Projects

Interactive projects built from real public data.

Every one of these runs. The numbers are live where the pipeline allows it, and accurate everywhere.

The Grid

Every high-voltage transmission line in the lower 48, the 64 balancing authorities across it, and the customers who lost power, hour by hour from September 2024 to September 2026. 93,995 segments, 17,520 hours.

live at thegrid.dustincoledata.com

How We Met

Two Stanford surveys asked 6,204 Americans how they met their partner, 1934 to 2022. Meeting online passed school in 2000–04, family, work and bars in 2005–09, and friends in 2015–19.

live at howwemet.dustincoledata.com

Record Days

220 English Wikipedia pages, each on the single biggest traffic day it has ever had. Of the 179 whose traffic came back to normal, the middle one took 28 days. 35 never came back.

live at recorddays.dustincoledata.com

How Tall

At five the average boy in the tallest country is 29.6 cm taller than in the shortest, and at nineteen 23.7 cm. A crowd of 160 countries you can age from five to nineteen, and your own country against the world.

live at howtall.dustincoledata.com

What America Eats

Chicken passed beef in 1992, 2003 or 2010, depending on which of the three weights USDA publishes you read. Thirteen findings from 113 years of per-person food supply, every figure recomputed from one file.

live at eats.dustincoledata.com

The Year of Everything

Forty percent fewer American babies are born on Christmas Day than on an ordinary day, the emptiest date of the year. The deadliest month used to be July; now it is January, and the reversal was the babies.

live at year.dustincoledata.com

What the Government Buys

Of the $5.3 trillion the federal government awarded in FY2025, 5.6% bought goods rather than labour. All 645 product categories are here, and it spent more on drugs than on guided missiles.

live at buys.dustincoledata.com

Asked

One month of Claude conversations sorted onto the US government's catalog of 18,796 work tasks. In the chat product, the biggest job is looking things up, not writing code.

live at asked.dustincoledata.com

Cause of Death

One row per year of age, birth to 100, each its own hundred people. Out of every 100 Americans who died at that age, this is what they died of, with the real death rate beside each row.

live at kills.dustincoledata.com

One Day in America

7,669 real diary days from the American Time Use Survey, each on its own clock. In the 3 a.m. hour the most common single activity holds 96.5% of the country; at noon it holds 25.8%.

live at oneday.dustincoledata.com

Deep Time

The whole history of Earth on one scroll, at true scale and no other. 40,000 years to the pixel, which is why everything humans built or remembered ends up three tenths of one pixel.

live at deeptime.dustincoledata.com

Namesake

Type any name and watch its 145-year life story rise, crest, and fall. Built from every US Social Security birth record, 1880 to 2024.

live at namesake.dustincoledata.com

Cascade

One small thing, enormous consequences — three ways the world does it.

live at cascade.dustincoledata.com

Meaning Map

893 US occupations placed by what the job actually involves, not by the industry that happens to employ it. Similar work lands close together. Click any point to see the jobs most like it.

live at meaningmap.dustincoledata.com

Where America Moves

Click any of the 31 biggest US metros and watch who moves in, who moves out, the net, and what those movers earn. Built from IRS county-to-county tax records.

live at moves.dustincoledata.com

Time Takes All

Twelve thousand years of things people built, 236 of them, each a real photograph of a real object. Scroll and the next one falls, hits the ground and breaks apart.

live at timetakesall.dustincoledata.com

The Real Price of Everything

Strip out inflation and everyday prices split: some things got cheaper, the essentials exploded. Scroll to watch nine of them diverge on one real-price axis, then guess where each lands.

live at realprice.dustincoledata.com

Statistical Illusions

Nobody has to lie for a number to mislead you. Four illusions, and you manufacture each one yourself out of numbers you were shown in full before you touched them.

live at illusions.dustincoledata.com

Climate Fingerprint

Every city has a shape to its year. Thirty years of daily temperature and rainfall as one radial poster, thirty cities side by side. Type any city and it computes in your browser.

live at climatefingerprint.dustincoledata.com

By Example

Drop labeled points. Watch a machine find the rule.

live at byexample.dustincoledata.com

Redraft

A fantasy football card game about the thing every manager gets wrong: it isn't which player, it's which year. A season you spend is gone from every other pick on the board.

live at redraft.dustincoledata.com

Why Do They

Google finishes the sentence for you. Two blooms of real autocomplete suggestions, one for men and one for women, read side by side. Search-suggestion patterns, not a poll.

live at whydothey.dustincoledata.com

Half the Shelf

143 classic cocktails call for 177 different ingredients, and 92 of them appear in exactly one drink and nothing else. Buy a thirty-bottle shelf and watch it make 28 of the 143.

live at halftheshelf.dustincoledata.com