GOOD infographics
GOOD Magazine has created an archive of their excellent infographics on Flickr. Lots of inspiration here. (via design observer)
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kottke.org posts about infoviz
Indy 500 car tracker
The Indianapolis Star did a really nice car tracker for the Indianapolis 500. Just push play and watch the race unfold. I was struck by how few changes in position there were…you’d think people would be passing each other all the time but that’s just not the case. (thx, nathan)
The hump of irrelevance
By Meg Pickard, a graph of the lifespan of Twitter trending topics compares “people talking about #topic” and “people talking about talking about #topic”. Outside of Twitter, this applies to pretty much any popular newsworthy topic…the news quickly moves from “we’re telling you about Topic X” to media coverage of the media coverage of Topic X. See: Twitter’s own coverage in the media currently. (thx, @ davidfg )
NYC subway ridership trends mapped
Mike Frumin took the NYC subway ridership data from all the way back to 1905 (!!) and graphed it on a map, with a sparkline of the ridership data for each stop. Frumin explains the project a little more here.
The result, after much whacking, is, I think, compelling, but you’ll have to see for yourself. The general idea it that the history of subway ridership tells a story about the history of a neighborhood that is much richer than the overall trend. An example, below, shows the wild comeback of inner Williamsburg, and how the growth decays at each successive stop away from Manhattan on the L train.
Update: Here’s another representation of the same data. In this one, the ridership numbers are represented by the thickness of the subway line.
It hurts when I pee
From a German book called Elektroschutz in Bildern, a collection of illustrations detailing a number of ways that people can get electrocuted and the path that the electricity takes through their bodies.
Photo by Bre Pettis. (via jacket mechanical)
Reducing your water usage
Good magazine has a nice chart with advice on reducing your water footprint. Meat = really really not good.
Who rides the M8 bus?
Miranda Purves and Jason Logan recently surveyed a bunch of riders of bus and subway lines that the MTA is attempting to eliminate because of a budget crisis. Don’t miss the associated PDF. Related: London tube seat hierarchy and morning subway demographics.
Internet blowhards
Here’s a handy flowchart to figure out which new media blowhard you are. I am “Try Again”.
Infographic bloopers
I believe these are the first infographic bloopers I’ve ever seen.
A collection of accidents that happened while working on maps and other graphics.
From the NY Times.
Greek to me but not to you
When confronted with an incomprehensible language, an English speaker might say “it’s all Greek to me” while a French or Finnish speaker might say that it sounds like Hebrew. Here’s a flowchart that illustrates the different incomprehensibility relationships (discussion here). The most stereotypical incomprehensible language appears to be Chinese. (via strange maps)
Garrett Lisi’s Theory of Everything
You may remember reading the New Yorker article on Garrett Lisi, a surfer, physicist, and snowboarder who came out of nowhere in 2007 to present a plausible Theory of Everything, “a unifying idea that aims to incorporate all the universe’s forces in a single mathematical framework”. I do but I missed this visualization of Lisi’s theory posted by New Scientist in late 2007. You may want to break out the bong for this one. (thx, matt)
The market movement in 2008
You may remember the Google Motion Chart from Hans Rosling’s TED talk about Gapminder. Now 26 Variable has used the chart to graph the movement of the stocks in the S&P 100 in 2008. The strange thing is that with the default settings, you’re left with the impression that those stocks were more up than down over the year…if you ignore all the dots sliding to the left towards zero market cap.
1930s Hollywood star power
A visualization of the top 10 Hollywood stars from 1936 to 1945.
For three years, from ‘36 to ‘38, Shirley Temple was the country’s top box-office star, and then Mickey Rooney had the title from ‘39 to ‘41. (And then it was Abbott & Costello.) Imagine. Temple and Rooney knew how to entertain, for sure, but the last thing you could call moviegoers back then, to judge by their six-year reign, was urbane or sophisticated.
Super Bowl tweets mapped
The NY Times has a timeline map showing what people from around the country said on Twitter during the Super Bowl broadcast. I like the emoticons tab but they also should have included a profanity tab.
Music from stock charts
Johannes Kreidler took the data from recent stock charts, fed it to Microsoft Songsmith, and produced melancholy tunes. It’s like the Visualizer in iTunes, only backwards. Ben Fry says of the project:
My opinion of Songsmith is shifting — while it’s generally presented as a laughingstock, catastrophic failure, or if nothing else, a complete embarrassment (especially for its developers slash infomercial actors), it’s really caught the imagination of a lot of people who are creating new things, even if all of them subvert the original intent of the project. (Where the original intent was to… create a tool that would help write a jingle for glow in the dark towels?)
Obama’s personal annual report
Dopplr is doing 2008 personal annual reports for all their users that shows “data, visualisations and factoids” about their 2008 travel. They’ve also done one for Barack Obama on his behalf that you can download for free. Obama took a whopping 234 trips in 2008 and traveled 92% of the distance to the moon!
Pictures of Numbers blog
Pictures of Numbers is infrequently updated, but the subject matter is timeless and the archives are worth a look.
Pictures of Numbers is a book-project-in-progress, consisting of practical tips and techniques for busy researchers on improving their data presentation.
100 Presidential days
A comparison of the words & deeds of the first 100 days of every President since Roosevelt.
Final update to election maps
I added 16 new maps to the 2008 Election Maps page in what is probably the final update. Big thanks to everyone who sent in maps.
Democrats trending upward
Since the 1980 presidential election, more people voted for the Democratic candidate in each successive election than in the previous one…that is, Mondale got more votes than Carter, Dukakis more than Mondale, Clinton more than Dukakis, etc. The vote for Republicans has been a bit more erratic.
The counter-intuitive comparison of all things
The goal of the creators of The Big Chart, The Counter-Intuitive Comparison Institute of North America (CICINA), is to find the single best thing in the world through an NCAA basketball tournament-style bracketing system. This video explains their plans.
Is the Bilbao Guggenheim better than McDonald’s french fries?Are penguins better than Miracle Grow? Can anything beat heated seats on a cold November day?
(via design observer)
How many coins?
Earlier this evening, I needed to take some coins that had been piling up to the Coinstar machine. Before I left, I uploaded a photo of the coin bags to Flickr and queried the masses: how much money in the bags?
How did the crowd do? Certainly not as well as the villagers at the 1906 livestock fair visited by Francis Galton.
In 1906 Galton visited a livestock fair and stumbled upon an intriguing contest. An ox was on display, and the villagers were invited to guess the animal’s weight after it was slaughtered and dressed. Nearly 800 gave it a go and, not surprisingly, not one hit the exact mark: 1,198 pounds. Astonishingly, however, the median of those 800 guesses came close — very close indeed. It was 1,208 pounds.
Nate Silver I am not, but after some rudimentary statistical analysis on the coin guesses, it was clear that the mean ($193.88) and median ($171.73) were both way off from the actual value ($426.55). That scatterplot is brutal…there are only a handful of guesses in the right area. But the best guess by a single individual was just 76 cents off.
To be fair, the crowd was likely misinformed. It’s difficult to tell from that photo how fat those bags were — they were bulging — and how many quarters there were.
Touchscreen follies
SNL’s Fred Armisen shows off his interactive touchscreen skills on some political maps of the US.
Check out Michigan…I can make it bounce.
Nice commentary on TV news anchor busywork. See also Anderson Cooper’s magic pie chart. (And sorry, Hulu = US viewers only.)
Update: For non-US viewers, here’s an alternative link that includes the clip in question and a bunch of other stuff. And please don’t yell at me for using Hulu…it’s often the only alternative and it’s relatively easy to watch outside of the US. (thx, nebel)
Mapping newspaper political endorsements
Philip Kromer took the newspaper endorsement data from the Editor and Publisher page I linked to this morning and mapped the results. The states are colored according to FiveThirtyEight’s current projections and those newspapers with larger circulations have larger circles. From Kromer’s blog post:
This seems to speak of why so many on the right feel there’s a MSM bias - 50% of the country is urban, 50% rural, but newspapers are located exclusively in urban areas. So, surprisingly, the major right-leaning papers are all located in parts of the country we consider highly leftish. The urban areas that are the largest are thus both the most liberal and the most likely to have a sizeable conservative target audience.
Tall mountains, long rivers
BibliOdyssey has collected a number of charts which compare the heights of mountains and lengths of rivers by laying them all out next to each other. (Ok, kinda difficult to explain…just go take a look.) I had a chance to buy a copy of one of these maps a few years ago (not sure if it was an original print or what; it looked old) but passed it up because I didn’t have the money. Wish I would have bought it anyway. (via quips)
What are the Japanese up to right now?
As part of the Japanese census, people were asked to keep a record of what they were doing in 15 minute intervals. The data was publicly released and Jonathan Soma took it and graphed the results so that you can see what many Japanese are up to during the course of a normal day.
Sports: Women like swimming, but men eschew the water for productive sports, which is the most important Japanese invention.
Early to bed and early to rise… and early to bed: People start waking up at 5 AM, but are taking naps by 7:30 AM.
Fascinating.
Quirky maps and charts for NYC wayfinding
Christoph Niemann shares a series of his New York City cheatsheets, including tips for getting on and off the subway at the proper points, muffin poking (you know, for checking freshness), and a door opening maneuver called “The Northside Eagle”.
Whenever I rode the subway with my two older boys, I tried to hold on to their hands at all times. In the process, I developed a special move. I think anyone who saw it must have been impressed.
I would hold the boys’ hands as we briskly made our way out of the station, then, just as we reached the turnstiles, I would let go. We would pass through the turnstiles simultaneously, and so smoothly that the boys’ hands would still be up in the air when we got to the other side, where I would grab their little fingers again in one fluid motion. (Requires practice.)
These are great fun.
Stock market charts, in context
Phil Gyford, wearing his finest pair of Tufte trousers, takes a chart of the FTSE that the Guardian ran on Saturday and places it on a scale that shows the fluctuations of Friday’s market compared to the full value of the index.
This particular annoyance is the graphs of share prices in the press and on TV. It is standard practice to start the y-axis at a number much higher than zero, in order to magnify the ups and downs of the market.
Flight pattern maps
A map of the world showing a simulation of all of the air traffic in a 24-hour period. Here’s a higher-quality video. Like Aaron Koblin’s Flight Patterns videos, only not just covering North America.
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