Big Blue Marble: Water and Air

Found on infosthetics.com, phiffer.com and boingboing.net

Global water and air volume. Conceptual computer artwork of the total volume of water on Earth (left) and of air in the Earth's atmosphere (right) shown as spheres (blue and pink). The spheres show how finite water and air supplies are. The water sphere measures 1390 kilometers across and has a volume of 1.4 billion cubic kilometers. This includes all the water in the oceans, seas, ice caps, lakes and rivers as well as ground water, and that in the atmosphere. The air sphere measures 1999 kilometers across and weighs 5140 trillion tonnes. As the atmosphere extends from Earth it becomes less dense. Half of the air lies within the first 5 kilometers of the atmosphere.

Credit: Adam Nieman / Photo Researchers, Inc

I'd love to see one more showing all of the oil in the world.



The original appears to be here at PhotoResearchers.com

The Summer of Pool Shows

Another page of quirky charts from Andrew Kuo that I came across from October 2007. These try to represent information about the 2007 summer's series of concerts at Brooklyn's McCarren pool.

Found on CoolHunting.com

Pessimist's Guide to Summer Festivals

A full page of different chart styles by Andrew Kuo on nytimes.com. A number of Andrew's quirky charts have been showing up in the NY Times lately.

When he was 15, in 1992, the artist Andrew Kuo tagged along with his older brother to the second year of Lollapalooza in Stanhope, N.J. It was Mr. Kuo’s first summer festival, and he was so excited that he bought the albums by most of the bands on the bill beforehand. Then, halfway through the show, after sets from Pearl Jam (his favorite) and the Jesus and Mary Chain, “I didn’t want to be there anymore,” he said. “I felt like I was being held captive.” Thus began his lifelong ambivalence toward outdoor festivals. “When you finally get to the picnic, there’s ants everywhere,” Mr. Kuo said. Here’s a pessimist’s guide to the summer festival season, which kicks into high gear with the Bonnaroo Music and Arts Festival on Thursday in Manchester, Tenn. Mr. Kuo will be home napping.

Thanks Sandhya!

Obama Funding Graphic

A small poster from our friends at XPLANE,

How Obama Reinvented Campaign Finance Barack Obama is the first major candidate to decline participation in the public financing system for presidential campaigns. He’s found a more effective way to raise money — by leveraging the power of the American people through online Social Networks.

Available as a PDF formatted for printing on 11x17 paper.

Fly Through Airport Security

"How to...Fly Through Airport Security" illustration by Jason Lee from Wired Magazine, March 2008 (16.03).

You might as well check your dignity curbside. Soon you'll be shoeless and flustered, spilling comics across the floor as you dig your MacBook from the depths of your duffel. But take a deep breath, frequent fliers: It is possible to pass security with your ego intact. Here's how.

Gerd Arntz

Gerd Arntz (1900-1988) was a German artist with a political activist focus. Many of his infographics, as well as his Isotype project to create a universal set of icons for signs, are available at www.gerdarntz.org. This infographic poster shows the New York City population explosion from 25,000 in 1767 to 9.5 million in 1930.

Grocery Aisle Nutritional Values

Three different ways to view the grocery store from Wired Magazine Infoporn January 2008 (16.01) by Dan Marsiglio. Cost per Calorie, Calories by Weight and Sugar by Weight.

If you're trying to cut back on the sugar in your diet, stay away from the cereal aisle!

Car HUD from the future

From the January 2008 (16.01)Wired Magazine; Artifacts from the Future, by Chris Baker. This future automobile HUD has some really cool features like a DUI driver identified ahead, in-car video chat, live GPS map with directions and a coupon for the Starbucks at the next exit. He's doing 90MPH, eating an energy bar and he's in the slow lane! For California, there definitely aren't enough cars on the road!

Looks a lot like a bunch of widgets on the desktop of your PC. It definitely seems too cluttered, but I think it was necessary to fit it on a narrow magazine page. I love that it seems to use a multiple-blink interface. Check out the calendar appointment in the top left: "...blink 3 times to reschedule."

If only this future were closer. I'm a real fan of car HUD interfaces. It's one of those promised technologies that still haven't become reality.

Code Swarm: Eclipse

code_swarm - Eclipse (short ver.) from Michael Ogawa on Vimeo.

Created by Michael Ogawa. Check out the website describing the project here.

This visualization, called code_swarm, shows the history of commits in a software project. A commit happens when a developer makes changes to the code or documents and transfers them into the central project repository. Both developers and files are represented as moving elements. When a developer commits a file, it lights up and flies towards that developer. Files are colored according to their purpose, such as whether they are source code or a document. If files or developers have not been active for a while, they will fade away. A histogram at the bottom keeps a reminder of what has come before.

Thanks Alwyn for sending in the link!

The Cost of Gadgets

From Wired.com, this is really a 3-dimensional chart. I liked it because there are very few 3D charts that actually portray 3 dimensions of data. (This is actually 4D if you include the different products as a dimension) Usually 3D charts are just bad use of chart styles from PowerPoint. I also like the perspective from above. Although unusual, it helps to see the whole chart.

The Extinction Timeline 1950-2050

Richard Dawson from What's Next (www.nowandnext.com) created the Extinction Timeline with his predictions of what products and services will disappear in the next 50 years. Also available as a PDF here. Here are a few highlights:

• 2018 DVDs
• 2019 Libraries
• 2025 Desktop computers
• 2030 Reality TV (why so long?!?)
• 2037 Glaciers
  
• 2049 Physical Newspapers

Found on Digg.com

WarCraft III DotA Poster

Created by Alwyn B., this hierarchical tree shows the complex Hero Item recipes for the WarCraft III MOD "Defense of the Ancients". As a fan and a player of the game, Alwyn painstakingly created his own infographic and then posted in on the Internet to share with other players. This makes a fantastic poster!

More than just the item combinations, the poster shows:

• Shows the basic items and how to combine them to form better items.
• Shows where to buy them, and for how much.
• Mini Map that shows shop locations
• Shop Item Layouts

When I looked today, this chart had been viewed over 100,000 times. Great job Alwyn, and thanks for sharing.

Democratic Party Voting Margins

New interactive infographic by Shan Carter and Amanda Cox on nytimes.com that shows the voter margins between Democratic candidates Hilary Clinton and Barrak Obama. These are based on exit poll data.


Choose any of the sorting criteria on the bottom, and then you can see specific data about any particular state by hovering the mouse over the blocks. The top chart shows how Men voted overall, and the second chart is how voters with No College Education voted.

Thanks Les for sending in the link!

The Flickr User Model

Designed by Soldier Ant (his real name is Bryce Glass), the Flickr User Model attempts to map out the Flickr user experience. This is version 0.1, and I think he's working on version 0.3 now. Also linked on visualcomplexity.com

On his post on October 24, 2005, Bryce explains: "I've been doing some concept diagramming for work lately, and I've found myself enjoying it immensely. (...) However, since it's for work I can't share much of it. I did post some sanitized versions, with all the object-names obsfucated, but that just didn't seem wholly satisfying. So over the weekend I invested some time in a diagram that I can share with the internets: a simple Flickr user model (regrettably incomplete -- but I realized that if I tried to include the whole Flickr-verse that this diagram would go beyond labor of love and straight into excercise in folly)".

Thanks Rex for sending in the link!

Greenwashing

From Futerra Communications:

Our Greenwash Guide (PDF) was born out of a desire to help communications professionals get their green messaging right. The majority of Greenwash is the result of over-eager communications campaigns that lack environmental rigour rather than malicious intent.

Found on Melodies In Marketing, thanks Mario!

The Infographic that Saved a Million Lives

Great story from 37signals.com about a very simple infographic that motivated Bill and Melinda Gates to change the focus of their charity spending.

“No graphic in human history has saved so many lives in Africa and Asia,” says NY Times columnist Nicholas Kristof about an infographic in a ‘97 Times article that spurred Bill and Melinda Gates to take action on public health.

...But then bill confessed that actually it wasn’t the article itself that had grabbed him so much—it was the graphic. It was just a two column, inside graphic, very simple, listing third world health problems and how many people they kill. but he remembered it after all those years and said that it was the single thing that got him redirected toward public health.

Beware of Search Spider Traps

Another good SEO infographic on making sure your website is friendly to search spiders from Elliance.com. Don't forget, you can sign up to receive their weekly infographic email.