When I was much younger I invented a game where you essentially managed the development of civilisations. xkcd pretty much explains why the idea appealed to me. Minus all the power, obviously. Because that house is by far the best place for a deep water port for the import/export of valuable commodities. This, however, is missing all the tanks and battleships.
Credit for the piece goes to Randall Munroe.
Boston and the rest of Massachusetts are attempting to dig out of the blizzard that struck them earlier this week. The Boston Globe has provided its readers with a step by step set of directions for how to best extricate people and cars from snowed in homes.
Credit for the piece goes to James Abundis and Javier Zarracina.
For those of you in the Northeast, you already know you are dealing with a little bit of snow. Thankfully the BBC put the amount received in Boston in context…of dogs.
Credit for the piece goes to the BBC graphics department.
Today’s piece is a photo I snapped of the cover of a relatively recent edition of the RedEye, a free, daily tabloid distributed in Chicago. The city of Chicago decided to raise the minimum wage in the city. And this photo of a stack of quarters depicts just how many quarters that increase will be over the next five years.
I find I usually do not enjoy data photos, for want of a better term. But here we have an obviously editorially driven graphic, but one that uses real materials to represent the data. In other words, we are not taking one quarter to represent one dollar per hour. One quarter means one quarter per hour. And the segmentations merely break out how much that will increase over the years. With minimal annotation, the photo is clear and direct.
Credit for the piece goes to Lenny Gilmore.
I don’t always watch pop culture. But on those occasions when I do, xkcd basically sums up why I became an information designer.
Credit for the piece goes to Randall Munroe.
At the time of writing, Orion has yet to launch. But by the time this is published, Orion—NASA’s successor to the space shuttle—will hopefully be at or near the greatest distance from Earth achieved by a spacecraft since the Apollo programme. The Houston Chronicle illustrated the different stages of the unmanned test flight. Hopefully in several years when the programme has its manned flight this blog will still be here and somebody out there will similarly illustrate that mission.
Credit for the piece goes to Ken Ellis.
This piece has been sitting for a month, but I still enjoy it. The Washing Post maps out Russian air activity around NATO airspace over a two-day period.
Credit for the piece goes to Gene Thorp.
Today is an American holiday: Thanksgiving. We give thanks that European diseases and military technology allowed us to remove the native population for colonisation of the continent. We do that by watching American football and eating lots and lots of food. For dessert, well, we have dessert. But also gluttonous amounts of shopping. So in that spirit, here is the New York Times’ presentation of Thanksgiving recipes per state. The description is followed by an expandable recipe.
To be fair, I really am a fan of shoofly pie. But that’s just me.
Credit for the piece goes to the New York Times.
The Philadelphia 76ers are a terrible basketball team. FiveThirtyEight details the deficiencies of the team in this small table. Icons represent characteristics that can be either positive or negative. They are then placed within the table to quickly show how awful the team is. My favourite is the icon for poor player.
Credit for the piece goes to the FiveThirtyEight graphics department.
As the title says, we are all going to die one of these days. But what are the odds that Ebola will kill you? Turns out it is fairly small. Smaller than your pyjamas catching on fire and killing you. Or even your regular clothes catching fire. How did I know that? Well, the Washington Post put together a nice interactive piece to do just that. It starts you out at Ebola and works up to the most likely causes of death. If you are looking for your morning pick-me-up, this might not be it. Fair warning.
Credit for the piece goes to Richard Johnson and Lazaro Gamio.
