From XKCD comes an informative infographic about your central visual field. As always, it’s quite informative. It’s not quite light hearted for Friday, but you’ll probably get an odd look or a laugh when you move your face really close to your monitor…
Also as always, credit for the piece goes to Randall Munroe.
In case you missed it, the weather the past few weeks has been hot across much of the United States. Last week the Washington Post published an infographic on temperatures in the District of Columbia.
As it turns out, it has been hot. But it appears that in mid-June a few years ago, the temperature was below 70 degrees. Why can we not have some of that?
Credit for the piece goes to Todd Lindeman.
CERN may—or may not—have discovered a particle that may—or may not—be the Higgs Boson that would probably fill in a lot of the holes in our understanding of how the world may work at a sub-atomic level. That is a lot of ‘may’s.
Understanding just what a Higgs Boson does is not quite so easy. In really simplified language, it explains why things have mass. And when you put things of mass on a planet that has gravity, like Earth, why things have weight. Back in the early 1990s, the British minister for science offered a prize for the best explanation to be given in layman’s terms. The following image, via the BBC, is one part of that example. We all probably need to know it just a little more today.
So my prediction of the health care law being thrown out did not come to pass. But what will pass is the space probe Voyager 1 out of the solar system in the very near future. (Don’t worry unlike Voyager, I will return—albeit to the original subject matter next week.) So from the National Post we have an infographic that details just what is Voyager 1. (And no, it is not V’ger, that was the fictional Voyager 6.)
Credit for the piece goes to Joshua Rapp Learn, Andrew Barr, and Richard Johnson.
As the Supreme Court is likely to scrap the mandate provision of the health care law—without which sick people are left to pay higher premiums if they can get coverage at all—later today, the New York Times looks at the impact of removing the health care law changes the number of people without health insurance.
Credit for the piece goes to Lisa Waananen.
From the Sydney Morning Herald, we have a link to an interactive infographic published by the Cancer Council of Australia, a non-profit that seeks to reduce the impact of cancer upon Australia. It is not the most graphical by way of charts, but offers the user “playful” interactions with statistics to better inform him or her about the causes and impacts of cancer. The format is also interesting in that it mimics the fad in infographics of the long, vertical scroll page. But here it is done to much better and ostensibly more useful effect. Useful in the sense of trying to help people.
Sometimes an infographic needs to put us in our place. Humanity is but one of many species on one of many planets in one solar system. Over at xkcd, we can see how only now are we beginning to expand our knowledge of how many other solar systems and planets there are (and that are just waiting to be discovered).
Credit for the piece goes to Randall Munroe.
People are nothing more than dirty stinking apes. Especially when it comes to microbes. On Monday the New York Times published an infographic that visualised the data on the prevalence and abundance of different microbes across a sample of over 200 individuals. That is to say the visualisation looks at where microbes are most common and just how common they are in that location.
This is a post that goes back a little bit in time, but that I stumbled upon and found worth a post. Last summer the United States ended the Space Shuttle programme by retiring all of our orbiters. And of course this prompted many to attempt infographics about the history of bringing liberty and freedom to space.
Amidst the fond farewells, I missed this interactive piece from the Philadelphia Inquirer about the history and the future of Americans in space.
The interactive piece contains three separate sections. The first looks at the individual Americans who made it into space. The second compares the Space Shuttle to the Russian Soyuz craft that we now must use to get into space. The third looks at the future, and what we might use.
But, the Inquirer also had a print edition to worry about, and published a static version of the piece. Is it perhaps a bit cluttered, yes, but the addition of the photographs and the annotations (even though the annotations are available as rollover conditions in the interactive piece) makes the print version more welcoming to explore and read at leisure. Additionally, the difference in scale of the three segments of the piece give a clear importance to the individuals rather than to the technology. This distinction is lost in the interactive piece because each segment is the same size and receives the same scale of treatment.
Credit for the interactive piece goes to Kevin Burkett and Rob Kandel. Credit for the print piece goes to Kevin Burkett.
Oil, sweet oil. How we depend upon you for modern civilisation. BP published a report on world energy that Craig Bloodworth visualised using Tableau.
The piece has three tabs; one is for production, another consumption, and a third for reserves. (The screenshot above is for production.) But when I look at each view I wonder whether all the data views are truly necessary?
In production for example, is a map of a few countries truly informative? The usual problem of Russia, Canada, the US, and China dominating the map simply because they are geographically large countries reappears. Furthermore the map projection does not particularly help the issue because it expands the area of Siberia and the Canadian arctic at the expense of regions near the Equator, i.e. the Middle East. That strikes me as counter-intuitive since some of the largest oil producers are actually located within the Middle East.
A map could very well be useful if it showed more precisely where oil is produced. Where in the vastness of Russia is oil being sucked out of the ground? Where in Saudia Arabia? In the US? Leave the numbers to the charts. They are far more useful in comparing those countries like Kuwait that are major producers but tiny geographies.
Lastly about the maps (and the charts), the colour is a bit confusing because nowhere that I have found in my quick exploration of the application does the piece specify what the colours mean. That would be quite useful.
Finally, about the data, the total amount of oil produced, but more importantly consumed, is useful and valuable data. But seeing that China is the second largest consumer after the US is a bit misleading. Per capita consumption would add nuance to the consumption view, because China is over three-times as large as the US in population. Consequently, the average Chinese is not a major consumer. The problem is more that there are so many more Chinese consumers than consumers in any other nation—except India.
A bit of a hit and miss piece. I think the organisation and the idea is there: compare and contrast producers and consumers of oil (and consumers of other energy forms). Alas the execution does not quite match the idea.
Credit for the piece goes to Craig Bloodworth, via the Guardian.
