Tiger Woods struggled off the tee yesterday at the Masters, a key reason he’s tied for 29th in a tournament in which many picked him as the favorite. Tiger’s driving accuracy has also contributed to the general decline in his performance since its peak in 2000. He’s looked better this season, t... Read more →

Nice before/after map and story from USA Today about how suburban growth has slowed:  Five years ago, millions of Americans were streaming to new homes on the fringes of metropolitan areas. Then housing prices collapsed and the Great Recession slowed growth to levels not seen since the Great ... Read more →

From The Washington Post:  The Bureau of Labor Statistics has a fascinating new report out that compares consumer budgets in the United States, Canada, Britain and Japan. As the graph below shows, there’s a huge amount of variation in what people in each country are spending their money on:  Read more →

Does Washington, D.C., have more cops than other cities? That’s the question I asked myself the other day after watching a patrol car drive down our quiet, residential street. I see patrol cars everywhere — much more often than I did previous cities like Houston and Austin. There’s a reason: Am... Read more →

Hint.fm visualizes surface wind from the National Digital Forecast Database:  View larger, live version and archive. H/T @blettenberger Read more →

PGA Tour players hit the ball 30 years farther off the tee now than they did three decades ago, according to the tour’s statistics. That’s most likely because their equipment, fitness and coaching have improved dramatically over that time.  These charts show a year-by-year average of all 980 pl... Read more →

Inspired by Tiger Woods’ victory on Sunday, I decided to chart some basic statistics from his 17-year PGA Tour career, including this one on how often he finished in the top 10 at tournaments:  See all the charts. The PGA site has tons of year-by-year data for each PGA tour player since 1980, ... Read more →

The New York Times has posted a sad and troubling story about the horse racing industry: [A]n investigation by The New York Times has found that industry practices continue to put animal and rider at risk. A computer analysis of data from more than 150,000 races, along with injury reports, drug... Read more →

Following Nathan Yau’s excellent tutorial for creating heat maps with time series data (he used vehicle accidents by day for a year), I visualized 3,559 of my tweets back to March 2009. These maps, created with a modified R script from the tutorial, show how often I sent tweets (both personal a... Read more →

Asians were the fastest-growing racial group in the United States from 2000-2010, growing by nearly 30 percent in most states, according to a new report by the U.S. Census Bureau released today:  The population that identified as Asian, either alone or in combination with one or more other rac... Read more →