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An epic chart from XKCD: Money - A chart of almost all of it, where it is, and what it can do. It’s broken out into “dollars, thousands, millions, billions, trillions”…here’s just a little snippet of the billions section:
This is kind of amazing…you draw a graph and Google Correlate finds query terms whose popularity matches the drawn curve. I drew a bell curve, a very rough one peaking in 2007, and it matches a bunch of searches for “myspace”.
This fits beautifully with the previous post about Vonnegut’s story shape graphs.
Using a chalkboard and a simple graphical axis, watch as Kurt Vonnegut explains the different shapes that stories can take.
(via @coudal)
Update: This is part of a longer talk that Vonnegut gave…a transcript is here.
I want to share with you something I’ve learned. I’ll draw it on the blackboard behind me so you can follow more easily [draws a vertical line on the blackboard]. This is the G-I axis: good fortune-ill fortune. Death and terrible poverty, sickness down here-great prosperity, wonderful health up there. Your average state of affairs here in the middle [points to bottom, top, and middle of line respectively].
(thx, clifford)
This chart shows former and future superheroes by movie. That is, George Clooney played Batman, so Out of Sight gets a Batman, along with another Batman for Micheal Keaton, and a Nick Fury for Sam Jackson. Lots of movies have 4 superheroes, though none on this chart have 5. Click through, you’ll understand. If you want to see how they all fit together, he’s made that chart, too. Raynor, you may raymember, also made the Harry Potter wizards in other movies chart.
HBO recently released a documentary about real-life superheroes. The trailer is below. It reminded me of the fascinating Rolling Stone article about Master Legend, but I can’t find it on their site because Rolling Stone doesn’t believe the internet needs to see old articles.
Incidentally, I found not 1, but 3 networks for real-life superheroes.
1, 2 3. But also, hipster superheroes. Hulk is only smashing ironically. And here’s a list of all the superheroes. All of them.
Lastly, I’d be remiss not to mention Petsaresuperhero.es, a project I put together with a friend. You know your pet’s a superhero, now you can show the world.
This infographic over at Information is Beautiful does a great job explaining the difference UV protections offered by sunscreens, what SPF is, when/how much to apply, etc. I had no idea about the stars or the difference between UVA and UVB.
Charlie Park takes a look at a type of chart that Edward Tufte developed for his 1983 book, The Visual Display of Quantitative Information. Unlike sparklines, another Tufte invention/coinage, slopegraphs didn’t really take off.
It’s curious that it hasn’t become more popular, as the chart type is quite elegant and aligns with all of Tufte’s best practices for data visualization, and was created by the master of information design. Why haven’t these charts (christened “slopegraphs” by Tufte about a month ago) taken off the way sparklines did? In this post, we’re going to look at slopegraphs — what they are, how they’re made, why they haven’t seen a massive uptake so far, and why I think they’re about to become much more popular in the near future.
From very small array, an infographic look at which movie genres have done well at the box office and at awards time. Dramas have all but vanished from the box office chart in recent years. (thx, jon)
David McCandless made a data visualization comparing the Atlantic Ocean fishing stocks in 1900 and in 2000. It’s a literal jawdropper…here’s just a little bit of it:
That’s not just depleted…the fish are just gone. Click through for the full craziness. (via @daveg)
Joshua Yaffa profiles Edward Tufte for The Washington Monthly.
After the publication of Envisioning Information, Tufte decided, he told me, “to be indifferent to culture or history or time.” He became increasingly consumed with what he calls “forever knowledge,” or the idea that design is meant to guide fundamental cognitive tasks and therefore is rooted in principles that apply regardless of the material being displayed and the technology used to produce it. As Tufte explains it, basic human cognitive questions are universal, which means that design questions should be universal too. “I purposely don’t write books with names like How to Design a Web Site or How to Make a Presentation,” he told me.
This Tumblr filled with hand-drawn timelines is wonderful…the Troublemaker of the Moment timeline is a favorite.
I’ve been seeing a few mini bar charts (aka sparklines) pop up on Twitter in the past few days. Like this one:
Last year Alex Kerin built an Excel-to-Twitter sparkline generator that uses Unicode block elements for the tiny charts and now media outlets like the WSJ are using it to publish data to Twitter:
Anil Dash has a nice post on how the WSJ came to use Kerin’s idea. Here are a few more favorites “sparktweets” (1, 2, 3, 4, 5):
Chartwell is a type family you can use to build all kinds of graphs and charts. Stringing letters and numbers together into ligatures, you can make things like this:
Here’s an infographic that shows feature films with four or more Harry Potter wizards in them.
i was watching sense & sensibility in the back of my neighbour’s minivan while on a stakeout the other night and realized that professors snape, trelawney, and umbridge had each somehow apparated into the cast. my neighbour (who is a former hogwarts alumna) pointed out that cornelius fudge and madam pomfrey were also in it. was this a record for the most harry potter wizards in a non-harry potter film?
Close but nine Potter wizards is the record…can you guess which movie before clicking through?
With the assistance of a nuclear reactor operator, Randall Munroe came up with this handy radiation dose infographic. Doses recorded near the Fukushima plant compare to those from a single mammogram or dental x-ray. A note on how to use this chart:
If you’re basing radiation safety procedures on an internet PNG image and things go wrong, you have no one to blame but yourself.
(via df)
Weatherspark is an impressive collection of weather data, graphs, and tools.
WeatherSpark is a new type of weather website, with interactive weather graphs that allow you to pan and zoom through the entire history of any weather station on earth.
Get multiple forecasts for the current location, overlaid on records and averages to put it all in context.
Here’s the weather for NYC. (via @bantic)
This interactive chart from the Washington Post shows how the average body mass index has risen in most countries since 1980. The European men getting comparatively heavier than European women (against the general trend of the rest of the world) is interesting.
As you can see in this visualization created by Information is Beautiful, the most commonly used words in horoscopes are amazingly consistent across the twelve different signs. As part of the analysis, they also created a meta-horoscope reading for use anytime during the year:
Ready? Sure? Whatever the situation or secret moment, enjoy everything a lot. Feel able to absolutely care. Expect nothing else. Keep making love. Family and friends matter. The world is life, fun, and energy. Maybe hard. Or easy. Taking exactly enough is best. Help and talk to others. Change your mind and a better mood comes along…
What a crock. (via @dens)
An hour-long documentary on statistics and infoviz produced by the BBC.
Documentary which takes viewers on a rollercoaster ride through the wonderful world of statistics to explore the remarkable power thay have to change our understanding of the world, presented by superstar boffin Professor Hans Rosling, whose eye-opening, mind-expanding and funny online lectures have made him an international internet legend.
(via waxy)
If you ever find yourself time travelling back to Victorian England, here’s a handy flowchart that will help you explain the internet to the youth of the era.
Lovely timeline of the progression of life on Earth.
It’s work clicking through to see the larger image. (via @moleitau)
This infographic attempts to explain all the interpersonal connections in Infinite Jest. (via personal report)
Before peeking ahead, quick quiz: as 1884 came to a close, what was the tallest building in the world? It’s the one in the middle of this beautiful diagram of The Principal High Buildings of the Old World from Cram’s Unrivaled Family Atlas of the World:
That’s right, the Washington Monument was the tallest building in the world for about five years before the Eiffel Tower, at almost double the height of the Washington Monument, took over the top spot for more than 40 years. (via modcult)
A 50-minute documentary on information visualization and its use in journalism.
Lots of kottke.org regulars in there…Fry, Wattenberg, Koblin, Felton, Stamen, etc. And Amanda Cox sounds like Sarah Vowell!
Pseudovariety — “the illusion of diversity, concealing a lack of real choice” — is when you go to the store and see an entire aisle filled with hundreds of different kinds of soda but most of those soda varieties are owned by three companies. Click through to see a neat visualization of soft drink brands and their market shares and owners.
Here’s what the communication between a web browser and YouTube looks like when the browser requests a video, slowed down 12X so you can actually see what happens.
Locals and Tourists is a set of maps showing where people take photos in various cities around the world. The results are broken down into tourist photos and photos taken by locals. Here’s NYC:
Blue points on the map are pictures taken by locals (people who have taken pictures in this city dated over a range of a month or more). Red points are pictures taken by tourists (people who seem to be a local of a different city and who took pictures in this city for less than a month).
Here’s European airspace shutting down as the ashcloud from Eyjafjallajokull drifts over the continent:
The music is an inspired choice. And here’s European airspace starting back up again:
(via infosthetics)
Shouldn’t the HDR Hole actually extend below the baseline? Larger version is here. See also Clayton Cubitt’s three-step guide to photography:
01: be interesting. 02: find interesting people. 03: find interesting places. Nothing about cameras.
(via clusterflock)
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