Nathan Yau

This is issue No. 400 of the Process . Four hundred. It only took me eight years. I'm Nathan Yau. This week, we rewind to the beginning of FlowingData and the Process newsletter to see where we might be headed.

For sheets.works, Akash Wadhwani visualized the mapping efforts of volunteers after an earthquake in Turkey in 2023. Emergency workers use publicly available maps, but the map was sparse when the disaster occurred. So thousands of volunteers quickly started drawing to fill in the empty space.

To augment its network of license plate readers, surveillance company Flock drew up plans to partner with dashcam company Nexar and use Uber and Lyft drivers to passively collect data.

A total eclipse path is passing through Europe this week. The New York Times has the maps and the weather forecasts for the occasion

The last total solar eclipse over Europe was in 1999. One will be visible on Wednesday. For Reuters, Adrián Blanco Ramos mapped where tomorrow's path will be and historical context with where previous paths were.

For the European Correspondent, Toon Vos counted the color of all the couches in IKEA catalogs from 1960 through 2021. The above shows the most common color over the years, and things are looking pretty neutral these days.

Speaking of IKEA, the IKEA complexity index by Greg Technology is a catalog of 20,000 products ranked by how long they take to build . When you get a PAX corner wardrobe, prepare for a manual in 16 parts and a 10 and a half hour build time. In contrast, a desk lamp will set you back only a few minutes.

In the early 1900s, Henry Gannett cataloged the origins of city names in the United States. For the Wall Street Journal, Carl Churchill made a searchable map to see

Multiple bots exploited a vulnerability in OpenAI's security system to gain internet access. Then the bots unwittingly went rogue and attacked Hugging Face's production infrastructure. Eric Wallace and Michael Dalton for OpenAI explained the incident in a talk:

most commonly used emojis and how it changes by generation