The Best Beer in America

Mike Wirth, The Beer Geek, created this map of award winning beers using 20 years of data of the Great American Beer Festival medal winners from 1987-2007. Originally created for the Lyke 2 Drink blog, it also shows the breweries with the most medals and the specific beers with the most awards.

Great work Mike!

UPDATE: Mike has put up an updated version of the Best Beer in America map.

The Ultimate Mammal Family Tree

This is very cool.  Going back 166 million years to see each of the branches where we share common mammalian ancestors.  The PDF is available for download, and is very detailed.  You need to zoom a long way to even see that there is text naming each of the known mammals in existence today.  It's a radial family tree that also represents a timeline as you move outwards from the center.  Here we are:

 

 

ABC TV in Australia did a short video on the family tree hosted by Dr. Paul Willis, and he literally walks around the infographic describing different parts.  Well done, and seemed very reminiscent of Carl Sagan in some of his shows.  The video credits Robin Beck, a Mammalian Systematist as the University of NSW, of creating the family tree.  Here's the link to the ABC page where you can watch the video, or you can click on the image below.

Thanks for the link Alwyn!  Great find!

The Life of a Web Article

Great infographic from the team at Eliiance.com showing how web content (articles) gets from publishing to actual consumption by online viewers.

Modern Day Pirates

Pirates infographic from the Russian News and Information Agency.  These are real pirates at sea (not online pirates stealing software, music and movies).  433 victims and 292 kidnappings in 2007! (EDITED: there were only 5 deaths, not 433)

Article 100 of the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS) requires that all states fight against piracy.  The annual damage from piracy to the global economy is around 15 billion Euros ($12 Billion).

This one and many other infographics are available online at the Russian News and Information Agency's infographics page.

Why Do Freeways Come to a Stop?

This is a simple, good infographic that seeks to explain why traffic on freeways slows to a crawl without any apparent reason to drivers.  By Stephen J. Beard and Rich Exner in The Plain Dealer.

EDIT: Here's a link to the original article, and a high-res PDF of the infographic.

A New President - Wordle

I don't think I've ever posted about Wordle.net. So I thought this word cloud of President Barack Obama's inaugural address yesterday would be a good example.

Wordle is a toy for generating “word clouds” from text that you provide. The clouds give greater prominence to words that appear more frequently in the source text. You can tweak your clouds with different fonts, layouts, and color schemes.

Dramatic Shift in Marketing Reality

Scholz & Friends: "Dramatic shift in marketing reality from Michael Reissinger on Vimeo.

Great little video from Michael Reissinger on the need for innovation and consumer interactions in today's marketing world.

Found through Twitter: @stonepayton

This Is Now!

Take a few minutes to enjoy the Sprint website http://now.sprint.com/widget/, a collection of widgets showing seemingly real-time information.

Found on See What You Mean

Long Weekends Calendar

The Long Weekends Calendar was created by thenonhacker (Alwyn Balingit) and posted on DeviantArt.com.  By plotting the holidays in both the U.S. and the Philippines, he has mapped out all the long weekends that need to be considered when creating project timelines involving people in both countries.

It's also good to plan vacation time...

Great job Alwyn!

Halo 3 HeatMaps

A while back Bungie.net, the makers of the Halo series of games, started tracking data on their servers about how their different online multiplayer maps are preforming.  They converted the data on kills and deaths in the multiplayer games into heatmaps, and then started publishing the maps online for everyone to see.

The advantages to players are that you can see places to avoid (areas with the highest deaths), and the locations from where the most kills come from.  The map above shows the total data for the map called The Pit.  But you can narrow down the information based on the type of weapon used.  For example the map below shows the locations of the kills made with the sniper rifle.  Meaning that shooting from these locations have been the most successful.  (Also helpful if you keep getting killed by snipers and can't find them)

"Heatmaps are the Doppler Radar System of Death in Halo 3. We're tracking encounters, weapons used and their results in a given game, collecting that data and sharing it with players visually. The key here is 'the darker the red, the more frequent the deaths (or kills, depending on the parameters)'," Bungie explains in its weekly update.

Infographic Video: The Histoy of the Internet

History of the Internet from PICOL on Vimeo.

Cool video created by Melih Bilgil

"History of the internet" is an animated documentary explaining the inventions from time-sharing to file-sharing, from arpanet to internet.  The history is told with help of the PICOL icons, which are also a part of my diploma. The icons are soon available for free on picol.org

Found on Information Aesthetics, and thanks to Ethel for the Tweet.

The Evolution of Game Controllers

Damien Lopez has hade two great images showing the evolution of game controller design over the last few decades.  He also created another one showing the evolution of portable game systems.  This was supposedly the link to Damien's page, but its not working for me.

Thanks Dániel for sending in the link.

Exploded iPhone T-Shirt

I just caught this over on Daring Fireball.  You can buy this t-shirt at www.explodedphone.com or you can see many more versions on CafePress.