Wind map of the Earth
You’ve probably seen the cool wind map of the US, but there’s one for the whole Earth now. (via df)
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kottke.org posts about infoviz
JZSMA (The Jay Z Social Media Average)
From Rap Genius, a chart showing mentions in rap songs of popular social sites and apps like Twitter and Instagram:
Compare with the graph for the same terms from Google News:
And here’s the graph for general search terms. (I excluded Snapchat from the Google graphs because Google wouldn’t allow 6 search terms at a time…it barely showed up in either case.) Twitter rules the rap roost, but Facebook demolishes everyone in general and news search traffic.
The bourbon family tree
A chart of where many varieties of bourbon come from, along with five things you can learn from the chart.
Pappy Van Winkle is frequently described by both educated and uneducated drinkers as the best bourbon on the market. It is certainly aged for longer than most premium bourbons, and has earned a near hysterical following of people scrambling to get one of the very few bottles that are released each year. Of the long-aged bourbons, it seems to be aged very gently year-to-year, and this recommends it enormously. But if you, like most people, can’t find Pappy, try W. L. Weller. There’s a 12 year old variety that retails for $23 around the corner. Pappy 15-year sells for $699-$1000 even though it’s the exact same liquid as the Pappy (same mash bill, same spirit, same barrels); the only difference is it’s aged 3 years less.
The chart is taken from the Kings County Distillery Guide to Urban Moonshining.
Written by the founders of Kings County Distillery, New York City’s first distillery since Prohibition, this spirited illustrated book explores America’s age-old love affair with whiskey. It begins with chapters on whiskey’s history and culture from 1640 to today, when the DIY trend and the classic cocktail craze have conspired to make it the next big thing. For those thirsty for practical information, the book next provides a detailed, easy-to-follow guide to safe home distilling, complete with a list of supplies, step-by-step instructions, and helpful pictures, anecdotes, and tips.
(via df)
Sorting Algorithms Visualized
This video visualization of 15 different sorting algorithms is mesmerizing. (Don’t forget the sound.)
An explanation of the process. You can play with several different kinds of sorts here.
The Best American Infographics 2013
Sadly, most infographics these days look like this, functioning as a cheap and easy way to gussy up numbers. But when done properly, infographics are very effective in communicating a lot of information in a short period of time and can help you see data in new ways. In The Best American Infographics 2013, Gareth Cook collects some of the best ones from over the past year. Wired has a look at some of the selections.
Visualizing the Rolling Stones tours
The Rolling Stones have been touring for almost 50 years, starting with a British tour in 1963, and this tool allows you to visualize their travels. It’s really cool. The craziest part to me is how dramatically the length of their tours has increased since they started out. Their first tour in 1963 (actually one of their longer tours early in their career) was about 28 shows over the course of a month. Their last tour in 2005 had about a gabillion shows over two years and grossed $528 million.
On a personal note, I read “The Rolling Stones” several times on this page and still spent parts of two days looking at it and thinking it was The Beatles tour visualization. Twice. I read “The Rolling Stones,” thought it was The Beatles, corrected myself, and then thought it was The Beatles again. (via @pbump)
Wheel! Of! Urine!
Uroscopy is the now obsolete practice of using the smell, taste, and color of urine to diagnose illness. There were even charts to help doctors and other healers identify different types of urine.
Many diseases affect metabolism and many changes in metabolism can be detected in the urine. For example, diabetics will excrete sugar in their urine — sometimes enough sugar that it can be fermented into whisky. There are many other diseases that change the smell of a person’s urine, including the very descriptively named Maple Syrup Urine Disease or Sweaty Feet Syndrome, now much more likely to be diagnosed by electronic sensor arrays than actually tasting the urine.
(via edible geography)
Infographic of shifting US political ideologies
It was not my intent to be so politically oriented this morning but here we are. This is a chart that tracks the ideologies of the Democratic and Republican members of Congress from 1789 to 2010. As you can see, the shift away from the center by the Republicans since 1975 is unprecedented, perhaps matched only by the shift toward the center by the Democrats beginning in 1921 and ending in 1945.
This reminds me of a timeline created circa 1880 for a book called Conspectus of the History of Political Parties and the Federal Government:
Bigger version here. (via @joecarryon)
Info visualization of the Dominos pizza supply chain from farm to apartment
This is a long zoom look at how pizza gets delivered to hungry people. It starts by looking at the routes taken by a Dominos delivery person during a typical night and slowly zooms out to reveal the pizza giant’s national supply chain.
Embark with Kwon on a trip that begins with a pizza delivery route in New York City, then goes across the country to California’s Central Valley, where nearly 50 percent of America’s fruits, nuts and vegetables are grown, and into the heartland for an aerial look at our farmlands.
Information Graphics, a new book from Taschen
This looks like an interesting new book from Taschen, Information Graphics (buy at Amazon).
Our everyday lives are filled with a massive flow of information that we must interpret in order to understand the world we live in. Considering this complex variety of data floating around us, sometimes the best — or even only — way to communicate is visually. This unique book presents a fascinating historical perspective on the subject, highlighting the work of the masters of the profession who have created a number of breakthroughs that have changed the way we communicate. Information Graphics has been conceived and designed not just for designers or graphics professionals, but for anyone interested in the history and practice of communicating visually.
The in-depth introductory section, illustrated with over 60 images (each accompanied by an explanatory caption), features essays by Sandra Rendgen, Paolo Ciuccarelli, Richard Saul Wurman, and Simon Rogers; looking back all the way to primitive cave paintings as a means of communication, this introductory section gives readers an excellent overview of the subject. The second part of the book is entirely dedicated to contemporary works by the current most renowned professionals, presenting 200 graphics projects, with over 400 examples — each with a fact sheet and an explanation of methods and objectives — divided into chapters by the subjects Location, Time, Category, and Hierarchy.
A practical guide to graphics for scientists and engineers
This looks like a potentially interesting book from Felice Frankel: Visual Strategies (at Amazon).
Any scientist or engineer who communicates research results will immediately recognize this practical handbook as an indispensable tool. The guide sets out clear strategies and offers abundant examples to assist researchers-even those with no previous design training-with creating effective visual graphics for use in multiple contexts, including journal submissions, grant proposals, conference posters, or presentations.
Visual communicator Felice Frankel and systems biologist Angela DePace, along with experts in various fields, demonstrate how small changes can vastly improve the success of a graphic image. They dissect individual graphics, show why some work while others don’t, and suggest specific improvements. The book includes analyses of graphics that have appeared in such journals as Science, Nature, Annual Reviews, Cell, PNAS, and the New England Journal of Medicine, as well as an insightful personal conversation with designer Stefan Sagmeister and narratives by prominent researchers and animators.
Process blog for the NY Times Graphics dept
chartsandthings is a behind-the-scenes look at how the infographic sausage is made at the NY Times.
Basketball has 13 positions, not just 5
Muthu Alagappan used topological data analysis to group NBA players into thirteen different player types, including Role-Playing Ball-Handler, Paint Protector, All-NBA 1st Team, and One-of-a-Kind.
Visualization of shipping routes from 1750 to 1855
This video is a visualization of the how ships moved goods and people around the world from the mid-18th century to the mid-19th century.
Here’s more on how it was done.
This shows mostly Spanish, Dutch, and English routes — they are surprisingly constant over the period (although some empires drop in and out of the record), but the individual voyages are fun. And there are some macro patterns — the move of British trade towards India, the effect of the American Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars, and so on.
There are times in the video when a single nation dominates all of the shipping traffic…the British in the early 1800s and the Dutch from the mid 1830s on.
Wind and water current maps by van Gogh
A pair of recent info visualizations look as though they were painted by Vincent van Gogh. Wind Map shows the realtime flow of wind over the United States.
Perpetual Ocean is a NASA animation of ocean currents around the world.
Would be cool to see both of these rendered through Stamen’s watercolor filter.
A chart of almost all the money
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:
Google’s search by drawing feature
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.
Kurt Vonnegut explains the shapes of stories
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)
Superheroes are all around us
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.
Sunscreen explained
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.
Slopegraphs
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.
Where has all the drama gone?
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)
No more fish in the sea
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)
Edward Tufte profile
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.
Hand-drawn timelines
This Tumblr filled with hand-drawn timelines is wonderful…the Troublemaker of the Moment timeline is a favorite.
Twitter sparklines
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, the infographics font
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:
Harry Potter wizards in other movies
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?
Radiation dose chart
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)
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