...is a weblog about the liberal arts 2.0 edited by Jason Kottke since March 1998 (archives). You can read about me and kottke.org here. If you've got questions, concerns, or interesting links, send them along.
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.
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)
The NY Times' Paper Cuts blog calls Cartographies of Time "the most beautiful book of the year". I cannot disagree. In attempting to answer the question "how do you draw time?", the authors present page after page of beautiful and clever visual timelines.
Cartographies of Time is the first comprehensive history of graphic representations of time in Europe and the United States from 1450 to the present. Authors Daniel Rosenberg and Anthony Grafton have crafted a lively history featuring fanciful characters and unexpected twists and turns. From medieval manuscripts to websites, Cartographies of Time features a wide variety of timelines that in their own unique ways-curving, crossing, branching-defy conventional thinking about the form. A fifty-four-foot-long timeline from 1753 is mounted on a scroll and encased in a protective box. Another timeline uses the different parts of the human body to show the genealogies of Jesus Christ and the rulers of Saxony. Ladders created by missionaries in eighteenth-century Oregon illustrate Bible stories in a vertical format to convert Native Americans. Also included is the April 1912 Marconi North Atlantic Communication chart, which tracked ships, including the Titanic, at points in time rather than by their geographic location, alongside little-known works by famous figures, including a historical chronology by the mapmaker Gerardus Mercator and a chronological board game patented by Mark Twain. Presented in a lavishly illustrated edition, Cartographies of Time is a revelation to anyone interested in the role visual forms have played in our evolving conception of history.
Phil Gyford's spot-on critique of the number and quality of infographics currently choking the web. As Phil notes, far too many infographics decorate and don't communicate.
Nice timelapse map view of taxi traffic across Manhattan.
I've often wondered what an NYC version of Stamen's Cabspotting project would look like.
The goal of This American Infographic is to make a companion infographic for every episode of This American Life.
From a study on how people use Firefox, a heat map that highlights the most- and least-popular menu items. Bookmarks got the most use by far, followed by copy and paste. Copy was used about twice as much as paste, which suggests that about 50% of the time, people are copying things to be pasted into another program. Oh and not a single person used "Redo". (via ben fry)
Photographer Michael Najjar took some of his photos from the Andes and turned them into stock market infographics. Here's Lehman Brothers stock price from 1980 to 2008.
Boy, their stock price really fell off a cliff there, didn't it? The rest of the series is worth a look as well, although Najjar's site features the worst use of Flash I've seen in many months...it automatically fullscreens and generally wastes a bunch of time with transitions. To find the rest of the photos, wait until the map starts loading and put your mouse at the bottom of the screen. A menu will s.l.o.w.l.y. slide up...High Altitude is what you're looking for. (via info aesthetics)
This visualization represents a year in color (summer is at the top, winter at the bottom).
The images were taken of the Boston Common, courtesy of Flickr.
Information visualization of some well-known movie quotes. A picture is, how you say, worth a thousand words:
A representation of how deep the Mariana Trench is. Turns out it's really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really deep. (via df)
Watch Twitter's engineering team and code base grow as the site gets more and more popular. It gets nuts at the end.
(thx, chris)
Ward Shelley paints these wonderfully intricate timelines of different things...his life, Frank Zappa's career, and the history of the avant garde.
Photographs of curves found in nature and the graphs and functions that go with them.
(via snarkmarket)
Clever idea: you can measure the amount of ink required to print different typefaces simply by writing them out with ballpoint pens. The pens themselves become the usage graph:
Update: You can also use this technique to represent which colors you draw with most often.
The most interesting of several infographics related to The Beatles is the first one depicting the declining rate of collaboration within the band gleaned from songwriting credit data.
(thx, bryan)
This clever graph by National Geographic shows the cost of healthcare compared to life expectancy in a number of countries. The way that the US healthcare expenditure is pictured entirely outside the confines of the graph's scale and legend is a particularly effective design decision. (thx, jim)
Today on xkcd, an illustration showing the gravity wells of our solar system's planets and some of their moons.
Two of Mars' tiny moons barely have any gravity at all:
You could escape Deimos with a bike and a ramp. A thrown baseball could escape Phobos.
That's great, but you forgot Pluto!
One of many from Mary and Matt. It's a stacked bar chart *and* candy. (via youngna)
New-ish thing from fake is the new real: outlines of the 100 most populous areas in the US. Some are cities and some are states.
The fifty largest metro areas (in blue), disaggregated from their states (in orange). Each has been scaled and sorted according to population.
By themselves, the New York, Los Angeles, and Chicago metros are the three most populous areas in the US. (via snarkmarket)
A visualization of the decline of the world's four maritime empires (British, Portuguese, French, Spanish) from 1800 to 2009.
France pretty much just explodes around 1960.
A wonderful character interaction map of the Lord of the Rings trilogy drawn by Randall Munroe. Here's just a little part of it:
Beautiful map by National Geographic of human exploration of the solar system.
See also Race to the Moon at HistoryShots and Bryan Christie's Mission(s) to Mars. (thx, byrne)
This was my present to my nephew for his 3rd birthday. He loves, loves, loves the subway so my sister asked me if I could make a custom map with all the places that mean something to him on the poster.
Best viewed a bit large.
Update: There's been a bit of confusion...this is not something that I made. I don't even have a nephew.
Update: The subway map was made by Erin Jang.
A diagram that shows the overlap of street photography, fine art photography, and photojournalism.
Great interactive graphic from the Times depicting how people spend their time.
A handy flowchart: how to get your photo taken by The Sartorialist. If you're a man and you have pants: "cuff 'em, roll 'em, make 'em too short".
Ben Fry just updated his interactive salary vs performance graph that compares the payrolls of major league teams to their records. Look at those overachieving Rays and Marlins! And those underachieving Indians, Mets, and Cubs!
Flip Flop Fly Ball is a marriage of baseball fandom and an enthusiasm for infographics. While not strictly baseball, this comparison of the sizes and shapes of sports balls is a favorite.
A very interesting infographic of the ideological history of the Supreme Court from 1937 to the present. The color coding on the map is weirdly inaccurate but you can still be general trends pretty well...like how many of the justices changed greatly during their terms. William O. Douglas became slightly more moderate mid-term and then got really liberal while Rehnquist went from very conservative to more moderate as his term went on, especially after he became Chief Justice.
OT: I knew there was a Burger on the bench but was unaware of Justice Frankfurter (1938-1961).
Update: Alex Lundry designed the visualization and got in touch to explain the color coding.
The colors are chosen based upon the Min, Max, and Median of the area we are comparing. So, in the first view, the "overall" view, the darkest Red is anchored to the maximum ideology number across all justices and all terms, the darkest Blue is anchored to the minimum score, and the purest white is anchored to the actual median number (The Location of the Median Justice is NOT necessarily the actual median, as it is calculated via a Bayesian statistical estimate).
The second "compare" option, "within each seat, row" calculates separate color anchors for each row.
Similarly, the third compare option, "within each year, column" calculates separate color anchors for each column.
The Location of Median Justice and Court Average are not included in these calculations and their color values are set to what they would be in the overall comparison.
Infographics News collects some lovely infographics from a new Portuguese newspaper called i.
The style of infographics follow the general design created by Javier Errea: no fireworks, modern, compact, with cromatic impact but smart. And the Innovation spirit: "newspapers must be daily magazines", as Juan Antonio Giner says.
(via max gadney)
Bud Caddell summarizes how to be happy with your work in the form of a Venn diagram consisting of three main overlapping areas: What We Do Well, What We Want to Do, and What We Can Be Paid to Do. (via today and tomorrow)
GOOD Magazine has created an archive of their excellent infographics on Flickr. Lots of inspiration here. (via design observer)
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)
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 )
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.
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)
Sprint would like to show you a video of what's happening right now. (via swiss miss)
Good magazine has a nice chart with advice on reducing your water footprint. Meat = really really not good.
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.
Here's a handy flowchart to figure out which new media blowhard you are. I am "Try Again".
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.
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)
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)
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.
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.
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.
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?)
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 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.
A comparison of the words & deeds of the first 100 days of every President since Roosevelt.
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.
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 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)
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.
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)
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.
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)
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.
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.
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.
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.
If you live and work in Los Angeles and have an average commute, you spend 72 hours a year in traffic. That's enough time to read War and Peace once, get through Wagner's The Ring Cycle almost five times, or watch the entire Lord of the Rings trilogy almost eight times. The page includes stats for other cities too.
Update: A closer read, a bit of arithmetic, and several emails have convinced me that the 72 hours is not the overall commute time but the time spent sitting motionless in traffic. (thx, everyone)
The Star Wars empire has grown into one of the most fertile incubators of talent in the worlds of movies (Lucasfilm), visual effects (Industrial Light & Magic), sound (Skywalker Sound), and video games (LucasArts). Along the way, some of the original Lucas crew has gone on to become his biggest competitors.
The Flash interface is really annoying and not useful...the whole image is a better way to look at it. Very Mark Lombardi. (via vc)
The earliest of the three is a winged death's head, with blank eyes and a grinning visage. Earlier versions are quite ornate, but as time passes, they become less elaborate. Sometime during the eighteenth century -- the time varies according to location -- the grim death's head designs are replaced, more or less quickly, by winged cherubs. This design also goes through a gradual simplification of form with time. By the late 1700's or early 1800's, again depending on where you are observing, the cherubs are replaced by stones decorated with a willow tree overhanging a pedestaled urn.
Pay special attention to the graph of the popularity of each motif and the slideshow of example gravestones. (thx, peterme)
Update: A reader writes in:
In regards to your post on Gravestone Motif Analysis, I think that the most important text on the subject is still Graven Images: New England Stonecarving and its Symbols, 1650-1815 by Allen Ludwig. It was originally published in 1966, before the article that you linked to. However, Wesleyan University Press published a new edition in 2000 to help meet the rising demands of Material Culture Studies courses. Lots of helpful images and histograms showing the changing patterns of gravestones over that time period.
I *love* that the collective readership of this site knows what the definitive text on New England gravestone carving is. (big thx, fletcher)
Slate has a nice short history of information visualizations, including work from Josh On, Jonathan Harris, and Martin Wattenberg. Many many more examples can be found on kottke.org's infoviz page.
Neat infographic of the 2008 US movie box office. It's more or less the same as this epic chart from the NY Times earlier in the year.
A very interesting graph of the estimated ideological positions of US voters, senators, and representatives shows that members of Congress are much more liberal and conservative than are US voters, who fall somewhere in the middle. (via 3qd)
For millennia, Martin Wattenberg's Name Voyager has been the gold standard in cool baby name web doohickeys. No longer...NameTrends gives it a serious run for its money. Lots of slicing and dicing of data going on there. Plus, popularity sparklines.
Ben Fry analyzes the data from an intelligence test administered to all incoming NFL players and displays the results by position. Offensive players do better than defensive players on the test, although running backs score the lowest (wide receivers and cornerbacks also don't do well). As Michael Lewis suggested in The Blind Side, offensive tackles are the smartest players on the field, followed by the centers and then the quarterbacks.
Malcolm Gladwell talked about the Wonderlic test at the New Yorker Conference and judged it a poor indicator of future performance.
Radiohead + Google + data visualization + lasers = I am contractually obligated to post this. Google has the backstory and some code for Radiohead's new music video, which was "filmed" using lasers instead of cameras. (via jimray)
Perhaps most exaggerated of all though has to be the images that are typically given to show the accumulation of "space junk" -- remnants of space flights and defunct satellites, etc. In this image each pixel represents approximately 114 miles; so a piece of debris the size of a car is marked with a point the size of Long Island -- easily a 6 order of magnitude exaggeration.
(via mike)
Short interview with Mike Migurski and Tom Carden of Stamen about their projects and process.
We try to start from a position of great abundance and information, to show the vastness or the liveness. I think live, vast, and deep is some of the terminology that we've been using lately in a lot of our talks.
A graph that perfectly describes my profanity usage from yesterday.
Ben Fry has updated his salary vs. performance chart for the 2008 MLB season that compares team payrolls with winning percentage. The entire payroll of the Florida Marlins appears to be less than what Jason Giambi and A-Rod *each* made last year.
MLB tracks every pitch thrown in a game using a system called PITCHf/x. You may have seen this system in action during televised games; it's used to show the viewer where the pitch was located when it crossed the plate relative to the strike zone. On his baseball statistics blog, Josh Kalk takes these stats and lets you slice and dice them however you want.
One of the most interesting statistics measured is the break of a pitch...how much up-and-down and side-to-side motion a pitched ball goes through after leaving the pitcher's hand. The break demonstrates why the knuckleball is such a difficult pitch to hit, particularly when used in conjunction with other pitch types. Here's a graph showing the break on knuckleballer Tim Wakefield's pitches so far this season:
The ball is all over the place...the hitter doesn't know where it's going. Compare that to the break on the three different pitches thrown by fellow Red Sox player Daisuke Matsuzaka:
Now take a look at the graphs on the player cards for Wakefield and Matsuzaka. Wakefield's pitches also have a wider range of velocities...Matsuzaka's pitches range in speed from about 77 to 95 mph while Wakefield's pitches range from 65 to 95 mph. And the graphs don't even account for the multiple breaks that a knuckleball can make during a single pitch. The uncertainties of speed and break of a knuckleballer's pitches combine to create a lot of trouble for batters...they neither know where the ball's going nor when it's going to arrive. (thx, fred)
P.S. So why is Wakefield not as effective as many other major league pitchers (his career stats aren't that impressive), none of whom throw the knuckleball? One guess is that sometimes the knuckleball doesn't break and essentially becomes a 60-65 mph meatball right down the middle of the plate, a pitch any decent hitter can put anywhere he wants.
Update: I thought that Wakefield's upper velocity range was a little high. I'm getting a lot of feedback saying that Wakefield's fastball is in the low 80s, not the mid-90s. Looks like we've got some screwy data here.
Also, another reason why knuckleballers are of limited effectiveness: it's difficult to throw a strike on command, which can be a problem when you're behind in the count and you have to throw your 80 mph fastball for a strike. (thx, jonathan & steve)
Interesting timelapse visualization of fatalities in Iraq since March 2003. Turn your sound on...after awhile, it starts to sound like machine gun fire. Note: fatalities are non-Iraqi only...it's likely the whole screen would be flashing if those were included. (thx, mark)
Graphical demonstration of the hand signals needed to buy and sell commodities on the floor of the New York Mercantile Exchange.
My wife is a bit of a statistics nut. A few years ago, she hooked herself up to a heart rate monitor during a playoff football game and graphed the results. Sometimes I think she does things just so she's got an excuse to open up Excel. So I wasn't really surprised when she showed me this graph yesterday afternoon:
That's a record of Meg's weight from when she got pregnant with Ollie to the present, 80 weeks of data in all...40 weeks with Ollie on the inside and 40 on the outside.
Charles Joseph Minard may get all the accolades for his graphic of Napolean's march to Moscow, but for me, the above chart is the most beautiful ever created. When I look at it, I see Ollie. The graph is a portrait of him, as sure as this photo is. It's also a record of an intense time for our family. I'm reminded of Meg, happy and pregnant but also struggling with her changing body. Trips we took, doctor visits, the growing belly and anticipation, the birth itself, and then falling off the cliff into the giddy, difficult unknown of new parenthood. And then you can see Meg slowly but surely getting back into shape while being a full-time stay-at-home mom (and managing an architecture project to boot), and achieving her goal of getting back to her pre-baby fitness level in a scant 8 months. You can't really see it, but there's a happy father and proud husband in there somewhere as well.
That's a lot of emotional impact for a simple black and white line graph with few labels. Imagine if it were in color and isometric 3-D! ;)
Gorgeous maps and infographics by Stefanie Posavec that map the literary geography of Jack Kerouac's On the Road.
The maps visually represent the rhythm and structure of Kerouac's literary space, creating works that are not only gorgeous from the point of view of graphic design, but also exhibit scientific rigor and precision in their formulation: meticulous scouring the surface of the text, highlighting and noting sentence length, prosody and themes, Posavec's approach to the text is not unlike that of a surveyor. And similarly, the act is near reverential in its approach and the results are stunning graphical displays of the nature of the subject. The literary organism, rhythm textures and sentence drawings are truly gorgeous pieces.
The sentence drawings are really worth checking out.
Update: Posavec's analysis of Walter Benjamin's The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction is available for sale at 20x200. Apropos!
The final episode of St. Elsewhere revealed that all of the action of the show took place in the mind of an autistic child. Two detectives from Homicide: Life on the Street investigate a doctor from St. Elsewhere. Thus Homicide is a fiction. And so are 280 other shows that are connected to those two shows through crossovers and references. This page contains a map of all the crossovers, encompassing such disparate shows as Doctor Who, The King of Queens, and Leave It to Beaver. Wonderful.
Flowchart: exposed to Dungeons and Dragons early in life, yes or no? I didn't play a whole lot of D&D as a kid (maybe three time total) but I've flowed through several of these points nonetheless.
The 2007 Digital Economy Handbook is almost 200 pages of information about trends related to the internet, hardware, software, communications, digital media, ecommerce, and more. Looks like an amazing document and it's a free download. Tons of charts and graphs and tables. (thx, jeff)
On view at MoMA through May 12, 2008: Design and the Elastic Mind.
In the past few decades, individuals have experienced dramatic changes in some of the most established dimensions of human life: time, space, matter, and individuality. Working across several time zones, traveling with relative ease between satellite maps and nanoscale images, gleefully drowning in information, acting fast in order to preserve some slow downtime, people cope daily with dozens of changes in scale. Minds adapt and acquire enough elasticity to be able to synthesize such abundance. One of design's most fundamental tasks is to stand between revolutions and life, and to help people deal with change.
I was surprised at how many of the show's ideas and objects I'd seen or even featured on kottke.org already. But getting there first isn't the point. The show was super-crowded and I didn't have a lot of time to look around, but here are a couple of things that caught my eye.
Michiko Nitta's Animal Messaging System (AMS), part of a larger project she did called Extreme Green Guerillas. The basic idea of the AMS is to use the radio ID tags worn by migratory animals to send messages from place to place. Nice map.
Molecubes are self-replicating repairing robots. Video here.
And I've been looking for Brendan Dawes' Cinema Redux project for several months now...most recently I wanted to include his work in my time merge media post.
Using eight of my favourite films from eight of my most admired directors including Sidney Lumet, Francis Ford Coppola and John Boorman, each film is processed through a Java program written with the processing environment. This small piece of software samples a movie every second and generates an 8 x 6 pixel image of the frame at that moment in time. It does this for the entire film, with each row representing one minute of film time.
For more, check out the online exhibition (designed by Yugo Nakamura and THA Ltd, the folks behind FFFFOUND!). Thanks (and congratulations!) to Stamen for hosting a tour of the exhibition.
An amazingly dense infographic of box office revenues for all movies since 1986. It's a little confusing at first because the vertical scale is basically irrelevant, but once you get the hang of things, it's fun to just scroll through the years. Interesting stuff to look out for:
1. The gross receipts have obviously gone up in the past 11 years.
2. The summers get much more blockbustery.
3. As time goes on, movies open bigger but don't last nearly as long in the theater as they used to. There are also more movies to choose from in 2007 than in 1986.
4. For some exceptions to the normal pattern, check out My Big Fat Greek Wedding, Juno, Dances With Wolves, Platoon, and Million Dollar Baby. (via big picture)
A map of a family's movements around the living room while watching TV for an hour. Would be nice to see an animation of the same data.
Regarding the graph of technological adoption I linked to the other day, I wrote the graph's creator** a little note, wondering if he'd done a version comparing the adoption rates directly (like this home run leaders chart). He hadn't, but he whipped one up quick and sent it to me...which saved me a lot of time in Photoshop.
I can't post it (the Times has legal dibs on it), but according to the graph (which Nicholas admits is more "guesstimate-y" than the one that ran in the Times), the five technologies that made it into 80% of US households the quickest were (with the rough year of initial availability in parentheses):
1. radio (1922)
2. microwave oven (1972)
3. VCR (1979)
4. color TV (1960)
5. cellphone (1983)
The internet has not yet reached the 80% mark and it may move into the top 5 when it does. And the way the cellphone trend is going, it might be the first to 90%. Anyway, it's interesting that the common belief is that technology is being adopted faster and faster by Americans these days but that radio was adopted faster than anything else on the chart.
** One Nicholas Felton, who you may recall from his lovely personal annual reports.
It seems like I'm always looking for this graph comparing the adoption rates of different technologies (cars, microwaves, color TVs, cellphones, etc.). No more...it's posted here for my future reference.
The referring article on the differences between what people spend and what people earn is worth noting as well.
If we compare the incomes of the top and bottom fifths, we see a ratio of 15 to 1. If we turn to consumption, the gap declines to around 4 to 1. A similar narrowing takes place throughout all levels of income distribution. The middle 20 percent of families had incomes more than four times the bottom fifth. Yet their edge in consumption fell to about 2 to 1.
Web Trend Map 2008 Beta, which is basically 300 influential web sites mapped onto a Tokyo train map. It's very pretty, but once again, kottke.org gets no love.
Update: A general trend map for 2008, this one modeled on the Shanghai subway map. (via mass custom., thx maaike)
Using "favorite books" data from Facebook and the average SAT/ACT scores from the colleges the people in the data set attend, Virgil Griffith plotted a graph of "books that make you dumb". Lolita, 100 Years of Solitude, and Crime and Punishment were the "smartest" books while the Zane erotica books are the "dumbest". (via o'reilly radar)
Info visualizations of the social networks and cross references in the Bible.
Stamen teamed up with MySociety to produce some lovely travel-time maps of London. My favorite is the interactive travel + housing prices map:
Next, it is clearly no good to be told that a location is very convenient for your work if you can't afford to live there. So we have produced some interactive maps that allow users to set both the maximum time they're willing to commute, and the median house price they're willing or able to pay.
The commute time slider makes a lovely Mandelbrot-esque pattern as you pinch the times together. (via o'reilly radar)
How does the GDP of the US today compare with that of other countries in the past?
China and India combined to produce nearly half the world's economic output in 1820 compared to just 1.8% for the U.S. Our remarkable growth since 1820 has benefited from democratic institutions, a belief in capitalism, private property rights, an entrepreneurial culture, abundant resources, openness to foreign investment, the best universities, immigration and relatively transparent markets.
The stories of three exemplary information graphics. If you're up on your Tufte, they'll be known to you already but always worth a look.
Duelity is a split-screen movie with one half of the screen showing the six-day creation of the earth & man in scientific terms and the other half showing the Big Bang/evolution origin of the universe as it might have been written in the Bible. (Click on "watch" then "duelity" to get the full effect.) Nice use of infographics and illustration. (thx, slava)
Foodpairing: extensive diagrams showing which foods go with other foods. See also the Synesthetic Cookbook.
Steam is keeping some interesting statistics related to how people play Half-Life 2. I love the heat maps of where people die on certain levels.
Related to Jason Salavon's work from last week is Brian Piana's work, the layouts and colors of web sites with all of the text and graphics stripped out. For instance, Barack Obama's Twitter page. The flowchart stuff is lovely...reminds me a bit of this page from Jimmy Corrigan. (thx, jonathan)
A history of matching tile games (like Tetris, Dr. Mario, Bejeweled). Don't miss the family tree of matching tile games about a fourth of the way down the page (larger version here). I'm no matching tile game scholar, but where the hell is Snood?
Update: Aha, it's because Snood is a rip-off of Puzzle Bobble. (thx, greg & kevin)
Meg, these infographics will help our understanding of all the different baseball pitches come next season.
Sci-Fi Starship Size Comparison Chart. After one glance I snorted, "what, no Death Star?" Asked and answered:
First, the Death Star is so friggin' huge that it doesn't fit on even the largest chart I've made. And that's even for the low-ball estimate of the size, which brings me to my second point: No one can agree just how big the Death Stars actually were, so there's no point in doing their sizes.
That's spectacularly and deliciously nerdy.
Update: The Death Star is listed here. (thx, everyone)
A very interesting extinction timeline from 1950-2050. Blogging is predicted to die out around 2023, the same time as Web 2.0, The Maldives, and spelling. The last to go? Death. It's based on the creator's book, Future Files: A History of the Next 50 Years.
Graph of the movie poster colors of the top-grossing movies, from the brightly colored G-rated movies to the dark and fleshy NC-17 films.
Edward Tufte highlights some infographics done by Megan Jaegerman for the NY Times in the 90s. Tufte: "Her work is elegant, smart, finely detailed, inventive, and informative. A fierce researcher and reporter, she writes gracefully and precisely. Her best work is the best work in news graphics."
Metropolis magazine profile of designer/programmer/artist Jonathan Harris, creator of such projects as Word Count, Daylife Universe, 10x10, and Seed magazine's Phylotaxis. More of Harris' work is available on his web site.
For her final project in a Media Lab class, Anita Lillie fastened three accelerometers to her body and tracked her movements while asleep. The data recorded allowed her to determine her sleeping positions and orientations (on her left side, on her back, etc.) and how they changed through the night.
Graph of US Presidential approval ratings since 1946. With the sole exception of Clinton, Americans like their presidents less at the ends of their terms than at the beginnings.
The Inglehart-Welzel Cultural Map of the World scores the world's countries on two axes of cultural values...from "traditional" to "secular-rational" and from "survival" to "self-expression". (via strange maps)
Decisions, Decisions: a nice looking hand-drawn flowchart poster.
Here are some updates on some of the topics, links, ideas, posts, people, etc. that have appeared on kottke.org recently (previous installment is here):
The Celluloid Skyline exhibition at Grand Central is well worth checking out...I was up there this past weekend. Pentagram collaborated with Saunders on the exhibit and wrote up a brief piece on how it came together.
My short post on Nina Planck's reaction to the recent "death by veganism", as she calls it, of a baby boy is a good reminder that I don't always agree with the things I link to. My only criteria for posting a link is that it's interesting, whether I think it's right or wrong or am still trying to form an opinion about it. Anyway, I got lots of mail about this one, much of it that said that the parents' veganism was beside the point -- which the prosecutors and jury in the subsequent criminal case agreed with (thx, matt) -- and that a headline like "Death By Stupidity" was probably more appropriate. After all, you don't see "Death by Omnivorism" headlines every time a baby with a more traditional diet dies of starvation.
Debra from Culiblog pointed out that contrary to Planck's assertion that "there are no vegan societies", the Jainists practice vegetarianism and veganism. On the other side of the aisle, meat fan Michael Ruhlman chastised Planck for going too easy on vegans, saying that "Veganism is a colossal arrogance, a refusal to admit to our own nature, a denial of our humanity. Sometimes it kills people. And it's not very much fun, besides." You can imagine the discussion that generated...although it was nothing like the 300+ comment thread on MetaFilter.
My opinion of Cars improved with a second viewing.
Discover's chat bot conversation reminded a reader of this old interview with the Ask Jeeves search engine (thx david). Back in 2002, I interviewed ELLEGirl magazine's AIMbot:
jkottke: Do you do anything to celebrate or recognize the changing of seasons?
ELLEgirlBuddy: do you do anything to celebrate or recognize the changing of seasons? that's a tough choice.
jkottke: yes, to celebrate or merely recognize. that is a toughie.
ELLEgirlBuddy: yes to celebrate or merely recognize that is a toughie? i dunno.
jkottke: you seem like an actual 13 year old girl.
ELLEgirlBuddy: i haven't really made a decision 'bout that.
jkottke: growing up is tough, isn't it?
ELLEgirlBuddy: i dunno.
And whoever posted the chat bot story to Digg (5696 Diggs and counting!) used the exact wording from my original post. You're welcome!
Prime, David Burke's quarter-million-dollar Black Angus bull, has his own web site. (thx, brian)
Regarding Alex Reisner's excellent baseball statistics web site and, in particular, the pennant race graphs, here's another interesting visualization of the pennant races...you can see the teams race to the end of the year like horses. (thx, scott)
Re: my post on better living through self-deception, I've heard that pregnant women tend to forget the pain of childbirth, perhaps because "endorphins reduce the amount of information trauma victims can store". Also related tangetially is this article on research into lying and laughing, which includes this simple test to see if you're a good liar:
Are you a good liar? Most people think that they are, but in reality there are big differences in how well we can pull the wool over the eyes of others. There is a very simple test that can help determine your ability to lie. Using the first finger of your dominant hand, draw a capital letter Q on your forehead.
Some people draw the letter Q in such a way that they themselves can read it. That is, they place the tail of the Q on the right-hand side of their forehead. Other people draw the letter in a way that can be read by someone facing them, with the tail of the Q on the left side of their forehead. This quick test provides a rough measure of a concept known as "self-monitoring". High self-monitors tend to draw the letter Q in a way in which it could be seen by someone facing them. Low self-monitors tend to draw the letter Q in a way in which it could be read by themselves.
High self-monitors tend to be concerned with how other people see them. They are happy being the centre of attention, can easily adapt their behaviour to suit the situation in which they find themselves, and are skilled at manipulating the way in which others see them. As a result, they tend to be good at lying. In contrast, low self-monitors come across as being the "same person" in different situations. Their behaviour is guided more by their inner feelings and values, and they are less aware of their impact on those around them. They also tend to lie less in life, and so not be so skilled at deceit.
The skyscraper with one floor isn't exactly a new idea. Rem Koolhaas won a competition to build two libraries in France with one spiraling floor in 1992 (thx, mike). Of course, there's the Guggenheim in NYC and many parking garages.
After posting a brief piece on Baltimore last week, I discovered that several of my readers are current or former residents of Charm City...or at least have an interest in it. Armin sent along the Renaming Baltimore project...possible names are Domino, Maryland and Lessismore. A Baltimore Sun article on the Baltimore Youth Lacrosse League published shortly after my post also referenced the idea of "Two Baltimores. Two cities in one." The Wire's many juxtapositions of the "old" and "new" Baltimore are evident to viewers of the series. Meanwhile, Mobtown Shank took a look at the crime statistics for Baltimore and noted that crime has actually decreased more than 40% from 1999 to 2005. (thx, fred)
Cognitive Daily took an informal poll and found that fewer than half the respondants worked a standard 8-5 Mon-Fri schedule. Maybe that's why the streets and coffeeshops aren't empty during the workday.
Stamen delivers another lovely project: Trulia Hindsight. It's an animated map of the US which shows new home construction over a period of years "with an eye towards exposing patterns of expansion and development". As you might expect, the growth of a city like Las Vegas is interesting to watch. More on the project from Stamen and on the Trulia Hindsight blog.
Pie charts representing the flags of the world's nations...the area of each color on the charts corresponds to the percentage of that color used in the respective flag. I'll take this opportunity to again maintain that Rem Koolhaas' barcode flag for the EU is, technically speaking, wicked awesome. (via colourlovers)
A "story map" distributed to guests of a wedding that shows the possible occupational, relational, and recreational relationships between guests to be used as a conversational cheat-sheet. Reminiscent of Mark Lombardi's network maps. Better larger. (via gulfstream)
Obesity infographics for several countries, the percentage of population older than 15 with a body-mass index greater than 30. That USA man is really fat.
While bumping around on the internet last night, I stumbled upon Alex Reisner's site. Worth checking out are his US roadtrip photos and NYC adventures, which include an account and photographs of a man jumping from the Williamsburg Bridge.
But the real gold here is Reisner's research on baseball...a must-see for baseball and infographics nerds alike. Regarding the home run discussion on the post about Ken Griffey Jr. a few weeks ago, Reisner offers this graph of career home runs by age for a number of big-time sluggers. You can see the trajectory that Griffey was on before he turned 32/33 and how A-Rod, if he stays healthy, is poised to break any record set by Bonds. His article on Baseball Geography and Transportation details how low-cost cross-country travel made it possible for the Brooklyn Dodgers and New York Giants to move to California. The same article also riffs on how stadiums have changed from those that fit into urban environments (like Fenway Park) to more symmetric ballfields built in suburbs and other open areas accessible by car.
And then there's the pennant race graphs for each year since 1900...you can compare the dominance of the 1927 Yankees with the 1998 Yankees. And if you've gotten through all that, prepare to spend several hours sifting through all sorts of MLB statistics, represented in a way you may not have seen before:
The goal here is not to duplicate excellent resources like Total Baseball or The Baseball Encyclopedia, but to take the same data and present it in a way that shows different relationships, yields new insights, and raises new questions. The focus is on putting single season stats in a historical context and identifying the truly outstanding player seasons, not just those with big raw numbers.
Reisner's primary method of comparing players over different eras is the z-score, a measure of how a player compares to their contemporaries, (e.g. the fantastic seasons of Babe Ruth in 1920 and Barry Bonds in 2001):
In short, z-score is a measure of a player's dominance in a given league and season. It allows us to compare players in different eras by quantifying how good they were compared to their competition. It it a useful measure but a relative one, and does not allow us to draw any absolute conclusions like "Babe Ruth was a better home run hitter than Barry Bonds." All we can say is that Ruth was more dominant in his time.
I'm more of a basketball fan than of baseball, so I immediately thought of applying the same technique to NBA players, to shed some light on the perennial Jordan vs. Chamberlain vs. Oscar Robertson vs. whoever arguments. Until recently, the NBA hasn't collected statistics as tenaciously as MLB has so the z-score technique is not as useful, but some work has been done in that area.
Anyway, great stuff all the way around.
Update: Reisner's site seems to have gone offline since I wrote this. I hope the two aren't related and that it appears again soon.
Update: It's back up!
Summize is a product review site that uses sparkline-like color bars for ratings instead of stars. Here's a bit more about how their display system works.
Ben Fry has updated his salary vs. performance graph for the 2007 MLB season...it plots team payrolls vs. winning percentage. The Mets and Red Sox should be winning and are...the Yankees, not so much. Cleveland and the Brewers are making good use of their relatively low payrolls.
Threadless is selling tshirts with a pie chart of pies on it.
I'm working on a longish post for later today (or early tomorrow) about this graph:
More soon.
Update: The long post is done...the above graph is (roughly) the growth of Blogger (in orange) to the growth of Twitter (in blue).
Logical, linguistical, and infographical analysis of the #1 single on the Billboard chart, This Is Why I'm Hot by Mims. "Mims is hot because he's fly. But it raises the question: Does being hot guarantee one's being fly? [...] It would appear that fly and hot are interchangable. If you are one, you are both; if you aren't at least one, you are neither." (via khoi)
Rollercoaster version of the graph of US home prices adjusted for inflation...you basically ride the curve of the graph. Brilliant...I want to ride all the graphs I come across! (via is it real or is it magnetbox)
Craig Robinson of Flip Flop Flyin' presents his life so far as a series of pie charts.
Profile of Edward Tufte. "Running his own enterprise, Tufte says, allows him to work 'elegantly, intensely, gracefully and incredibly efficiently.'"
Universe is another pretty but useless data visualization of the news. See also: just about every other data visualization of the news.
Neat music video by a band called The Longcut that uses infographics to tell the story of a boy and girl falling for each other.
Clever demographic data visualizations using faces ripped out of the SkyMall catalog.
Dumb interface, but here are some neat maps of global fish catch locations, mostly tuna. For example, on these maps you can see the dramatic increase of purse seine fishing from 1964-1998. (thx, spencer)
Social network map of the New Testament. Jesus Christ, supernode. (via waxy)
Diagram that charts instances of the "x is the new y" snowclone from 2005. See also: a list I compiled last last year.
Genealogy of Influence: "a graph of biographical entries at Wikipedia with connections denoting creative influence between philosophers, social scientists, writers, artists, scientists, mathematicians". Reminds me peripherally of Simon Patterson's The Great Bear (a print of which is hanging behind me right now).
Netlag: infovisualization of the world made of exterior web cams over time. So as the day goes on, you can see Europe light up, then the eastern seaboard of the US, then the western US, and so on.
Images of the dashed line in use (as hidden geometry, movement, paths, ephemeral material, etc.). "I've had trouble justifying my excitement about this intricate visual detail, so I thought it would be good to collect a bunch of examples from over fifty years of information design history, to show it as a powerful visual element in ubicomp situations." (via migurski)
Chart by Ben Schott (of Schott's Original Miscellany) detailing the 5 years since 9/11.
How to do a click heatmap on your site with JavaScript and Ruby. Includes source code. Very slick.
Slides for Michal Migurski's talk on data visualization at UX Week 2006.
Want to draw you some diagrams, charts, or flowcharts? Try these nifty tools.
Script for producing sparklines (a la Edward Tufte) in Photoshop.
The Independent has a great infographic on its cover today depicting which countries support the immediate ceasefire in the Middle East demanded by the UN and which do not:
That message would take up less space as words, but somehow the impact wouldn't be quite the same. (thx, g)
Beautiful Evidence is both the title of Edward Tufte's latest book and an accurate description of the document itself. Like few other mass market publications, BE is lovingly hand-crafted, a physical manifestation of the ideas expressed in its pages; the text and images therein could be about another subject entirely and you might still get the point: "Words, Numbers, Images - Together" (the title of the book's fourth chapter).
Case in point. Pages 123 and 124 fold out into a spread depicting Charles Joseph Minard's famous infographic of the disastrous 1812 invasion of Russia by France. But unlike most magazine and book fold-outs, the page that folds out is cut 1/2 inch narrower than the underlying page so that a) a bit of the page underneath peeks out, providing a visual cue for unfoldability, and b) there's no difficulty when you go to refold the page with getting it caught in the book's crease or otherwise undesirably bending/creasing it. The fold-out design is a small thing that the casual reader might not even notice, but it demonstrates the care that went into the production of the book (and perhaps the reason why Tufte took so long in writing/designing it).
The gang at 37signals noticed similar craftsmanship in the writing and presentation:
"What struck me is how you almost never have to hold something in your head while turning the page...he usually finishes his thought within the two pages you can see...and when you flip, it's something new...that's an excellent self-imposed constraint...'whatever i need to say, i'll do it here.'" Jason replied, "Yes, I love that. I noticed that more on this book than others. The image and text is in one spread so when you turn you are turning your attention to a new idea. If you have too much to say than the space allowed then you are probably saying too much...it definitely makes it easier to design the book too...you can design each spread as if it was a standalone poster."
What I've also noticed about Beautiful Evidence is the lack of reviews in mainstream publications; I can't find a single newspaper or magazine that has published a review. Compare that to the releases of Gladwell's Blink, Remnick's Reporting, and Anderson's The Long Tail, for which reviews started appearing almost everywhere before the books were even available. Those books were written for mass audiences and backed by large publishing companies with ample PR resources and plenty of review copies to go around. In contrast, Beautiful Evidence is self-published by Tufte, which means it's beautiful, personal, and done just right, but also invisible to the mainstream press. Not that Beautiful Evidence is being ignored -- the blogosphere is talking about it and the Amazon Sales Rank is currently about 600 (which doesn't count online sales directly from edwardtufte.com) -- but it deserves the consideration of the mainstream press.
This tshirt with infographics on it is too nerdy even for me. That and I've been getting a ton of crap from everyone I know about how many Threadless tshirts I own.
FAS.research has produced a visualization of the 2006 World Cup final showing "the passes from every player to those three team-mates he passes to most frequently". The graphic also shows the "flowbetweenness" of a player.
The proof is in the underpants: global warming is real. (via eyeteeth)
Interesting tour/visualization imagining 10 dimensions. (thx, james)
Classic Royksopp music video featuring dozens of wonderful infographics.
Social, political, economic, cultural, historical, and technological timelines of the world from 1750 to 2100. Having all the timelines in one view is nice, but the zoomable interface is clunky.
Google Trend graph for "the" and "and". I would have expected them to be flatter.
Fun! See graphs for the popularity of Google search results with Google Trends. Is the blog meme trend finally flattening out? And hey, I had a hand in shaping this one.
The Junk Charts blog searches for example of crappy graphs and charts in the media. (via do)
Demographic charts for New York City using data from 1790 to the present.
Rob at Cockeyed is building a photographic height/weight grid, effectively a catalog of people's body types. Description and call for entries here.
Infographic of the connections between "3 celebrities, 35 corporations, 40 subsidiaries and more than 300 brands". For a closer look, check out the larger version.
The Baseball Visualization Tool was designed to help managers answer the question: should the pitcher be pulled from the game? Handy charts and pie graphs give managers an at-a-glance view of how much trouble the current pitcher is in. I wonder what TBVT would have told Grady Little about Pedro at the end of Game 7 of the 2003 ALCS?
Neat information design on the menu for Alinea. The size, positions, and darkness of the circles on the menu represent the sweetness/tartness, size, and flavor intensity of each course.
Update: Better photo of the menu here.
Visualization of frequently quoted passages from the Bible. "This visualization is an attempt to understand how people quote the Bible: which parts they choose to quote, & why." More frequently quoted verses appear in a larger, darker font. (via ia)
Beautiful flight pattern visualizations over the US based on data from the FAA. (via ia)
Graph of suicides by location off the Golden Gate Bridge. This is a fascinating graph. More overall deaths on the SF half than the Marin half and way more on the bay side. A lot of people walked pretty far before jumping. And lightpost 69...it looks to be about halfway between the towers...lots of symbolism there for the jumpers.
I love the little sparkline graphs on information aesthetics (right sidebar). That's some information richness. Must check out the Sparkline PHP Graphing Library at some point.
A series of art projects based on Flickr. The Flickr tag cloud tshirt is clever; the printing on the shirts is reversed so that you can read them in the mirror..."the [Flickr user's] narrative is actually addressing himself while claiming to address others". (via ia)
PDF (2.3 Mb) of nifty infoviz graphs that show different improvisation styles for jazz greats Miles Davis, Cannonball Adderley, and John Coltrane. More here. Reminds me a little of Tufte's sparklines.
The letter-pairs analysis application reads in some text and displays a graphical representation of distribution of letter pairs used in the text. Love the aesthetics of the information display.
The best way to get a sense of what kottke.org is all about is to head to the front page or check out some random entries from the archives.
design (760) • video (1203) • movies (1355) • Edward Tufte (41) • books (904) • food (846) • timelines (25) • language (333) • Twitter (95) • finance (74) • Google (231) • sparklines (9) • typography (182) • Randall Munroe (2) • obesity (25)
See more on the Job Board.
Many posts on kottke.org have been "tagged" with keywords, which activity results in collections of related posts like sports, infoviz, or best of.
parenting (60) • post updates (139) • video (1203) • design (760) • art (501) • movies (1355) • TV (493) • Apple (305) • food (846) • sports (630) • lists (765) • photography (1026) •
movies (1355) • video (1203) • photography (1026) • books (904) • food (846) • NYC (832) • science (805) • lists (765) • design (760) • sports (630) • music (547) • art (501) • TV (493) • business (450) • best of (445)
photography (1026) • economics (239) • lists (765) • best of (445) • infoviz (214) • food (846) • NYC (832) • firstworldproblems (4) • cities (162) • restaurants (226) • video (1203) • timelapse (9) • interviews (305) • language (333) • maps (287) • fashion (207) • NSFW (70) • remix (319)
Edward Tufte (41) • Ben Affleck (3) • headlines (14) • Not The Onion (6) • cigarettes (5) • weblogs (411) • books (904) • design (760) • Beautiful Evidence (8) • .com (20) • Michael Lewis (50) • photography (1026) • this is a metaphor for something (6) • Rainy Day Fun and Games for Toddler and Total Bastard (2) • Greg Knauss (8)
