Stranger Than Fiction

This video is the introduction to the movie Stranger Than Fiction, full of infographics. It's been around for a while, but I thought I would share it too.

Lotteries Profit, but Do Students?

Interactive graphic, from the NYTimes:

Lotteries in 42 states and the District of Columbia rake in billions of dollars, but much of the cash from ticket sales gets channeled back into prizes and lottery administration. States earmark the profits for programs like education, but the lottery dollars contribute only a small percentage of the total education funding.

Where we live...

Found on Data Mining, this is an interactive graphic from Time magazine showing the population density in America as a histogram. Similar to my earlier post on World Population Density, this one focuses on just America, and adds the 3d element to the visual.

Who Owns the Media Companies?

Similar to my earlier post about Who Owns the Car Companies?, I found that Advertising Age magazine has created a poster showing the ownership in the media companies.

You thought the car companies were complicated...

Science Related Wikipedian Activity

A new visualization from the same group that did the earlier visualization of Wikipedia revision activity. This one focused on science and tech related articles. The mystery is the significance of the blue/green band that crosses the map.

Map of the Internet (blacklisted)

Found on Information Aesthetics, this is a map of all 4,294,967,296 IP addresses in the world. Blocks of addresses are shown grouped together in squares based on the owner (ISP, corporation, goverment, university, etc.), and individual addresses are shown as grey dots. The IP addresses that are listed on the Spamhaus XBL blacklist are shown as red dots, representing suspect addresses.

Who Owns the Car Companies?

I found three different images showing the complex network of ownership between the automotive companies. Three different attempts at making these complex relationships easier to understand. This first one is a scan from a magazine, but I can't find any reference to which actual magazine it came from. Charted out like a subway map, it's pretty easy to follow.

This next one from Too Many Cars is charted like a family tree, or a mind map. It's the easiest the follow, but probably the least aesthetically pleasing. Online the image is broken into smaller pictures so you can zoom closer, but is also available as a large poster in PNG or PDF formats. The data for this one is from 2006, and is the most current of the three.


This last graphic claims to show the ownership mix in the auto industry as a form of bubble chart, but I can't find any date or source data link. I think the bubble sizes represent something, like size of the company or ownership, but I can't tell. So I can't tell how accurate this is. The image is on Tinypic.

Wikipedia Activity Visualization

From A Beautiful WWW, this image is a pretty good attempt to visualize the article revision activity on Wikipedia. An article explaining the visualization is here, but the image is a combination of images are from the most linked-to articles, and the size of the colored dots represent the amount of revision activity in the linked articles.

A really cool interactive version was made using the Google Maps API so you can zoom in and move around the graphic.

Infographic Music Video

A complete music video made of infographics! It's pretty good too! The song is "Remind Me" by Royksopp, and the video continuously blends one infographic into the next. Let's hope real life is more than a series of graphics about the choices we make.

Found on the Data Mining blog.

The Flu Virus

Flu season is coming soon, so its about time to know your enemy. Graphic of the Flu virus from newscientist.com.

Kinda looks like a big squishy ball doesn't it?

Plastic Bags

Here's another one from Chris Jordan. Is it art, or is it infographic?

The image shows 60,000 plastic bags, which is how many bags are used in the U.S. every 5 seconds! The picture currently on display at the Paul Kopeikin Gallery in Los Angeles is 5ft x 6ft large so viewers can step up close to see all of the details.

Americans Remain Woefully Ill-Informed

Wired magazine calls infographics like this "infoporn". I guess you could call this a version of a bubble chart, but it shows a comparison of what people knew in 1989 vs. 2007. Separately it shows knowledge of three questions based on the respondent's usual source of news.

I can't tell how big the sample size was, or what type of people they interviewed. It quotes the source as the Pew Research Center for the People & the Press, but that alone isn't enough to make it credible.

Potential Solar Energy

Submitted by a reader (thanks Louis), this infographic is from Good Magazine. Of course there isn't actually a way to capture ALL of the light from the sun, but it is indicative that we should be able to capture more than we do.

Check out this link at Good Magazine for a few other infographics too.

Nip and Tuck

From Many Eyes, this bubble chart shows the number of plastic surgery procedures per 100 people, by nation. Let's just say, the U.S. is one of the smaller countries measured this way.

Radial Organization Chart

Found on Visual Complexity, this chart from 1924 is an interesting variation of an organization chart. With the authoritarian leader in the center, the subordinates are mapped outward from the center. Rings at different radii show peer level responsibility.

WiFi Detector T-Shirt

Another one for the "real world" infographics. This t-shirt from ThinkGeek will detect WiFi 802.11b or 802.11g wireless networks and display their signal strength on the front of the shirt. A great Christmas present for the geek in your family, for only $30.

It will amuse you, that I caught this one from Guy Kawasaki on Twitter.com, which linked to Truemors.com, which linked to BoingBoing.com, which linked to BoingBoingGadgets which finally linked to the original page on ThinkGeek.com. What a tangled web we weave...

Population Heat Map

From CraigStats, the image above shows the population per square mile in the San Francisco area as a pseudo heat map. The site also has combined the apartment listings on Craig's List with Google maps to create pseudo heat maps showing the areas with the most apartments.

Flight Patterns

The images at Flight Patterns are really cool, but the videos are awesome (I think my favorite is the color coded)! Created by Aaron Koblin at UCLA, he took the daily flight data from the FAA and plotted the flight paths over the U.S. over time.

Found on Visual Complexity.

Breathing Earth

Breathing Earth is a cool website that displays international statistics in real-time, similar in concept to Poodwaddle.com's World Counter. Breathing Earth focuses on carbon dioxide emissions by country and adds population, births and deaths.

Welcome to Breathing Earth. This presentation displays the carbon dioxide emission levels of every country in the world, as well as their birth and death rates - all in real-time. Though considerable effort has been taken to ensure that the presentation uses the most accurate and up-to-date data available, please remember that this is just a simulation.

Breathing Earth was created by David Bleja (aka Stillwater), whose home website is stillwater-microcosm.net

Found on SimpleComplexity.net

Who participates online?

A good one from BusinessWeek.com. This chart shows the participation in the various Web 2.0 activities by age group.

As part of Gen X, these graphs look like a tidal wave rising up behind me.

The Polar Clock

The Polar Clock, from Pixel Breaker, version 3 is now out as a screen saver for Mac and Windows. It's also available as a Mac OS X Widget.

I don't know why, but I love this clock. I'm mesmerized watching the seconds going around. With a little practice, you can visualize the time. I won't say this is the best way to visualize the time, but it's definitely fascinating.