Gregor Aisch

Information+ 2027 is coming to Milan! Join us on 7-9 June 2027 at Politecnico di Milano for three days of presentations, talks, workshops and exhibition pieces around information design and data visualization. The website is now live: informationplusconference.com #InformationPlus2027

Just finished reading "A Deepness in the Sky" only to find out that the author, Vernor Vinge, was also one of the greatest visionaries in the field of AI. Here are some statements from his 1993 (!) paper. So spot on.

EXCLUSIVE: 404 Media placed a tracking device in a shipment of rare books to see which AI company was buying it, and found an Amazon facility where Amazon scans and destroys books. @evystadium.bsky.social has more. Investigation by @emanuelmaiberg.bsky.social here: www.404media.co/we-tracked-a...

Information designers have been hacking at recipe designs for ever and it took an engineer to come up with this design 20+ years ago.

IKEA complexity index uses a simple formula of steps in the assembly multiplied by number of parts: > ikea.greg.technology Get yourself a PAX Corner Wardrobe for $1,755 and the manual split into 16 parts for ten and a half hours of assembly time come free.

New estimate of Elon Musk’s death toll just dropped www.thelancet.com/journals/lan...

Heute ist auch wieder die #Hitze 🥵 ein Thema. Nicht nur steigen die Temperaturen 🌡️ auf bis zu knapp 40°C, gleichzeitig ist es auch noch enorm schwül bei Taupunkten 💦 um 20°C. Dementsprechend laufen #Warnungen vor starker (hellviolett) oder extremer (dunkelviolett) #Wärmebelastung im ganzen Land.

Die #Feuer in Frankreich gehen weiter: jetzt mussten schon über 250.000 Menschen evakuiert werden. Hier eine Karte der Lage am Sonntagmorgen und mein Foto von der Fahrt nach Bordeaux am Freitagabend. Warum die #Erderhitzung die Brandgefahr eskalieren lässt: scilogs.spektrum.de/klimalounge/...

Die US-Regierung hat beschlossen, die Visadauer für internationale Journalist*innen auf 240 Tage zu verkürzen. Das erhöht nicht nur bürokratische Hürden, sondern führt zu extremer Unsicherheit: Das Heimatschutzministerium kann Anträge willkürlich ablehnen.

"98% of readers prefer imperfect-yet-authentic human writing; most will stop reading, block you, and downvote you if they suspect AI" ☝🏻 Report: How developers react to AI-scented blog posts writethatblog.substack.com/p/dev-reacti... Bookmarked.

In Frankreich steht die dritte große #Hitzewelle dieses Jahres an. Schon wieder drohen über mehrere Tage Temperaturen um oder über 40 Grad. Es ist hier ein bisher historischer Sommer. #canicule kachelmannwetter.com/de/modellkar... /LD

Die Spitzen von CDU, CSU und SPD wollen das Informationsfreiheitsgesetz abschaffen – einen Grundpfeiler unserer Demokratie. 2025 haben wir den Angriff der Union aufs IFG gemeinsam abgewehrt. Das schaffen wir auch heute – unterzeichnet jetzt unsere WeAct-Petition! weact.campact.de/petitions/sp...

NEU: Die Bundesregierung plant den schwersten Angriff auf staatliche Transparenz in der Geschichte der Bundesrepublik. Das IFG soll abgeschafft werden. Das ist nicht nur ein Bruch des Koalitionsvertrags, sondern beschädigt Presse- und Informationsfreiheit massiv. fragdenstaat.de/artikel/poli...

JUST POSTED PART II A NYT ANALYSIS OF CONFLICTS OF INTERESTS EVIDENT IN TRUMP's $2.2 BILLION HAUL (free link) www.nytimes.com/2026/07/01/u...

All visualizations (except the map) in this project where built with #SveltePlot by @driven-by-data.net. Very nice to work with, offering quite some flexibility in terms of custom marks and responsive adaptation.

Both totally unnecessary and extremely funny that the Guardian has an interactive graphic for you to change the color of the US flag's blue to the color of the Reflecting Pool from 8 to 19 June and counting

"but where are all the bluesky instances?" i've heard this so many times that i wrote an explainer

Not believing in science really comes back to bite you, doesn’t it?

www.nytimes.com/interactive/...

Researchers have created the first high-resolution global map of the extent of one of Earth’s largest—and least visible—living networks

✨ New project! ✨ Mapping the hidden infrastructure which connects to >70% of plants, extends root networks up to 100x and reaches a length of 1 BILLION times the distance to the sun 🤯 Arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi! Learn all about them here: a-hidden-infrastructure.spun.earth w/ @spun.earth 💚

Here’s a really nice (and sad) story by my colleagues Katherine Chui and Catrin Einhorn. Truly a great multimedia piece to enjoy with sound on tinyurl.com/5dmu42zs gift link 🐳 🎧

the single biggest criticism svelte has received over the years is 'you can't have multiple components in a file'. so we fixed it! by making them unnecessary. with declaration tags (svelte.dev/docs/svelte/...), snippets/each blocks/etc can have their own state: svelte.dev/playground/a...

demoscapes.org is a visual atlas of demographic surfaces hosted at @mpidr.bsky.social. It is also my passion project growing out of my 2016 human mortality database explorer. Did you publish something containing Lexis surfaces? Consider reaching out and having your work featured on the site.

Wer sich in den vergangenen Wochen etwas mit der NSDAP-Mitgliederkartei beschäftigt hat, musste irritiert sein vom Stunt von Correctiv und Katapult. Viel zu spät haben die Medienhäuser begriffen, was sie da am Dienstag rausgehauen haben. Nun mussten sie ihre Veröffentlichungen zurückziehen. 1/12

Hey, I wonder how you're all dealing with agent-generated code! Do you keep a log of prompts? Do you commit after each prompt? For a recent project, I set up this Claude hook for exactly this (log prompt + commit w/ summary message) gist.github.com/gka/ce1d8c5a... Are there any best practices?

omfg - the first link in this week‘s index: fraude.design

The FT @financialtimes.com is hiring a new data journalist to join our US data and visuals team in New York. Great job, great team, great place to work. Apply here 👉 job-boards.eu.greenhouse.io/financialtim...

A reminder of where we stand. Source: ed-hawkins.github.io/climate-visu...

Experimental: PickyPalette — a color picker that shows you the weight of each color as you build your palette. See how much space a color claims. Every color fights for its territory in the color space. So you know exactly how dominant or subtle your pick is. WDYT? meodai.github.io/color-palett...

A new search engine that allows users to search Nazi party records in order to find out whether their ancestors were card-carrying members has been accessed millions of times since it was launched earlier this month. https://cnn.it/4tZZBiF

Can we please acknowledge that whatever AI #Apple is using for categorizing shopping list items in the Reminders app is the dumbest piece of software that has ever existed? How f$#^& hard can this be?

“.. Inflation was coming down in the United States — and then Trump’s tariffs happened.” @heathmayo.bsky.social

“The Weight of Rain” is back! Video of my 2014 talk disappeared for years, but Visualized kindly pulled a copy from their archives: style.org/visualized/

I wanted a way to explore Unicode by visual similarity, not just by name or codepoint, so I built Charcutrie. It lets you browse characters that look alike, search across scripts and symbols, and even sketch a shape to find matching glyphs. (pretty badly for now :D) charcuterie.elastiq.ch#U+221E

Home.

And another big project today: We've analyzed millions of member records from the Nazi-Party NSDAP and made them searchable and browsable. 🎁 www.zeit.de/wissen/2026-...

If all goes to plan, tomorrow night, a spacecraft with four astronauts will start its mission toward the moon - the first time since 1972. To illustrate the journey, we set out with a simple yet crazy idea: Let’s show this journey to scale. Here's the result: www.zeit.de/wissen/2026-...

One of the best articles I read this week! Bravo @polgreen.bsky.social It’s Not Trump. It’s America. www.nytimes.com/2026/03/26/o...

I wrote about the price of the illusion of American omnipotence that’s driving this reckless war in Iran, and so much else. www.nytimes.com/2026/03/26/o...

Line charts seem straightforward, but there's a lot one can do to improve them! For presidential approval ratings, colors, averages, and annotations can make all the difference. 🎨 🪧 📈 Hear from Datawrapper's co-founder and visual journalist @driven-by-data.net: www.datawrapper.de/blog/fix-my-...

A quick update to ziptbl.com: you can now open shared data directly in @datawrapper.de! The video shows the full flow: load data into Ziptable > share the link > create a 📊 in Datawrapper As always: the data stays off any servers until you send it to Datawrapper - it's just compressed in the url