Balance Your Media Diet (The Media Pyramid Infographic)

From Wired Magazine's "New Rules for Highly Evolved Humans" section of the August 2009 issue.

Practicing good nutrition keeps your mind sharp, your body fit, and your life long. The same could be said for consuming media. (Seriously, knowledge is power.) When you add it all up, the average American spends roughly nine hours a day glued to some kind of screen, and like your diet, quality is as important as quantity. Here areWired's suggested servings for optimal media health.

Found on Nathan's Flowingdata.com

Big Bang Briefly [video]

A new video on YouTube that visually tries to help explain the Big Bang and the creation of the universe.  Narrated by Dr. Janna Levin.  Maybe a little more on the visual illustration side than infographic, but still good.

"We made this video about the Big Bang because the theory is important and amazing, but often misunderstood.

This video was produced without any funding from any outside sources. It was put together with donated creative time from a group with a desire to further public cognition of science

Science has many amazing stories to tell, this is the first. The Big Bang Briefly."

 Found on VizWorld.com

Roomba path long exposure photo

Paul Mathew at SignalTheorist.com attached an LED to the top of his Roobma and took a long exposure photograph to document the path the Roomba takes.  iRobot can tell you the Roomba gets into every corner, but it takes a visual like this to really prove it.

"Now here’s something interesting, I set up a photo camera in my room, turned out all the lights and took a long-exposure shot of my roomba doing it’s thing for about 30 minutes. The result is a picture that shows the path of the roomba through it’s cleaning cycle, it looks like a flight map or something. It really hits every spot!"

Thanks to Tyler at RoboticVacParts.com for the link!

Apple's 1 Billion Apps live countdown

Apple is using a live countdown timer for is 1 Billion App Countdown promotion.  It's almost real-time, and is a step better than when they did the 1 Billion Song Download a few years ago.

At the rate its going, they'll reach a billion before the end of the week!

Download an app and you’ll automatically get the chance to win a $10,000 iTunes Gift Card, an iPod touch, a Time Capsule, and a MacBook Pro.

 Also, there a link to enter the contest without buying an App.  You can enter 25 times a day.

TimeSpace - World

From The Washington Post, TimeSpace-World is an experiment in a visual way to see news stories from around the world.  You can specify the time period during a day that you want to see with the slider, and then click the stories to zoom into the map.  You can also enter search terms to view a smaller set of relevant stories.

TimeSpace is an interactive map that allows you to navigate articles, photos, video and commentary from around the globe. Discover news hot-spots where coverage is clustered. Use the timeline to illustrate peaks in coverage, and customize your news searches to a particular day or specific hour. (Many Washington Post stories appear at midnight; others are published throughout the day as news happens). Click the ? In the upper right for help.

 Link found from Mitul69 on Twitter

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!

The "Super" Family Tree of Dinosaurs

Recently published in the Proceedings of The Royal Society, Biological Sciences, Volume 275 Number 1650 on November 7, 2008.

This is over my head, but this radial family tree shows the diversity of dinosaur species.  It's used in the article to help challenge the theory that dinosaurs went through a rapid decline during the Cretaceous period.  A brief summary is online over at The New Scientist.

Furthermore, we conclude that dinosaurs did not experience a progressive decline at the end of the Cretaceous, nor was their evolution driven directly by the Cretaceous Terrestrial Revolution (KTR).

Thanks for the link Michael!

The Age of Pop

From verysmallarray.com, the Age of Pop visualizes the #1 songs every week from 1960-1969.  You can see that Pop ruled the decade.  Check out their home page to see how other decades sounded.

Olympics Schedule Tracker

The Olympics Tracker is an interactive schedule of the events.  It now only shows which events are scheduled each day and hour, but you can drag them to rearrange your favorites to the top.  Clicking on past events shows the results, and clicking on future events shows the upcoming event details.  Medal awarding events marked with a small medal icon.  You can even download a desktop version for Mac or Windows.

Olympic History of World Records

The History of World Records from NYTimes.com shows how the world record in a number of Summer Olympic events has progressively been beaten over the last 100 years.  In this chart, the Men's 100m Freestyle record was beaten three times this year improving the world record by 0.45 seconds.  Similar events are all charted together, so you can see other freestyle events on the same chart.

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.

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.

One Day Poem Pavilion

Sort of crossing the line between infographics and art. A very cool project called the One Day Poem, from Experimental Typography. The geodesic structure is aligned to the sun, and perforated in a very specific pattern to show different parts of the poem over the course of a day, and even a different poem at different times of the year.

The specific arrangements of the perforations reveal different poems according to the solar calendar: a theme of new-life during the summer solstice. During summer solstice, the poem will contain the theme of “new life”. During winter solstice, the poem will be on “reflection and the passing of time.”

Found on digg.com

The Growth of Wal*Mart

Great video found on blog.kiwitobes.com that show the store expansion of Wal*Mart starting with the first store in 1962. Based on the publicly available data on freebase.com.

What if...

Craig Robinson, from flipflopflyin.com, has created a graphic showing many of the different paths/branches his life could have taken. Clicking on each character icon reveals text describing the event or deviation from actual events.

Who hasn't at one time or another wondered how their life could've gone in other directions if different events had occurred or different choices been made? These are the ways my life could've deviated from its actual path (the top row).

" Craig dies at the age of 34, killed by an angry swan" I found incredibly funny.

Found on NiXLOG.

Family Movement Map

Cool infographic project on Flickr, this map of the living room tracks the movements of a family over the course of only one hour on Christmas Day in 2006. Posted on Flickr by The Bumblebee.

Thanks Oliver for sending me the link.

Cool Color Fading Calendar

I don't think this is an actual product, but a concept from the mind of designer Shi Yuan
from his website. The ink is light sensitive, so it fades slowly over the course of a day, eventually disappearing by the end of the day.

Found on Sawse

Disneyland Wait Time

Traveling in California this last week kept me from being able to post. But here's a real-life infographic from Disneyland in Anaheim, CA. At the entrance to each separate attraction, is a posted wait time estimate, but they are all combined on this information board in the center of the park.

Not willing to wait an hour for the new Finding Nemo Submarine Voyage? Pick a handful of other rides that you can get through in the same amount of time and maximize the money you spent getting into the park.

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.

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.