We all know of the Flying V, the great hockey plan developed in the 1990s—wait, no, wrong one. I meant to talk about birds flying in formation. Because science is finally allowing us to understand the mechanisms of how and why birds fly in these tight, v-shaped formations. In a BBC article reporting on the most recent findings, the graphics team included a diagram showing just how formation flying works.
Credit for the piece goes to the BBC graphics department.
Airlines want to make flights as profitable as possible. And that largely entails cramming as many people into those hollow cylinders called aircraft fuselages as possible. This is despite advice from Airbus, one of the world’s largest aircraft manufacturers to set a minimum seat width standard greater than US airlines are investigating. Thomson Reuters does a nice job illustrating the changes in this graphic.
Credit for the piece goes to the Thomson Reuters graphics staff.
A lot of people have been talking about Bridgegate, a scandal in New Jersey wherein the governor’s office allegedly abused its power to negatively impact the residents of Fort Lee, New Jersey. What actually happened for a few days this past fall? The Washington Post uses aerial photography and illustration to diagram the normal traffic flow and the flow during the traffic “study”.
Credit for the piece goes to the Washington Post graphics department.
If you live in the United States, you probably have heard the term polar vortex by now. People have been using the term to describe the bitterly cold temperatures affecting the eastern two-thirds of the country. But the term polar vortex is a meteorological term that means a specific phenomenon. In other words, it’s more than a hashtag along the lines of snowmageddon. The Washington Post explains what the polar vortex is.
My caveat for this piece is that from my understanding, it’s not entirely correct. Or perhaps not detailed enough. In brief, we turn to the National Weather Service out of New York for a more technically correct, but more poorly designed graphic.
Poor type, poor colours, poor hierarchy. Those are abundantly clear, but the important part is that the NWS wants to correct many of the popular misconceptions. Somewhere between the well-intended but less-than-entirely-clear Post piece and the accurate-but-also-unclear National Weather Service piece is an opportunity to explain the concept to the public.
Credit for the Washington Post piece goes to Bonnie Berkowitz, Richard Johnson, Katie Park, and Gene Thorp.
Credit for the National Weather Service goes to the graphics team at the National Weather Service of New York.
Today’s post comes from the Washington Post, which looks at further revelations about the NSA surveillance programme. Specifically, the Post details how the NSA tracks Americans by what is called co-traveler analytics. The piece does a really nice job of explaining how the tracking works through illustrative examples.
Credit for the piece goes to the Washington Post graphics department.
Earlier this week xkcd looked at the planets near Earth (within 60 light years) within their respective star system’s habitable zone. Turns out there are quite a few.
Credit for the piece goes to Randall Munroe.
Doctor Who? Exactly. This weekend, Saturday in fact, is the 50th anniversary of British sci-fi show Doctor Who. That is not to say it has been airing for 50 years. In the 1990s and early 2000s the show was off the air, living on only in audio broadcasts and novelisations. But in 2005, the show was relaunched and it slowly began to acquire a new generation of followers. Some, like your author, have watched it in the States first via SyFy since 2006.
Still 50ish years of television about time travelling through space in a blue police box makes for lots of data. And so back in March Simon Rogers created this infographic to explain some of the history of the show.
If you intend on watching the 50th special this weekend—or Monday in some movie theatres here in the States—and you want to brush up on the timeline of the Doctor and his travelling companions, the Guardian also has this graphic.
But of course the BBC, which produces Doctor Who, has a more in-depth site about the history of the character and the show. Did I mention the content is displayed within the TARDIS? I know, it’s bigger on the inside.
Have you ever watched the show? Do you have a favourite Doctor? A favourite companion?
Credit for the first Guardian piece goes to Simon Rogers.
Credit for the second Guardian piece goes to the Guardian’s Graphic News team.
Credit for the BBC piece goes to Christopher Ashton, Christine Jeavans, Helene Sears, Tian Yuan, Nick Davey, and Ben Fell.
I have always had an interest in architecture. And so this piece from the Los Angeles Times is just because I like to indulge myself every so often, a look at the five tallest buildings in Los Angeles.
Credit for the piece goes to Scott J. Wilson, Matt Moody, and Anthony Pesce.
I have received a few questions in the non-blog world about why certain people have been receiving notices in the post that they are about to lose their insurance plans. The short answer for many of those people is that they likely bought individual, private plans and those plans fall short of the new minimum requirements. But, if you are not satisfied with that explanation, the New York Times does a much better job explaining it than I ever could. It is a piece worth a quick read.
Credit for the piece goes to Larry Buchanan, Alicia Parlapiano, and Karen Yourish.
I didn’t see a lot of informative graphics regarding the shooting at LAX. But, here are two pieces. The first is from the Los Angeles TImes. Terminal 3 is rendered in three dimensions. Different buttons add views of the remainder of the airport.
The Washington Post opted for a flat, two-dimension drawing in one graphic with both all of LAX and Terminal 3 in the same graphic.
The thing about the three-dimensional rendering is that it adds too much complexity whereas the two-dimensional schematic strips most of it out. Is it important to know the specific details of a building? Or is it more important to see its general shape and an area inside of it?
Credit for the Los Angeles Times piece goes to Javier Zarracina, Raoul Ranoa, Lorena Iniguez, and Anthony Pesce.
