Sophia Mersmann
@sophiamersmann.bsky.social
data viz engineer @ourworldindata.org
How will your country's demographics change this century? At Our World in Data, we built a tool to let you see for yourself. The UN's assumptions are the starting point. But then you can adjust the three drivers of change — births, deaths, and migration — to what you expect.
📢 We’re looking for a writer to join our team at Our World in Data! What we’re looking for is quite unique: someone who writes excellent narrative articles on large global problems, finds memorable framings to make hard ideas easier to understand, while being genuinely obsessed w/ technical details
We’re looking for a writer
We’re hiring a writer who can make the world’s largest problems understandable to our large Our World in Data audience.
ourworldindata.org
On any average day, 165,000 people die globally. That’s 60 million a year. What do they die from? 🔧📊 We built a new interactive tool that lets you answer this question, with data for every country. Globally, 75% of deaths are from non-communicable diseases (NCDs). Heart disease alone is 1 in 3.
🔧 Website upgrade: It’s now easier to see which countries make up world regions, such as “East Asia and Pacific”, in different datasets— Many of our charts, like the one here, show data grouped by world regions — such as “East Asia and Pacific” and “Europe and Central Asia”.
🔧 Website upgrade: You can now type to select a specific year or date in our interactive charts Many of our interactive charts feature long time series, and it can be difficult to select the exact year or date that you want to see data for.
Hey OWID fans! We’re looking into how to improve the time-lapse animation in our charts and would love your input. If you use the “Play” button on our charts: When do you use it, and what do you use it for? What does the animation help you understand? Thanks for helping us make OWID better 🫶🏻
🔧 New feature: you can now view two maps showing different years side by side! A useful way to look at change over time for an indicator is to view two maps showing different years side by side.
🔍 Introducing our new, more powerful search! → ourworldindata.org/search With such a rich publication—nearly 14,000 charts and 100s of articles on 120+ topics—it can be hard to find what matters to you. Now, finding what you’re looking for, or discovering something new, has never been easier.
Rachel McAdams and Regina George are completely different people in my mind
And we’re not even done yet! Some things are still cooking…. Stay tuned!
Our World in Data@ourworldindata.org · last yr.💡 Very excited to announce new features: better interactive maps! 🗺️ – Enhanced country/region selection with several sorting options and a bar chart preview – Selecting a country highlights it and shows its value on the map – Zooming to your selection brings up a 3D globe view 🌍
🏳️🌈 It’s lesbian visibility week! 🏳️⚧️ I edited a volume about queer, and specifically trans and lesbian, history and story telling. Despite the German title, most contributions are in English. You can read it for free (open access) or buy a print copy 💗 www.transcript-verlag.de/detail/index...
Hab ein Buch herausgegeben und hier könnt ihr es lesen (Open Access als pdf oder als Druck Ausgabe) www.transcript-verlag.de/detail/index...
Gaudi schön und gut aber wart ihr schon mal Darmstadt Hundertwasserhaus
For every best-practices engineer in a team there should be one yolo engineer to balance things outs
I don’t usually like story lines that feel too constructed but the narrator in du Maurier’s Rebecca ending up exactly where she started is 🤌 chef’s kiss
It just broke my heart a little that the first ‘question’ on this super important and very personal talk was just some guy mansplaining her. A Case for Feminism in Programming Languages by Felienne Hermans:
[SPLASH'24] Pacific - Onward! (Oct 23th)
YouTube video by ACM SIGPLAN
youtube.com
How could @ourworldindata.org maps be better? Do you experience any annoyances or pain points when you interact with our maps? Is there something you wish you could do that you currently can’t? What’s the next cool thing we could build on top of our maps? Any notes welcome! Thank you 🙏
GDP per capita
This data is adjusted for inflation and for differences in living costs between countries.
ourworldindata.org
If I were to pitch @gitbutler.com, I’d say it’s a Jujutsu-like workflow packaged as git client
Glaube nicht, dass die Illustrator*in Merz besonders mag?
Code formatting - Doesn’t get in the way - Real time saver - Nice and friendly Linting - Disrupts work - Barely helpful - Mean and annoying
Continuous list of things that would be better without touch screens: Push-to-walk button Stove Doorbell Kettle
Advertising for zero backlog at work while my personal reading list keeps growing and growing………
Does anyone know of a Figma plugin that draws ✨ beautiful arrows ✨ that auto-update when connected shapes are moved? I‘m thinking @tldraw.com quality arrows but in Figma
Starting the year right by rotating Grapher’s y-axis labels
The trickiest part of refactoring is deciding if the new code is *actually* better or if it just *feels* better because it’s now more familiar to you.
