The stories behind the data. Each article walks through a project I built — what I was trying to figure out, how I did it, and what the numbers actually said.
Seven climate models, sixteen cities, one question. Every model warms every city — and they disagree about the amount by nearly half as much again. For Delhi they span 0.03°C to 1.57°C.
One database sorts science journals into free and not free. I checked 348 of them against the registry that asks journals directly — and nearly half the ones labelled free-to-publish charge a fee.
China says it sent Germany $116 billion of goods in 2022. Germany says it got $208 billion. Same ships, same year — and across 2,600 country pairs the middle disagreement is 31%.
1,323 rooms in the world where internet companies meet to swap traffic. 93 of them have nobody in them at all — and the biggest one is not in Frankfurt, London or Amsterdam.
There are two ways to count who has clean water: one kind, one strict. The strict one is the goal the world set for 2030 — and for 62 countries and 2.21 billion people, nobody has worked it out at all.
Eight European grids, every hour of 2025. Germany’s published 63.38% hides a 59-point spread, four countries had their worst renewable week in the same January, and Italy never priced below zero — because its floor is exactly zero.
One week of Wikipedia pageviews across 18 countries and 14 languages. The median pair of countries shares 2.81% of what it reads, 60 of 91 language pairs share nothing at all, and none of India’s 140 most-read pages were on Hindi Wikipedia.
I opened the 2015 FIES microdata expecting the worst. The headline figures checked out — and food turns out to take 59.6% of income at the bottom and 21.4% at the top, falling at every step.
In January 2023 a kilo of onions cost ₱487.50 against ₱313.38 for pork. The WFP file that records it had been in this repo for a year unopened — and its first lesson is that 46 of its 62 foods only start in 2020.
The ₱32.8M "average" house price is one 2.5-billion-peso listing dragging 1,500 others. Divide by floor area and the 13× gap between cities becomes 2.9× — Cabanatuan costs more per square metre than Quezon City.
Two reconstructions of the same Philippine atmosphere sit 1.09°C apart on Manila’s mean and a factor of 1.9 apart on its warming rate. Averaging them would be a lie — so every trend here is a range. What they agree on: 8 of 9 cities set heat records since 2020.
17,312 MMDA traffic tweets, read carefully: Parañaque counted twice because of a broken letter, 55 rows geocoded to the middle of the ocean, and half of everything in one city. Also, lunch is the safest hour of the day.
957 storms entered Philippine waters across 45 satellite-era seasons — 66.2% of everything the busiest basin on Earth produced. Four are tied at 315 km/h. And February, the quietest month, still is not empty.
Multiply each name’s two count columns together and you recover the population the file was built against — the same number, 1,000 times over, to within 1.21%. It dates an undated snapshot to about 2019-2020.
TVL has 4.2 times as many students as STEM, which is fourth of eight. Meanwhile teachers grew 4.97 times faster than pupils over eleven years — and 1,616,165 primary-age children are still in no school at all.
We burn more coal for our power than anyone nearby, we buy it in dollars, and the Meralco rate rose a fifth in eighteen months.
The 2019 rice law cut the price traders pay by a fifth. The price you pay fell half as much, and the gap between them doubled.
What it really takes to rebuild Supabase on AWS, what each costs at 1k, 10k and 100k users, and the one number — around 12,000 monthly active users — where the answer flips.
Eleven years of dengue records show a pattern so regular you can plan around it. Plus two death rates that fooled me at first.
We buy more from the world than we sell to it, every single year. Electronics and one trading partner explain most of the gap.
Sixteen years of visitor numbers: a record high, a 98% collapse before it, and a quiet swap at the top of the list in early 2026.
Three years of Cebu port data and 82,888 roads. Over half the cargo drives onto the ship itself — and the roads behind the piers are thin.
The official Philippine COVID toll is 66,864. Count the deaths above a normal year instead and you get 290,774. This is about the gap, and about why the death rate everyone quotes does not mean what it looks like.
I pulled 16,489 Philippine earthquakes from the USGS catalogue, then found the biggest number in it was the one I could not use. Also: why December is not an earthquake season.
Sector returns, foreign flows, and market cap breakdowns. I pulled a decade of PSE data to understand how the local market actually moves.
Turnout in 2022 was 82.98%. But 2,213,371 ballots named no president at all, and nearly 1.5 million more skipped the vice-presidential line entirely.
We grow 4.9 times more rice than in 1961, on barely more land, and still import it. The reason is one number nobody quotes.
OpenStreetMap holds 803 bus routes for Metro Manila and 26 jeepney routes. The gap is not a flaw in the data — it is the data.
Philippine debt is 56.6% of GDP, down from 73.9% in 1993. Interest takes 15.3% of spending, down from 39.4% in 1990. I had the story backwards until I drew the chart.
Home internet here got 9.2 times faster in six years. We are still last of six ASEAN countries for how many people are online. Two different problems.
A Filipino hate-speech benchmark of 27,383 posts. 273 of them leak between practice and test, and the length chart turns out to be a picture of a platform rule.
Philippine goods arrive on time and then wait at the border. The gap between our own best and worst is wider than the gap between us and the regional leader.
Philippine unemployment is 2.24% and poverty is 15.5%. The number that reconciles them is vulnerable employment — a third of workers, with no wage and no contract.
Life expectancy is up 10.8 years since 1960. But tuberculosis is higher than in 2000, and 44.4% of health spending comes straight out of families' pockets.
Overseas Filipinos sent home $41.56 billion in 2025 — 5.33 times all net foreign investment. The line never dipped, not in 2008 and not in 2020.