August 16, 2017 at 02:16AM

Today I Learned: 1) So far this year, there have only been five reported cases of guinea worm. That's down from just over a thousand cases worldwide in 2011, and several million each year in the 1980s. We're really, really close to wiping this one out! 2) When I need a color palette (usually for graphing data), I go to colorbrewer2.org. It has a nice selection of pre-screened color palettes for 3-12 color classes, with options to use only colorblind, print-friendly, and photocopy-safe color schemes. It's designed for maps, but I find it works well for other kinds of data presentation. Today I learned about two other similar services, both of which have far better names than colorbrewer. First is coolors.co*, which wins for best presentation -- it has a very slick interface for quickly iterating through a bunch of colors, picking the ones you like, and filling in the rest. It's better for exploring color palettes than for finding optimal ones, though -- they don't seem especially well-optimized comapred to colorbrewer's. The other site is i-love-hue.com, which easily wins for best name. It does something functionally similar to both of the others, but is algorithmic (unlike colorbrewer) and is pretty transparent about its clustering algorithm (unlike coolors). It's worth taking a couple of minutes to check out those sites, if just to see how they handle presentation differently. * Not to be confused with coolors.com, which redirects to a Spanish-language car dealership page. 3) ...about this delightful set of 23 personality-probing questions: http://ift.tt/1GXeHqA