to GDP ratio.

I wonder who benefits of this trends?

Unweighted averages by industry, based on LinkedIn data through June 2026.

Sources: World Economic Forum, Global Gender Gap Report 2026

Sources: International Energy Agency, Statistical Review of World Energy

Made using PowerPoint

I’ve been going through the pictures in a lot of old books lately, and the charts and diagrams are some of my favorite finds. Conventions at this time were unsettled, so people were trying all kinds of things. This one turns the US economy of 1882 into two stacked towers.

The left tower is spending inside the US. The right tower is foreign trade, with each block split into exports on the left and imports on the right. Cotton, for example, is $225M going out and only $2M coming in.

Does the chart work? Well, it’s not the easiest to parse as the perspective throws things off, and there’s no scale. But I do love that someone in the 1880s looked at these numbers and thought they should look like a monument.