Ever wondered what a network of twin cities around the world would look like? I grabbed some data from #Wikidata a while ago, and thought #Experimental day 5 of the #30DayChartChallenge was a good excuse to share this half-finished gizmo with the world. Enjoy! bothness.github.io/twin-cities/ 1/3

Watch out for some exciting charts from the ONS #DataViz team this month as part of the #30DayChartChallenge. I'll try to add them all to this 🧵 1/n

Crazy crazy day. My first Cloudflare blog, and it's a big one. We're rebuilding WordPress as if it were built today. It's end to end TypeScript, works as an Astro plugin, and has secure plugin execution in dynamic workers. It's called EmDash, try it now ⤵️ blog.cloudflare.com/emdash-wordp...

🛢️ Record-breaking oil Brent crude hit $118 a barrel on Tuesday, on course for its biggest monthly gain in data going back to 1988 Who would've predicted this... FT www.ft.com/content/b2c8...

The big epistemological problem economics has, which is a problem faced by few other sciences, is that nowhere near as many people are interested in paying a geologist big money to get an incorrect and self-serving answer to a question about rocks.

Published today! My take on why it’s so difficult for governments to make immigration policies that people trust What Is Immigration Policy For? amzn.eu/d/03bM5fDM

🎉 ggauto is now on CRAN 🎉 An #RStats package that selects better chart types, and provides more accessible styling for #ggplot2 plots 📊 Blog post explaining why I made it and how it works: nrennie.rbind.io/blog/introdu... #DataViz

All eight #SmallProphets covers are available as a pack of postcards. Buy here: colemandesign.co.uk/shop and love them. Forever. 9/

This is phenomenal work. Brings back memories of reading John Wyndham novels as a kid. bsky.app/profile/cole...

I always think I should make a thread of it, but I can't find the time, so here it is, one of the projects I'm most proud of: we developed the dataviz standards for the Quebec government's website. 📊

In spite of all the talk of Claude Code and Codex meaning the end of humans writing code, software job adverts are actually going up, according to @jburnmurdoch.ft.com's crunching of millions of job ads for this week's The AI Shift www.ft.com/content/7325...

In light of the fallout from the LiteLLM supply chain attack, I just learned that you can exclude newly published package versions when installing with uv using exclude-newer.

NEW: Just weeks ago, the shadow fleet was on the run amid a crackdown on the illicit oil trade. But the Iran conflict has offered the ghost vessels a lifeline. We take a deep dive into their clandestine operations. ig.ft.com/shadow-fleet/

🇺🇸 Traders placed $580mn oil bet ahead of Donald Trump’s social media post on Iran talks “My gut from watching markets for the last 25 years is this is really abnormal,” said a portfolio manager FT www.ft.com/content/1171...

Statistical Rethinking 2026 is done: 20 new lectures emphasizing logical and critical statistical workflow, from basics of probability theory to causal inference to reliable computation to sensitivity. It's all free, made just for you. Lecture list and links: github.com/rmcelreath/s...

Also available on my website as a neat interactive 😎✌️

Amazing cherry blossom in my neighbourhood at this time of year.

Old and new climbing shoes. Unparallel Up Rise VCS on the right (old) and Scarpa Vapor V on the left (new). Not as different as you might expect. The Vapor V has a slightly more aggressive toe (which is what I switched for) but otherwise they feel quite similar out of the box.

The Bank of England’s hawkish pivot in language has rattled markets. @financialtimes.com analysis shows it was the largest shift of any major central bank, raising questions about whether it misjudged its tone Lots of number crunching from me and @joelsuss.ft.com here: as.ft.com/r/bd03a4a9-e...

I think I come down to the "you put your name on it, you vouch for it unconditionally, every word, regardless of LLM use" side of the debate rather than the "you should explicitly say if you used an LLM always" side. Too much potential to use the machine to dodge accountability

Suffragette-defaced Edward VII penny with subversive political graffiti for the UK women's suffrage cause - 20thC, via British Museum #WomensArt #WomensHistoryMonth

As a profession, we should collectively agree that parquet is the default standard for exchanging tabular data from now on. bsky.app/profile/stat...

A fun fact, uncovered while preparing for my next Gresham Lecture (23rd March): "Whereas the size ratio of humans to the Great Pyramid of Giza is 1: 69 million, the ratio is 1: 5800 million for ants and in relation to the largest of their mounds." Go ants!

From a study by Anthropic itself: “Productivity benefits may come at the cost of skills necessary to validate AI-written code”: www.anthropic.com/research/AI-...

I'm a part of ParaCliffHangers. It is a group that makes rock climbing accessible to disabled athletes (and future athletes!) We're hosting Owl Night at Pacific Pipe on Saturday 3/14. The gym will be open until 3am. Get tickets paracliffhangers.rallybound.org

This was such an amazing project to work on, it really pushed me to the limits of what I can do with mapping tools

I did something stupid last week. I publicly posted my data and code... statsepi.substack.com/p/open-scien...

BTW, this is a failure of tech leadership. Having a dashboard as the only interface into data should be considered an incomplete data product.

Hey R and Python folks at #NICAR26 looking at coding agents for data analysis: Databot from Posit (formerly RStudio) is another option. It's an assistant for the Positron IDE specifically designed for data work. See a demo from September's Posit conference: youtu.be/Ve7cNChzq5Q?... #RStats #Python

New 📝📈: From next year, large employers in the EU will have to report on their gender pay gap. But will this help to close it? I looked at the evidence from countries -- including the UK -- that have already tried it. www.ft.com/content/9ffe...

If you use Python and are curious about learning Polars, you might like the workshop @eadehemingway.bsky.social and I delivered at #NICAR26: Analyzing election data with Polars and Python. The repo contains a detailed walkthrough of everything we covered in the session. github.com/olihawkins/n...

We are pleased to release `uk_address_matcher`, a free Python package for address matching and geocoding, developed by Tom Hepworth and me. The package has several aims: simplicity, speed and accuracy.

Rock climbers Lucy Smith and Pauline Rankin of the Ladies’ Scottish Climbing Club, 1908, Salisbury Crags, Scotland #WomensArt Welcome to #WomensHistoryMonth

When D3 was released in February 2011, it transformed how we build data visualizations for the web and ushered in a new age of unbridled creativity in information design, data journalism, and beyond. Today, it remains the backbone of modern, interactive data viz. Happy 15th birthday, D3 🎂 d3js.org

Choose your fighter. I am “Don’t trust NSE”! bsky.app/profile/ding...

This is a terrific thread which really demonstrates the value of statistical reasoning. bsky.app/profile/pwgt...

Just saw Leah W. share this on LinkedIn - great round-up of AI contribution policies! By @melissawm.bsky.social github.com/melissawm/op...

1/8 So you're excited to go to the @ire.org 2026 NICAR data journalism conference! And you want to follow all the speakers online. This tutorial will show you how do this quickly with #Rstats and @bsky.app. schedules.ire.org/nicar-2026/#/

New: Drones are redrawing the map of war in Ukraine. Relentless surveillance has pushed the battlefield 20km beyond the front, in both directions. Supplies arrive by drone; the wounded leave by robot. This is the “kill zone” — and the future of warfare. 👉 ft.com/kill-zone

Have seen two R threads this week debating language features: the first on base R dataframes vs tibbles; the second on the magrittr pipe vs the native pipe.

My friend Ivan recently told me about this Python package, and if you need to routinely fetch data from a flaky API, it's a gift. pypi.org/project/retry/

Clinical Researchers: I am here to warn you about a meteor hurling towards us. That meteor represents increasing scrutiny of clinical research; and in particular how we approach data collection, analysis, interpretation and reporting. Prepare now, or face the consequences. 1/

love a bit of continvouclous morging

Display an album that was important to you when you were nineteen. bsky.app/profile/rsim...

Just discovered a 23GB Slack cache on my machine!

Short musings on "cognitive debt" - I'm seeing this in my own work, where excessive unreviewed AI-generated code leads me to lose a firm mental model of what I've built, which then makes it harder to confidently make future decisions simonwillison.net/2026/Feb/15/...

A special FT magazine issue all about maps is out today, w great pieces by @okr.bsky.social and @theboysmithy.ft.com, plus maps by me on how glacial melt is redrawing Alpine borders, the battle to redraw America and more Read it online here (though best enjoyed in print!) www.ft.com/content/efab...