It started with three questions about a chart. Diving into candle review ratings turns into a case for the “don’t smooth a smoother” rule.

A recent paper used DNA matching to support using a log function for dog-age to human-age conversions, but I’m not so sure the data supports it.

Remaking a puzzling bar-mekko chart in several forms. When width and height both encode data values, so must area.

A deeper dive into 93,000 insurance customer rate changes shared an analysis by The Markup. Making sense of suspicious residuals.

I’ve never found chord diagrams very valuable, but I’m eager to learn where they are useful. Maybe I just need the right data.

I’ve been doing crossword puzzles on my iPad over breakfast (usually oatmeal) for the past few years. Here are some views of the varying daily difficulties of New York Times crosswords.