Nathan Yau

The United States Geological Survey defines barren land as: “areas of bedrock, desert pavement, scarps, talus, slides, volcanic material, glacial

FlowingData

Natural diamonds require a lot of pressure and time, and then someone has to mine for them. Lab-grown diamonds can be produced to be nearly indistinguishable from the natural ones, minus the time and mining. For Works in Progress, Javid Lakha describes the process and

AI models are trained on data, and better data helps make better models. Likewise, it's hard to develop worthwhile models with bad data. So what happens when it grows more difficult for AI-based bots to scrape the web and more of the available data is generated via AI in the first place? For NYT's the Upshot, Aatish Bhatia imagines a

For The Washington Post, Anahad O'Connor and Aaron Steckelberg show the contrast between making unrefined avocado oil, which is more natural, and

Since weather and land availability vary across the country, so do the crops. This is the cropland geography of the United States.

This is one small bit in a Reuters piece by Mariano Zafra and Sudev Kiyada about highly flammable materials in buildings constructed in the 1980s . The

Hey, it's Nathan. This is The Process , the weekly newsletter for FlowingData members. Part me thinking out loud about working with data and part guidance on making better charts.

Every two years, since 2012 , the North American Cartographic Information Society publishes Atlas of Design . It's a collection of beautiful maps and the process behind each.

Here’s a fun interactive from NASA Landsat that lets you enter your name to see it spelled with satellite imagery. There are multiple images for each letter, so you get a new combination when…