Hello and welcome to another edition of The Crunch!
In this week’s newsletter we have charts on … how common museum heists actually are, 65,000 years of Indigenous oral history on one timeline, the staggering rise of political protests under Donald Trump, and a look at how statistics can predict the release date of iconic pop tune Mambo No 5.
But first … bird migration is changing. What does this reveal about our planet?
If you thought we would stop talking about birds even though the bird of the year competition is over, you were sorely mistaken.
Our colleagues in the UK produced this beautiful visual feature about bird migration patterns and how they are changing, which I can’t recommend enough.
It combines bird GPS data, illustrations and excellent maps to show how migration patterns are changing in response to a changing climate and other changes to the birds’ environment.
Four charts from the fortnight
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1. “No Kings Day” anti-Trump protests likely the largest single-day political protest ever
G Elliott Morris, writing at Strength in Numbers, has partnered with the the Xylom to produce crowdsourced estimates of participant numbers at the No Kings protests.
According to their estimates, the No Kings protests are likely to be the largest single-day political protest ever, with a median estimate of 5 million people taking part.
Elliott has also charted the cumulative number of protests, showing Trump’s second term is facing far more popular opposition than the first:
Read more here.
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2. 65,000 years of Indigenous oral history in one feature
This is an absolutely amazing piece of work – the (Australian) ABC spent five years working on this interactive feature that brings together First Nations oral histories spanning 65,000 years.
The centrepiece of the feature is a timeline which starts 65,000 years ago and puts Australian First Nations cultural knowledge into context with defining events across different eras, until we reach the present. You can also explore the same stories and histories either mapped to relevant places, or grouped together by topics.
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3. It’s a heistogram chart*
One of the biggest stories of the week was the daring Louvre jewel heist. The Economist quickly put together this chart and story which shows that museum heists are surprisingly common:
According to the Economist, there have been at least 40 cases of theft from French museums between 1990 and 2022!
*I (Nick) stole this joke from Danny Dougherty on Bluesky. Sorry Danny, it was too good.
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4. Overdose deaths rising in some regions even as US sees national decline
Overdose deaths continued to rise in some communities across the US even as they declined nationally in 2024, according to an exclusive data analysis by the Guardian which found wide geographical disparities in fatalities linked to the public health crisis.
While overdoses declined nationally between August 2023 and December 2024 (the most recent month when county-level data is available), they increased by as much as 120% during that time in some US counties.
Bookmarks
Protein powders and shakes in the US contain high levels of lead
The real height at which a hill becomes a mountain, according to data
Off the Charts
Can you predict when Lou Bega’s greatest hit, Mambo No 5, was released based on the names of all the women mentioned in the song?
Thanks to data enthusiast Damie Pak, it turns out the answer to this is yes, yes you can!
I’m not going to lie, the actual statistics involved here are beyond me, but essentially Damie has used the distribution of name popularity for all of the women in the song, adjusted them for the lag time from birth to adulthood, and then put it all together using STATISTICS to create this distribution with a centralised point at 1999, which is the actual release year:
I am actually amazed it lined up so well.
The runner-up for Off the Charts this week was a graphic from USA Today, which compares the weight of prize-winning giant pumpkins to various things. Did you know a prize-winning pumpkin can weigh as much as a male adult walrus? Well now you do.
Incidentally the whole “comparing things to amounts of other things” to show weight, distance, number of people etc is such a regular media trope that I have long dreamed of making a system which gives you the units of Things in Other Things in a Nice Graphic.
For example, you could put in an amount of liquid and get a automatic visualisation showing how many Olympic swimming pools’ worth of water it is. If you build this, let me know and I will shout your praises to the heavens (put you in an amazing email newsletter about datavis).
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